Nikki Giovanni was born in Knoxville, Tennessee to Yolande Cornelia, Sr. and Jones "Gus" Giovanni. She grew up in Lincoln Heights, a suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio, and in 1960 began her studies at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, her grandfather's alma mater. She graduated in 1967 with honors, receiving a B.A. in history. Afterwards she went on to attend the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University. In 1969 Giovanni began teaching at Livingston College of Rutgers University. She is an Honorary Member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc.

The civil rights and black power movements inspired her early poetry that was collected in Black Feeling, Black Talk (1967), Black Judgment (1968), and Re: Creation (1970). She has since written more than two dozen books including volumes of poetry, illustrated children's books, and three collections of essays.

Giovanni's writing has been heavily inspired by African American activists and artists. Her book, Love Poems (1997), was written in memory of Tupac Shakur and she has stated that she would "rather be with the thugs than the people who are complaining about them." • Nikki Giovanni Books

He was involved in American politics for 24 years, serving first in the U.S. House of Representatives (1977–85) and later in the U.S. Senate (1985–93) (representing Tennessee) before becoming vice president. Gore was the Democratic nominee for president in the 2000 presidential election. He won the popular vote by approximately 500,000 votes, but ultimately lost the electoral college to Republican candidate George W. Bush when the legal controversy over the Florida election recount was eventually settled in the U.S. Supreme Court by a 5–4 margin in favor of Bush.

Gore is the recipient of a number of awards. He and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. In addition, he received a Primetime Emmy Award for Current TV in 2007, a Webby Award in 2005, and was named as a runner-up for Time's 2007 Person of the Year. • Al Gore, Jr. Books

Grooms was born in Nashville, Tennessee during the middle of the Great Depression. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, then at Nashville's Peabody College. In 1956, Grooms moved to New York City, to enroll at the New School for Social Research. A year later, Grooms attended a summer session at the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Grooms' work has been exhibited in galleries across the United States, as well as Europe, and Japan. His art is included in the collections of thirty-nine museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Phillip Morris Kabutz of American Sunburnt Fat Rich BLT Eating Avant Garde Pop Culture Koshers, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cheekwood Botanical Garden & Museum of Art in Nashville, the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the Boca Raton Museum of Art. • Red Grooms Books

Benjamin Hooks was born in Memphis, Tennessee. He was the fifth of seven children of Robert B. Hooks and Bessie White Hooks. His father was a photographer and owned a photography studio with his brother Henry known at the time as Hooks Brothers, and the family was fairly comfortable by the standards of black people for the day. Still, he recalls that he had to wear hand-me-down clothes and that his mother had to be careful to make the dollars stretch to feed and care for the family.

Young Benjamin’s paternal grandmother, Julia Britton Hooks (1852–1942), graduated from Berea College in Kentucky in 1874 and was only the second American black woman to graduate from college. She was a musical prodigy who began playing piano publicly at age five, and at age 18 joined Berea’s faculty, teaching instrumental music 1870–72. Her sister, Dr. Mary E. Britton, also attended Berea, and became a physician in Lexington, Kentucky. With such a family legacy, young Benjamin was inspired to study hard and prepare himself for college. In his youth, he had felt called to the Christian ministry. His father, however, did not approve and discouraged Benjamin from such a calling.  • Benjamin L. Hooks Books

Hull was born in a log cabin in Olympus, which is now part of Pickett County, Tennessee, but was then part of Overton County. He became the elected chairman of the Clay County Democratic Party at the age of 19.

In 1891, Hull graduated from Cumberland School of Law at Cumberland University and was admitted to the bar as a teenager. He served in the Tennessee House of Representatives from 1893 to 1897. During the Spanish-American War, he served in Cuba as a captain in the Fourth Regiment of the Tennessee Volunteer Infantry.

Hull served 11 terms in the United States House of Representatives (1907–1921 and 1923–1931) and authored the federal income tax laws of 1913 and 1916 and the inheritance tax of 1916. After an electoral defeat in 1920, Hull served as chairman of the Democratic National Committee. He was elected to the Senate in 1930, but resigned upon being named Secretary of State in 1933. • Cordell Hull Books

After leading a much-publicized investigation into organized crime in the early 1950s, he twice sought his Party's nomination for President of the United States. In 1956, he was selected by the Democratic National Convention to be the running mate of presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson. Still holding his U.S. Senate seat after the Stevenson-Kefauver ticket lost to the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket in 1956, Kefauver was named chair of the U.S. Senate Anti-Trust and Monopoly Subcommittee in 1957 and served as its chairperson until his death. • Estes Kefauver Books

She made her film debut in 1968 in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.

Sondra Locke was born and raised in Shelbyville, Tennessee. Her parents are Alfred and Pauline Locke. She has one older brother, Don. Locke was the valedictorian of the Shelbyville Central High School class of 1962. She attended Middle Tennessee State University for a year, before dropping out to pursue an acting career.

Locke got a career boost in 1976 when she played a pioneer woman opposite Clint Eastwood in the western classic The Outlaw Josey Wales. With Eastwood as her leading man, Locke went on to star in a number of blockbuster hits. Her notable film roles include playing a foul-mouthed prostitute in the action film The Gauntlet and a spoiled heiress in offbeat Bronco Billy. She played a country singer in the comedy Every Which Way But Loose, which was the second-highest grossing film of 1978. She reprised her role in the sequel, Any Which Way You Can. She starred as a revenge-seeking murderess in Sudden Impact, which became the most successful of the film Dirty Harry franchise. • Sondra Locke Books • Sondra Locke Movies

In the four-and-a-half decades since her national-chart début, she remains one of the most-successful female artists in the history of the country genre which garnered her the title of 'The Queen of Country Music', with twenty-five number-one singles, and a record forty-one top-10 country albums. She has the distinction of having performed on a top-five country hit in each of the last five decades and is the only artist to score a number-one country single in each of the past four decades.  She is known for her distinctive soprano, sometimes bawdy humor, flamboyant dress sense and voluptuous figure.

Her family was, as she described them, "dirt poor". She described her family's shortness of money in her song "Coat of Many Colors" They lived in a rustic, dilapidated one-room cabin in Locust Ridge, Tennessee, a hamlet just north of the Greenbrier Valley in the Great Smoky Mountains of Sevier County, a predominantly Pentecostalist area.

Music formed a major part of her early church experience. She once told an interviewer that her grandfather was a Pentecostal "holy-roller" preacher. Today, when appearing in live concerts, she frequently performs spiritual songs.• Dolly Parton Website • Dolly Parton Discography • Dolly Parton Books • Dolly Parton DVD's

Sarah Colley was born in Centerville, in Hickman County, Tennessee, about 50 miles (80 km) southwest of Nashville. She was the youngest of the five daughters of a prosperous lumberman in Centerville. She graduated from Ward-Belmont College, at the time Nashville's most prestigious school for young ladies, where her major was theater studies and dance was a particular interest. After graduation she taught dance for several years.

Cannon was an important influence on younger female country music singers and rural humorists such as Jerry Clower, Jeff Foxworthy, Bill Engvall, Carl Hurley, David L Cook, Chonda Pierce, Ron White and Larry the Cable Guy. In 2002 she was ranked as number 14 on CMT's 40 Greatest Women in Country Music list.

She was also a close friend of performers outside the country genre, including Dean Martin and Paul Reubens. In 1992 Reubens made what would be his last appearance as Pee-Wee Herman for 15 years at a Minnie Pearl tribute show. • Minnie Pearl Books • Minnie Pearl Discography

Presley began his career in 1954 as one of the first performers of rockabilly, an uptempo fusion of country and rhythm and blues with a strong back beat. His novel versions of existing songs, mixing "black" and "white" sounds, made him popular—and controversial—as did his uninhibited performances. Presley had a versatile voice and he had unusually wide success encompassing many genres, including rock and roll, gospel, blues, country, ballads and pop. To date, he has been inducted into four music halls of fame.

In 1968, after making movies in Hollywood and having been away from the stage for seven years, he returned to live performances in a television special, which led to a string of successful tours across the U.S., notably in Las Vegas, for the remainder of his career. In 1973, Presley staged the first global live concert via satellite (Aloha from Hawaii), reaching at least one billion viewers live and an additional 500 million on delay. It remains the most watched broadcast by an individual entertainer in television history. • Elvis Presley Website • Elvis Presley Discography • Elvis Presley Books • Rock & Roll Hall of Fame - Elvis Presley • Elvis Aaron Presley DVD's

Henry Grantland Rice was born in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, the son of Bolling H. Rice, a cotton dealer,, and his wife Beulah Grantland Rice. His grandfather Major H.W. Rice was a Confederate veteran of the Civil War. Rice attended Montgomery Bell Academy and Vanderbilt University—where he was a member of Phi Delta Theta—in Nashville. After taking early jobs with the Atlanta Journal and the Cleveland News, he later became a sportswriter for the Nashville Tennessean. Afterwards he obtained a series of prestigious jobs with major newspapers in the Northeastern United States. He is best-known for being the successor to Walter Camp in the selection of college football All-America teams beginning in 1925, and for being the writer who dubbed the great backfield of the Notre Dame team of 1924 the "Four Horsemen" of Notre Dame. A Biblical reference to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, this famous account was published in the New York Herald Tribune on October 18, describing the Notre Dame vs. Army game played at the Polo Grounds: • Grantland Rice Books

Carl Rowan was born in Ravenscroft, Tennessee, and was raised in McMinnville, in that state. He studied at Tennessee State University (1942-43) and Washburn University (1943-44). He was one of the first African-Americans to serve as a commissioned officer in the United States Navy. He graduated from Oberlin College (1947) and earned a master's degree in journalism from the University of Minnesota (1948). He began his career in journalism as copywriter for The Minneapolis Tribune (1948-50), and later became a staff writer (1950-61), reporting extensively on the Civil Rights Movement.

In 1961, Rowan was appointed Deputy Assistant Secretary of State by President John F. Kennedy. The following year, he served as a delegate to the United Nations during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Rowan became the U.S. Ambassador to Finland in 1963. In 1964, Rowan was appointed director of the United States Information Agency by President Lyndon B. Johnson, but resigned in 1965 when both Johnson and Rowan were accused of trying to dictate a pro-administration bias to Voice of America broadcasts. He was the first African-American to attend meetings of the National Security Council. • Carl Rowan Books

The powerful sprinter emerged from the 1960 Rome Olympics as "The Tornado," the fastest woman on earth. The Italians nicknamed her "La Gazzella Nera" (the Black Gazelle); to the French she was "La Perle Noire" (The Black Pearl).

Wilma Rudolph was born prematurely at 4.5 lbs., with 19 brothers and sisters, and caught "infantile paralysis" (caused by the polio virus) as a very young child. She recovered, but wore a brace on her left leg and foot which had become twisted as a result. By the time she was twelve years old, she had also survived scarlet fever, whooping cough, chicken pox and measles. Her family drove her regularly from Clarksville, Tennessee to Nashville, Tennessee for treatments to straighten her twisted leg. • Wilma Rudolph Books

After the acceptance of his syllabary by the nation in 1825, Sequoyah walked to the new Cherokee territory in Arkansas. There he set up a blacksmith shop and a salt works. He continued to teach the syllabary to anyone who came to him. In 1828, Sequoyah journeyed to Washington, D.C. as part of a delegation to negotiate a treaty for land in Indian Territory.

His trip brought him into contact with representatives of other Native American tribes from around the nation. With these meetings he decided to create a syllabary for universal use among Native American tribes. With this in mind, Sequoyah began to journey to areas of present-day Arizona and New Mexico seeking tribes there. • Sequoyah Books

Her best known roles include starring as Jacy in The Last Picture Show, Maddie Hayes in Moonlighting, as Cybill Sheridan in Cybill, as Betsy in Taxi Driver and as Phyllis Kroll in The L Word. She recently starred in the Hallmark Channel Original Movie Mrs. Washington Goes To Smith.

In her autobiography she revealed that in 1978 she called her mother, crying, unhappy with the way her life and career were going, to which her mother replied "Cybill, come home". She went home to Memphis where she met and began dating local auto parts dealer and nightclub entertainer David M Ford. She became pregnant and they married that year. Their daughter Clementine Ford was born in 1979 but the marriage ended in divorce in 1982. In 1987 she became pregnant by chiropractor Bruce Oppenheim and married him, giving birth to twins Zack and Ariel Shepherd-Oppenheim during the fourth season of Moonlighting. They were divorced in 1990. • Cybill Shepherd Books • Cybill Shepherd Movies

After failing singing auditions for the bands of Benny Goodman and both Jimmy Dorsey and his brother Tommy Dorsey, Shore struck out on her own to become the first singer of her era to achieve huge solo success. She enjoyed a long string of over 80 charted popular hits, lasting from 1940 into the late '50s, and after appearing in a handful of films went on to a four-decade career in American television, starring in her own music and variety shows in the '50s and '60s and hosting two talk shows in the '70s. TV Guide magazine ranked her at #16 on their list of the top fifty television stars of all time. Stylistically, Dinah Shore was often compared to two popular singers who followed her in the mid-to-late '40s and early '50s, Doris Day and Patti Page.

Born to Solomon and Anna Stein Shore, Jewish immigrants from Russia, young Frances Rose lived in Winchester, Tennessee. When she was two years old, she was stricken with polio (infantile paralysis), a disease that was not preventable at the time, and for which treatment was limited to bedrest. Her parents provided intensive care for her and she recovered and overcame the disease. However, she continued to have a slightly deformed foot and limp, which did not physically impede her. • Dinah Shore Books • Dinah Shore Movies • Dinah Shore Discography

Turner started out her music career with husband Ike Turner as a member of the Ike & Tina Turner Revue.

 Success followed with a string of hits including "River Deep, Mountain High" and the 1971 hit "Proud Mary". Allegations of spousal abuse following her split with Turner in 1977 arose with the publication of her autobiography I, Tina. Turner rebuilt her career, launching a string of hits beginning in 1983 with "Let's Stay Together" and the 1984 release of her album Private Dancer.

Her musical career led to film roles, beginning with a prominent role as The Acid Queen in the 1975 film Tommy, and an appearance in Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. She starred opposite Mel Gibson as Aunty Entity in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome for which she received the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Actress in a Motion Picture, and her version of the film's theme, "We Don't Need Another Hero", was a hit single. She appeared in the 1993 film Last Action Hero. • Tina Turner Website • Tina Turner Discography • Tina Turner Books • Tina Turner Film

Alvin Cullum York was born in Pall Mall, Tennessee on December 13, 1887. He was born to an impoverished farming family, as the third of eleven children. In the few years before the war, York was a violent alcoholic and prone to fighting in saloons. His mother, a member of a pacifist Christian denomination, tried to persuade York to change his ways, but to no avail. Then during a night of heavy drinking when he and a friend got into a fight with other saloon patrons, York's friend was killed. The event shook York so much that he finally followed his mother and became a pacifist, and stopped drinking. On June 5, 1917, at the age of 29, Alvin York received a notice to register for the draft. From that day until he arrived back from the War on May 29, 1919, he kept a diary of his activities • Alvin York Books