• Comedian Dave Chappelle is the latest recipient of the Mark Twain prize for lifetime achievement in comedy, an honor bestowed Sunday night at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. The event marked a homecoming for Chappelle, who was raised in suburban Silver Spring, Md., attended Washington's prestigious Duke Ellington School of the Arts and filmed his first HBO special in the capital. Chappelle was already a well-established comedian and comedic actor when he was given his own sketch comedy show in 2003. Chappelle's Show, which aired on Comedy Central, was an immediate hit. At the height of his popularity, Chappelle shocked the entertainment industry by walking away from a lucrative contract extension and abandoning the show while it was preparing for its third season. He later explained that the pressures of the show's success and the influence applied by Comedy Central made him feel "like some kind of a prostitute." Chappelle gradually returned to performing and now releases regular stand-up specials under a multimillion-dollar deal with Netflix. Sunday's ceremony will be broadcast Jan. 7 on PBS.
• The last evening that country singer Craig Morgan spent with his 19-year-old son, Jerry, was during one of Morgan's performances at the Grand Ole Opry three years ago. "The last pictures I have of us together is on that stage," Morgan, 55, said backstage at the Opry House last week. "So this is a very special place. It was anyway before, but now it has additional meaning, knowing this is where we hung out together." His son, Jerry, died in a drowning accident on Kentucky Lake in July 2016. Three years later, Morgan, who wasn't signed to a label at the time, returned to the Opry this past summer to sing a song he wrote about his son called "The Father, My Son, and The Holy Ghost." Morgan said he stepped off the stage, physically and emotionally exhausted from the performance, and told his friend Ricky Skaggs, the bluegrass singer and Country Music Hall of Famer, that he didn't know if he could sing that song again. "Ricky told me, 'You have to sing this song for the rest of your life,'" Morgan recalled. Morgan's first song in three years has now been championed by his peers at the Opry and the larger musical community. The song hit No. 3 on Billboard's country digital song sales chart without the help of a label or radio play. "I didn't even know what was happening," Morgan said. "I was in Alaska and had no idea what was going on until I started getting texts from everyone."
A Section on 10/28/2019