When it comes to celebrating Thanksgiving, each country star has their own traditions. For Thomas Rhett, Brett Young and Carly Pearce, those traditions vary from favorite foods to reflecting on meaningful milestones.
Each year, Thomas happily takes on the task of prepping the turkey, turning the job into a countrified experience with a grill and beer in hand.
“When it comes to Thanksgiving, I am the turkey guy. I love to smoke food. I love to stand by the grill with a cold beer for hours upon end watching a brisket smoke, doing ribs,” he explains. “Around Thanksgiving, I am the guy that does the turkeys, and it is a job that I love to do.”
While Thomas enjoys taking on the turkey, Brett is adamant about the one popular food dish he is not a fan of: cranberry sauce. The hit singer recalls a humorous memory growing up in California of how his grandmother, Bonnie, was particular about “massaging” the can of cranberry sauce.
“I’ll never forget one Thanksgiving, she perfectly got it out onto the plate, and then my dad was giving the blessing, and my uncle Scott started smooshing it up. My grandma interrupted the prayer because he was ruining the perfect can-shaped cranberry,” he shares. “I hate that. Fruit on meat never works for me. So cranberry sauce never makes it on my Thanksgiving plate, ever.”
Though food is a mainstay for Thomas and Brett, this year, label mate Carly is counting her blessings when it comes to the success she’s achieved, from releasing the critically acclaimed album 29: Written in Stone to winning Female Vocalist for the first time at the CMA Awards.
“So many of my dreams have come true this past year in a way that I never thought could actually happen, especially in one calendar year,” she expresses. “I think I’m just going into this holiday season feeling so happy and extra grateful just for where I’m at in my life.”
Dion DiMucci has just released his new studio album, Stomping Ground, the doo-wop and rock ‘n’ roll great’s second star-studded collaborative project in just over a year.
A follow-up to 2020’s Blues with Friends, this record includes contributions from Eric Clapton, Bruce Springsteen and wife Patti Scialfa, ZZ Top‘s Billy Gibbons, Mark Knopfler, Peter Frampton, Boz Scaggs, Rickie Lee Jones and more.
Dion tells ABC Audio that he had a lot of fun working on Stomping Ground, and he couldn’t be happier with the project.
“I’m writing some of the best songs in my life, singing better than ever, the way I express stuff,” he maintains. “I have more confidence than ever, and I have these great tracks with the greatest guitar players on the planet on them, and making music with great artists and friends, and making friends with this music.”
Clapton lent his guitar talents to a song called “If You Wanna Rock ‘n’ Roll.” Dion says that when it came time for Eric to record his part, “he said…’I’m gonna play this standing up like I’m playing for 20,000 people.’ And he did, man. He walked in the studio and did this thing, and I tell you, it sounded like he was 19 years old.”
Springsteen and Scialfa, who also appeared on Blues with Friends, are featured on the new song titled “Angel in the Alleyways,” with Patti singing and Bruce contributing harmonica and tremolo guitar. Dion says Springsteen told him that Scialfa was responsible for “the whole arrangement” of the tracks they recorded.
Gibbons, another Blues with Friends contributor, plays guitar on the tune tune “My Stomping Ground.”
Dion says of Billy, “His guitar playing is so simple and recognizable…and so potent.”
Here’s the full Stomping Ground track list:
“Take It Back” — with Joe Bonamassa
“Hey Diddle Diddle ” — with G.E. Smith
“Dancing Girl ” — with Mark Knopfler
“If You Wanna Rock ‘n’ Roll” — with Eric Clapton
“There Was a Time ” — with Peter Frampton
“Cryin’ Shame ” — with Sonny Landreth
“The Night Is Young ” — with Joe Menza and Wayne Hood
“That’s What The Doctor Said ” — with Steve Conn
“My Stomping Ground ” — with Billy Gibbons
“Angel in the Alleyways ” — with Patti Scialfa and Bruce Springsteen
“I’ve Got to Get to You ” — with Boz Scaggs, Joe Menza and Mike Menza
“Red House ” — with Keb’ Mo’
“I Got My Eyes on You Baby ” — with Marcia Ball and Jimmy Vivino
“I’ve Been Watching ” — with Rickie Lee Jones and Wayne Hood
Iman Shumpert is this year’s champion of Dancing with the Stars, taking home the Mirror Ball Trophy on Monday night’s season finale. Iman’s victory is historical, as he is now the first NBA player to ever compete in the DWTS finals…and win it all!
His pro dance partner, Daniella Karagach, praised Iman’s tremendous improvement over the past season, noting that he was one of the few competitors who never danced “a day in [his] life” and but worked hard to defy all expectations by making it into the finale.
Iman says his status as this season’s underdog fueled his desire to come out on top, and lead to him performing never-before-seen stunts on the ballroom floor with perfect execution.
Aside from a glittering new trophy, he ended his DWTS journey with two perfect scores for his foxtrot/cha-cha fusion, which saw judge Bruno Tonioli declare him the “king of the ballroom,” and for his Chicago-themed freestyle that was deemed one of the best in show’s history.
JoJo Siwa, who also made history by becoming the first contestant to compete with a same-sex partner, came in second. Peloton instructor Cody Rigsby ended the season in third and The Talk co-host Amanda Kloots took fourth place.
The finale also saw a small change at the judges’ table. After Derek Hough tested positive with a breakthrough case of COVID-19 last week, his sister and a former DWTS pro dancer, Julianne Hough, rose to the occasion to fill in for her big brother.
Julianne enjoyed doling out advice and praise to the competitors because, as she said, “I’m so excited to be here in person, so I don’t have to yell at the TV anymore!”
That wasn’t the only welcome return to the ballroom. Spice Girls‘ Melanie C belted out an emotional rendition of the girl group’s pop ballad, “2 Become 1,” as the show revisited some of the season’s most memorable and tear-jerking moments.
Country star Jimmie Allen also took the floor to help bring the season to a close, performing his hit “Good Times Roll.”
While another year of Dancing with the Stars may be over, fans can relive the magic of season 30 when the cast hits the road on a nationwide tour, which kicks off January 7, 2022 in Richmond, Virginia. Jimmie, Amanda and last year’s champion, Bachelorette star Kaitlyn Bristowe,will also be part of the fun.
(NEW YORK) — Here are the scores from Monday’s sports events:
NATIONAL BASKETBALL ASSOCIATION
Brooklyn 117, Cleveland 112
Charlotte 109, Washington 103
Atlanta 113, Oklahoma City 101
Boston 108, Houston 90
Indiana 109, Chicago 77
Milwaukee 123, Orlando 92
Minnesota 110, New Orleans 96
Phoenix 115, San Antonio 111
Memphis 119, Utah 118
Philadelphia 102, Sacramento 94
NATIONAL HOCKEY LEAGUE
Columbus 7, Buffalo 4
St. Louis 5, Vegas 2
Nashville 3, Anaheim 2
Pittsburgh 3, Winnipeg 1
Colorado 7, Ottawa 5
San Jose 2, Carolina 1
NATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE
Tampa Bay 30, NY Giants 10
TOP 25 COLLEGE BASKETBALL
UCLA 75, Bellarmine 62
Duke 107, The Citadel 81
Kentucky 86, Albany 61
Houston 70, Butler 52
Arkansas 72, Kansas St. 64
Cincinnati 71, Illinois 51
Ohio St. 79, Seton Hall 76
Florida 80, California 60
Gonzaga 107, Central Michigan 54
Southern Cal 98, Dixie St. 71
(HOLYOKE, Mass.) — A Massachusetts judge has dismissed all criminal charges against two former officials from the Holyoke Soldiers’ Home, citing no “reasonably trustworthy evidence.”
The facility made national headlines last year, when 77 veterans, who were residents of the home, died of coronavirus in the early months of the pandemic.
In September 2020, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey asked a grand jury to indict former superintendent Bennett Walsh and ex-medical director Dr. David Clinton, on charges of elder neglect, and on permitting bodily injury.
The prosecution focused on a decision, taken on March 27, 2020, to consolidate two dementia units into one.
Healey alleged that Walsh and Clinton were “ultimately responsible for the decision” that led to tragic and deadly results” of combining the 42 veterans into a single unit that usually accommodates 25 beds. Six or seven veterans were placed in rooms meant to hold only four people. Due to overcrowding, nine beds also were placed in a dining room.
The placement of symptomatic residents, including confirmed COVID-19-positive residents, and asymptomatic residents, within feet of each other, thus increased their risk of exposure, Healey said.
“There is insufficient reasonably trustworthy evidence that, had these two dementia units not been merged, the medical condition of any of these five veterans would have been materially different,” wrote Hampden Superior Court Judge Edward J. McDonough, Jr., in a dismissal on Monday. “Therefore, because the evidence does not support a finding of probable cause to believe Mr. Walsh or Mr. Clinton committed any crime, I must dismiss the indictments against both.”
The five specified veterans in the original suit had “already” been exposed to COVID-19 before the merger took place, the judge wrote.
In a statement to ABC News, a spokeswoman for Healey wrote that the office is considering other legal options moving forward.
“We are very disappointed in today’s ruling, especially on behalf of the innocent victims and families harmed by the defendants’ actions. We are evaluating our legal options moving forward,” wrote spokeswoman Jillian Fennimore.
When the suit was filed in September of 2020, Susan Kenney, whose father, Charles Lowell, served in the Air Force from 1960 to 1965, during the Vietnam War, and died at the facility as a result of the outbreak, told ABC News that she welcomed the charges.
“I think that Bennett Walsh and Dr. Clinton should have to dig every grave that hasn’t been dug yet — as well as whatever time they receive if they’re found guilty,” Kenney said last fall. “They need to accept responsibility and account for their behaviors and the actions that they took.”
(CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.) — NASA astronaut Jessica Watkins will take to the skies in 2022 on a historic debut spaceflight to the International Space Station.
Watkins will become the first Black woman to embark on a long-duration mission at the space station, where she will live and conduct research in the microgravity laboratory as it orbits the Earth.
NASA announced that Watkins will serve as a mission specialist for the SpaceX Crew-4 mission, the fourth rotation of astronauts on the Crew Dragon spacecraft to the ISS. This will be her first journey to space since becoming an astronaut in 2017.
She will join NASA astronauts Robert Hines and Kjell Lindgren, as well as European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti. The group is scheduled for liftoff in April 2022 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Watkins was born in Maryland and now calls Colorado home. Previously, she worked as a geologist with a bachelor’s degree from Stanford University and a doctorate from the University of California, Los Angeles.
She joined NASA as an intern and has worked at various research centers in California. At the time of her astronaut selection, Watkins worked as a post-doctoral fellow on the science team for the Mars Science Laboratory rover, Curiosity.
When Watkins launches into space next spring, it will be the realization of a dream she’s held since she was in elementary school.
“A dream feels like a big faraway goal that’s going to be difficult to achieve or something you might achieve much later in life,” Watkins said in a video released by NASA last year. “But in reality, what a dream realized is just one putting one foot in front of the other on a daily basis. If you put enough of those footprints together, eventually they become a path towards your dreams.”
Deep Purple has released a cover of Huey “Piano” Smith‘s classic 1957 tune “Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu” as the third single from their upcoming studio album, Turning to Crime, which arrives this Friday, November 26.
The track is available now via digital formats, while an animated music video for the tune has debuted at the earMUSIC label’s official YouTube channel. The clip tells the fantastical story of the rise and fall of a piano that plays music by itself.
As previously reported, Turning to Crime is the first Deep Purple album made up entirely of songs originally recorded by other artists. The band made the album remotely during the COVID-19 lockdown.
Regarding why the band chose to record “Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu,” Deep Purple keyboardist Don Airey explains, “I’m supposed to say it’s a song I always wanted to do since I was a child, but at the same time it was quite new to me. I didn’t know the original very well, but I knew Professor Longhair‘s version, which is the one that inspired my arrangement.”
He adds, “I just love the whole thing, that style of piano playing…Very, very hard to replicate. It was a bit of a challenge. And when it came back from the other members of the band with all this other music on it, I just thought: ‘Wow, that worked out. What an insane arrangement!'”
Probably the best-known version of “Rockin’ Pneumonia” is the one by Johnny Rivers, which hit #6 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1973.
Turning to Crime also includes covers of Fleetwood Mac‘s “Oh Well,” Bob Dylan‘s “Watching the River Flow,” Cream‘s “White Room” and more.
(BOSTON) — The death of Elijah Lewis, the 5-year-old boy from New Hampshire who went missing before being found dead in Massachusetts last month, has been ruled a homicide, authorities said Monday.
Lewis died from “violence and neglect,” John Formella, the New Hampshire attorney general, said in a release. The boy suffered “facial and scalp injuries, acute fentanyl intoxication, malnourishment and pressure ulcers.”
The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Massachusetts conducted the autopsy.
Lewis’ body was found late last month, after “credible information” led investigators to a wooded area near Boston, the local district attorney said at the time. There, a cadaver dog found Lewis’ remains “buried in the ground.”
Two people — Lewis’ mother, Danielle Dauphinais, 35, and her boyfriend, Joseph Staph, 30 — remain held without bail on charges of witness tampering and child endangerment, which were brought against them last month after they were arrested in New York City.
Both allegedly asked other people to lie about where the 5-year-old was living, “knowing that child protection service workers were searching for Elijah,” the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office said.
“The endangerment charge alleges that they violated a duty of care, protection or support for Elijah,” the office said.
The two pleaded not guilty to both charges in a New Hampshire court.
The Merrimack Police Department began investigating Lewis’ disappearance on Oct. 14, after the Rhode Island Department of Children, Youth, and Families reported to police that his whereabouts were unknown, according to the state’s attorney general’s office. The child welfare agency’s involvement with the boy is unclear.
The search for Lewis involved multiple New Hampshire and Massachusetts state and county agencies, as well as the FBI.
Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
(GROVELAND. Fla.) — A judge in Florida posthumously exonerated four Black men, known as the “Groveland Four,” who were falsely accused of raping a white woman in the central Florida town of Groveland in 1949.
Their families have been fighting to clear their names for decades, and in October, Florida State Attorney Bill Gladson filed a motion to posthumously clear the “Groveland Four” of their criminal records after the state determined that the evidence against the men was falsified.
Charles Greenlee’s daughter, Carol Greenlee, told ABC News that knowing her father has been exonerated has cleared a “cloud” that has followed her for 72 years.
“All my life I’ve been waiting to hear those words: ‘Restore presumption of innocence,'” she said.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis granted posthumous pardons to the men — Charles Greenlee, Ernest Thomas, Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin — in 2019.
“Even a casual review of the record reveals that these four men were deprived of the fundamental due process rights that are afforded to all Americans,” Gladson wrote in the motion that was heard in court Monday morning. “The evidence strongly suggests that a sheriff, a judge and prosecutor all but guaranteed guilty verdicts in this case.”
Following the rape accusation in 1949, an angry mob shot and killed Thomas before he could be arrested. Charles Greenlee, Shepherd and Irvin were all put to trial and convicted.
Charles Greenlee was given a life sentence. Irvin and Shepherd were sentenced to death and successfully made an appeal. In 1951, the U.S. Supreme Court vacated their convictions and ordered a new trial for each. Following the new indictment, a Florida sheriff, Willis McCall, shot and killed Shepherd and attacked and injured Irvin.
Records show that the indictment against Thomas and Shepherd were never dismissed by the court, according to Gladson’s motion.
Irvin was retried, convicted and again sentenced to death, but later had his sentence commuted to life in prison.
Following the hearing, Gladson addressed reporters in a press conference and was joined by family members of the Groveland Four.
The first of the family members to speak was Carol Greenlee, who broke down in the court when the judge announced her father’s name would be cleared.
“This is a day that God has made,” she told reporters and thanked everyone who has helped her along her journey to fight for her father.
Carol Greenlee, who is 72, is just as old as the case of the Groveland Four. She was born a few months after her father was wrongfully imprisoned for rape.
Charles Greenlee, who was only 16 at the time, received a recommendation of mercy from the jury and received a life sentence instead of a death sentence. He did not appeal the verdict, but he was released on parole when his daughter was 11 years old. He died in 2012.
In an emotional interview with ABC News, Carol Greenlee, who said she took on the fight to clear her father’s name because he didn’t appeal his conviction, reflected on the “hole” in her life that the Groveland Four case has left and how it impacted her relationship with her father.
She said that she grew up visiting her father in prison until she was 3, when he asked her mother not to bring her back because it was “too painful.” But he continued to send her things from prison and didn’t miss a birthday card, she said.
Carol Greenlee said it took her years to understand the story of the Groveland Four and why her father didn’t want to see her.
“As a child, I would play in the courtyard while they talked and this one particular Sunday, he told her not to bring me back,” she said. “And that gave me a sense of being rejected, not being wanted. For a long time, I couldn’t understand. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
Carol Greenlee said that the charges against her father made her feel “guilty” growing up, and she felt like “other children that knew about it looked at me in a very strange and unforgiving way, that I was dirty.”
But as she got older, she learned more about what happened to the Groveland Four, and when she was 40 years-old, she finally asked her father and heard the story from him for the first time.
“I decided that in order to get rid of this hole that was inside of me that nobody could fill, that marching on picket lines couldn’t fill that, that everything that I did could not fill that hole — the desire to know more about my father,” she said.
Carol Greenlee said she can now begin to heal spiritually, because this journey has taught her that “hate destroys you from within, anger tears you apart.”
“But compassion, forgiveness, and hope builds you up. And as long as you got hope, you can look forward,” she added.
When asked how she wants the world to remember her father, she said, “I want the world to know Charles Greenlee as a compassionate, loving family man who cares dearly about his children and wants to protect them at all costs.”
Other family members who spoke at the press conference on Monday included Dr. Beverly Robinson, the cousin of Samuel Shepherd; Eddie Irvin and Gerald Threat, nephews of Walter Irvin; and Aaron Newson, the nephew of Ernest Thomas.
Author Gilbert King — who won a Pulitzer prize for “Devil in the Grove,” his 2012 book about the Groveland Four — also spoke following the hearing. He was joined by Thurgood Marshall Jr., the son of the late Supreme Court justice who represented Irvin in the trial.
Marshall Sr. was with the NAACP at the time before becoming the Supreme Court’s first Black justice. His son said the case always haunted his father.
ABC News’ Rachel DeLima contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — The Department of Justice has reached a settlement with parents of the Parkland shooting victims, court documents obtained by ABC News show.
Parents Fred and Jennifer Guttenberg sued the DOJ in 2018, alleging that the FBI knew shooter Nikolas Cruz was “going to explode” at some point and did nothing to stop him from starting a massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
Other parents of Parkland victims joined the suit.
On Feb. 14, 2018, Cruz opened fire at the school, which he attended, and killed 17 fellow students. In October, he plead guilty to 17 counts of murder, and a jury will decide if he should face the death penalty or not.
“He wanted to kill people, and he had the means to do so—he had spent the last several months collecting rifles and ammunition,” the complaint filed in federal court in 2018 says. “Forty days later, Mr. Cruz did just what tipster warned the FBI he would do. He entered his former high school—Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida—and executed 17 people.”
While the DOJ did not offer any settlement details, in their most recent court filing, the details are being worked out between the parties.
The court asked that the specifics of the settlement to be reached by Dec. 20.
