Earth Wind & Fire

The band Maurice White named after the three elements in his astrological chart, and then spent thirty years making sound like a philosophy. Earth, Wind & Fire came out of Chicago in 1969, where White had been a session drummer at Chess Records and a member of the Ramsey Lewis Trio, and where he picked up the kalimba that would end up threaded through the catalogue. Two albums for Warner Brothers went nowhere. White dissolved the lineup, kept his brother Verdine on bass, brought in Philip Bailey, Larry Dunn, Ralph Johnson and others, and built something else entirely — jazz musicianship, a full horn section, Afro-Caribbean rhythm, and lyrics about brotherhood and enlightenment, delivered by a live show involving levitation and disappearing pyramids.

That's the Way of the World, Gratitude, All 'n All and I Am made them one of the biggest acts in the world across the second half of the 1970s, and sales now stand above 90 million records. Six Grammy Awards, a Hollywood Walk of Fame star in 1995, induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000, and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2016. Maurice White stopped touring in 1996 after a Parkinson's diagnosis and died in 2016, having kept producing to the end. Bailey, Verdine White and Ralph Johnson still take the band out — and every September 21, a song the band released in November returns to the top of the internet.