Huey Lewis

Huey Lewis is an American singer-songwriter, harmonica-player, and lead-vocalist of the American rock band Huey Lewis and the News whose four-decade music career has produced multiple defining 1980s American pop-rock-music albums — particularly the band's 1983 third commercial album Sports (which sold over seven million American copies and produced four consecutive Billboard Hot 100 top-10 singles). He was born Hugh Anthony Cregg III on July 5, 1950, in New York City, into an Irish-American working-class family. His father Hugh Anthony Cregg Jr. was a New York-area radiologist, and his mother Magda Gabor was a Polish-Jewish homemaker.

His education at Cornell University (1967–1968; without earning a degree, after he left to pursue a music career) launched his early-career path. His teenage and early-adulthood American music career across 1968–1972 — across multiple international hitchhiking-and-busking engagements (particularly his 1968–1969 European hitchhiking trip during which he busked harmonica in multiple European cities) — produced his early-career American folk-blues-and-rock public profile.

His 1972 founding of the American funk-rock band Clover (alongside fellow San Francisco Bay Area-area musicians) launched his early-career mid-1970s American funk-rock public profile. The 1976 Clover relocation to England (under producer Nick Lowe) and the subsequent 1979 Clover backing-band work on Elvis Costello's first commercial album My Aim Is True produced his early-career late-1970s American-and-British rock-music public profile.

His 1979 founding of Huey Lewis and the News in San Francisco (alongside guitarist Chris Hayes, bassist Mario Cipollina, drummer Bill Gibson, keyboardist Sean Hopper, and saxophonist Johnny Colla) launched his early-1980s American pop-rock-music public profile. The 1982 second commercial album Picture This sold over one million American copies and produced his early-1980s American pop-rock public profile through the singles "Workin' for a Livin'" and "Do You Believe in Love."

His September 15, 1983 third commercial album Sports — released by Chrysalis Records — sold over seven million American copies and produced his mid-1980s American pop-rock-music commercial peak. The 1983 album produced four consecutive Billboard Hot 100 top-10 singles — "Heart and Soul," "I Want a New Drug," "The Heart of Rock & Roll," and "If This Is It." His 1985 single "The Power of Love" (recorded for the soundtrack of Robert Zemeckis's Back to the Future) became his first Billboard Hot 100 number-one single. His later 2018 Ménière's-disease diagnosis shaped his late-2010s and 2020s biographical narrative. He has been with American homemaker Sidney Conroy since 1983.

His name Huey is the English diminutive of Hugh (from the Old Germanic root meaning "mind" or "intellect"). Huey has been a popular American boys' name across the early-to-mid 20th century.