The Recording Academy announced its 2017 Special Merit Awards recipients. The Lifetime Achievement Award honorees are Shirley Caesar, Ahmad Jamal, Charley Pride, Jimmie Rodgers, Nina Simone, Sly Stone, and the Velvet Underground. Thom Bell, Mo Ostin and Ralph Peer are Trustees Award honorees; Alan Dower Blumlein is the Technical GRAMMY Award recipient.

The Lifetime Achievement Award celebrates performers who have made outstanding contributions of artistic significance to the field of recording.

Additionally, The Recording Academy and Hal Leonard Books will release in early January A GRAMMY Salute To Music Legends, a hardcover book that collects two decades of artist-written tributes to The Academy’s annual Special Merit Awards honorees. The tributes were originally commissioned for the annual GRAMMY Awards program book and never published widely until now.

Read more at GRAMMY.org.