Producer, arranger and renowned studio hand ARIF MARDIN died June 25 in New York after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. During his career, much of it spent with Atlantic Records, Mardin worked with Aretha Franklin, Dusty Springfield, Norah Jones, […]
The new Tom Petty album played on the jambox in Todd Snider’s East Nashville basement as he and old friend/frequent collaborator Will Kimbrough faced each other, cups full of Centenario rum and ears perked by Petty’s jangle. “‘You’re flirting with […]
There’s no telling how the promising musical career of Vince Bell might have played out had he avoided that near-fatal auto accident in late 1982. It is difficult to imagine it would have been as interesting, provocative or inspirational as […]
Among his 1950s contemporaries, Fats Domino has seemed to exist in a literary limbo. Books about Elvis have turned into a cottage industry while Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly and Jerry Lee Lewis have been the focus of multiple biographies. Nearly […]
About once a decade, the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum seems to produce a fresh, lavishly illustrated history of the music. Yes, they are coffee table books, but this one aspires to rather more: It asks to be […]
Performance artist Jo Carol Pierce has a rap in her music/theater piece “Bad Girls Upset By The Truth” in which a young girl attends church and receives a message from Jesus: “Don’t you ever even worry about keeping that beat. […]
Jump blues/R&B pianist FLOYD DIXON, best known for his 1954 song “Hey Bartender”, died July 26 in Los Angeles, California, of kidney failure. A protege of Charles Brown, he recorded for Aladdin, Specialty, and a number of smaller imprints before […]
Blues singer JESSIE MAE MEMPHILL died July 22 in Memphis, Tennessee, of complications from an infection. She was 71.
Singer, drummer, and harmonica player SAM MYERS died July 17 of throat cancer. The legally blind frontman was best known as a member of Anson Funderburgh & the Rockets, though much earlier in his career he worked with Elmore James […]
Writer/publisher PAUL NELSON was found dead in his New York apartment July 5. He wrote for a number of music magazines, founded the Little Sandy Review with John Pankake in 1961, then served as managing editor of Sing Out! when […]
