As we come to the end of 2022, we remember the people who have moved through the door of life and into our collective unconscious. Musicians, composers, and singers are among the many groups of people that deserve a moment of remembrance as they frequently put into feeling what we cannot express simply through words or pictures or hugs.
Below I will list some of the names of musicians who passed away in 2022. It will be a solid list, and I’ll link to larger and more robust obituaries throughout, but it’s almost entirely made up of American artists and people who found success in America. I ask your forgiveness in advance for the people I miss. I mean no disrespect and would appreciate their mentions in the comments, or stories you may have that are related to any of the music-makers listed below.
This is the final part of a three-part series.
Loretta Lynn: The coal miner’s daughter herself. Lynn had a long and illustrious career, and got to enjoy being a living legend for decades. Part of her legend was fed by her curiosity and generosity with younger performers. She never did forget the well where she drew water.
YouTube Video
Herschel Sizemore: Sizemore was a bluegrass player known for his mandolin work. He grew up near the famous Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and by 14 was working as a musician playing school and square dances.
YouTube Video
Harry Sheppard: He started his in the New York jazz scene, playing with the likes of Billie Holiday, Benny Goodman, and Duke Ellington. He moved down to Houston for the second half of his life and was ubiquitous as a “virtuosic vibraphonist.”
Jesse Powell: Powell was a R&B singer who hit with the song “You” in the 1990s.
YouTube Video
Jim Post: He started his songwriting and singing career with the folk group the Rum Runners back in the early 1960s. He subsequently hit the charts in 1968 with the song “Reach Out of the Darkness” in the duo Friend and Lover.
Anton Fier: He was a drummer for bands like the Feelies, Lounge Lizards, and the Golden Palominos. He was also a composer and sought-after New York musician who played with everyone from Herbie Hancock to Yoko Ono, and Mick Jagger to Gil Scott-Heron.
Pharaoh Sanders: A saxophone jazz legend, Pharaoh made his bones as a member of various John Coltrane groups in the 1960s. Amiri Baraka said of Sanders: “Sanders has consistently had bands that could not only create a lyrical near-mystical Afro-Eastern world but [also] sweat hot fire music in continuing display of the so-called 'energy music' of the '60s.”
Kevin Locke: Locke was a flute player, hoop dancer, and educator. A member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, he had been performing for 40 years, right up until he passed.
YouTube Video
Coolio: He was a West Coast rapper who hit it big with the song “Gangsta’s Paradise” back in the 1990s. His music tended to draw from 1970s soul and R&B classics, a harbinger of the music that Kanye West would later draw from to become a mega star in the hip hop world. Coolio hit the popular music scene a little later than many and brought with him a born-again Christianity that he said had helped him recover from early addiction issues.
David Malachowski: He was a guitarist and musical director for Shania Twain. He also toured in the pit bands of Broadway musicals like Mamma Mia! and Rent.
Keith Johnson: Johnson was known in the gospel world as “Wonderboy,” with various radio hits and quite a few albums over the years. He was known for his gospel quartets, started his career in New York City, and migrated recently to Atlanta.
Lenny Lipton: He was more of a poet and technological developer, but as freshman engineering major at Cornell University wrote a poem that was subsequently discovered—left in a schoolmate’s typewriter—by Peter Yarrow. Yarrow was the Peter of Peter, Paul, and Mary, and that poem became the lyrics to a song we call “Puff The Magic Dragon.”
Ivy Joe Hunter: He was a songwriter in the Motown machine, working on such hits as “Dancing in the Streets,” on which he played a set of tire chains slapping a piece of wood.
Jody Miller: The country singer hit it big with her crossover hit “Queen of the House” (an early music response to Roger Miller’s “King of the Road”). It was a different time. Even though Miller’s hit was accepted by all, her followup 1965 song, an “empathetic ode to a boy who is bullied and barred from school” because he’s basically become a hippie, was banned from some country stations.
YouTube Video
Ronnie Cuber: A baritone jazz saxophonist, he played all over, and even as a part of the Saturday Night Live band for a time. Cuber played all kinds of reed instruments, but he told journalist Bret Primack in 2016 that he began playing the baritone when he auditioned for Marshall Brown’s Newport Youth Band at the age of 17. “He asked me if I would consider playing baritone. I said, ‘Well, I don’t have a baritone.’ He said, ‘Well, kid, if I buy you one, will you play it?’” The rest, as they say, is music history.
Anita Kerr: Kerr was a singer and arranger known as one of the creators of the “Nashville sound” era of country music. You might remember her and the Anita Kerr Singers as the background vocal chanting heard on Roy Orbison’s “Only the Lonely.” Her daughter wrote of her passing, “Such sad news and what a great loss for the music industry. Anita was a legend in her time but first and foremost she was my mother. May you rest in peace. I will forever miss you but I am comforted in knowing that you are now singing with angels. You are forever in my heart.”
Angela Lansbury: She was a murderous baker, a television detective, and the most famous singing teapot of all time, among many other things. Have a little priest pie from Mrs. Lovett’s Pie Shop, on her behalf.
YouTube Video
Danny “Monsta O” Devoux: When the West Coast rap collective Boo-Yaa T.R.I.B.E. hit the scene they were quite a revelation, both visually and audibly. The West Coast scene relied far more on funk samples than the more dominant East Coast hip hop world, and a huge crew of tatted-up Samoan dudes was not something seen on television in the late 1980s.
Thomas Sleeper: Professor Sleeper was “the Frost Symphony Orchestra conductor for 25 years and served as Director of the Florida Youth Orchestra for 27 years.” One of his students, a successful conductor in his own right, Cristian Măcelaru, had this to say about Sleeper: “Thom understood that the quality of one's education is directly linked to exposure to a multitude of styles and genres...Those lucky to get to know Thom will remember him as a bright composer and conductor, an inspired professor, and a wonderful human being. He was a committed father and partner, a skilled carpenter, a tinkerer of many things, and a great cook. Though our hearts feel empty today knowing of Thom's passing, our lives remain full for having known him. We thank him for everything. He will be greatly missed.”
Grand Daddy I.U.: He was a hip hop legend. He came up in the 1980s, as a rapper and a producer, with Cold Chillin’ Records. He hit with songs like “Sugar Free,” and the ear worm “Something New.”
YouTube Video
Robert Gordon: Called a rockabilly revivalist, Gordon brought his throwback stylings to the New York punk scene in the 1970s.
Lucy Simon: Two of the three Simon sisters passed away this year. Lucy Simon was known as a Broadway composer and singer who kept a lower profile than her famous sister Carly.
Joanna Simon: A television correspondent and a former acclaimed opera singer. While the latter half of her career was on television, the first part of her career was on the stage singing classics.
Bettye Crutcher: She was a songwriter at Stax Records, creating hits for artists like Johnnie Taylor, The Staple Singers, Sam & Dave, and Albert King. In a 2019 interview, she talked about being the sole female songwriter on the staff at Stax. “To be the only female songwriter for Stax was quite an event,” Crutcher recalled in a 2019 interview. “You’re talking about the sexist ‘60s, and I really think the guys thought the girls couldn't do it.” But she could. And she did.
YouTube Video
Gregg Philbin: He was the bassist for REO Speedwagon before the advent of MTV. Philbin was too progressive rock for the direction the band wanted to go, but he found his freedom.
Geraldine Hunt: Hunt was a Chicago-raised singer and performer who hit in the 1970s and 1980s. As the disco era came to a close, Hunt was able to straddle the two decades with her “Can’t Fake The Feeling.”
YouTube Video
D.H. Peligro: Peligro grew up in St. Louis and joined the Dead Kennedys in 1981, replacing their first drummer. Peligro played with a variety of legendary punk and underground groups over the years, including the Hellations, Feeders, and the Red hot Chili Peppers.
YouTube Video
Paul Haggerty: Haggerty was a country music singer-songwriter who led the very proud Lavender Country group, the first openly gay country music outfit. The band got together around 1973, and being open about his sexuality meant Haggerty was an activist because his honesty in a world filled with bigotry made his music that much more courageous. Haggerty grew up in the 1940s and 1950s on a dairy farm in Washington. He said he knew he was gay at an early age and was lucky to have a father who was also an open-minded and supportive man. Earlier this year, he told Pitchfork in an interview, “It’s really quite astonishing, to have come full circle and realize that my anti-fascist work and my art get to be combined into the same me. I get to go out on stage and be a screaming Marxist bitch, use all of my artistry and hambonedness to do my life’s work. I get to be exactly who I am.”
Takeoff: He was one-third of the wildly successful hip hop group Migos. Takeoff, whose real name was Kirshnik Khari Ball, died young—a casualty of American gun violence. Takeoff and the group Migos’ ascent to the heights of hip hop popularity was meteoric and unfortunately too short.
YouTube Video
Don Lewis: He was a synthesizer pioneer, creating a name for himself in the music and engineering world when he created a Live Electronic Orchestra. “Designed in 1974 and finally completed three years later, this complex project involved Lewis linking multiple synths together so that he could control them simultaneously for live performances - and all without the aid of MIDI, which had yet to be invented.” Lewis worked on a number of synthesizers over the decades as a “consultant,” but he was so much more than that.
Vimeo Video
Hurricane G: Her real name was Gloria Rodriguez, and she was a Puerto Rican MC who hit in 1997 with the song “Somebody Else.” She also was an early bilingual rap pioneer, fusing the legitimacy of her New York City rap roots with her Puerto Rican heritage.
Jeff Cook: He was a founding member of the country music power band Alabama. Cook sang, played guitar and fiddle, and even added keyboards in the band that was too big not to be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2005.
YouTube Video
Keith Levene: He was a Brit, but his reach in America was important with groups like Public Image Ltd (PiL) and The Clash. Levine founded The Clash and then left the formed band that would go on to to incredible success while founding Public Image Ltd with Sex Pistols’ front man John Lydon.
Gene Cipriano: Called “Cip,” the saxophonist played music on many televisions shows and films. His instrument can be heard on Batman, The Flintstones, M*A*S*H*, Star Trek, The Simpsons, American Dad, and Mission Impossible. Actor Tony Curtis is great and all in Some Like It Hot, but he couldn’t play the saxophone—that’s Cip making all that music.
YouTube Video
Ned Rorem: Rorem lived a very long life and composed a lot of important American music. He won the Pulitzer Prize for some of his more than 500 art songs. But Rorem composed everything from symphonies to operas. Rorem also had a very voluminous written diary that he was known for, where his opinions on music and life provoked much thought.
YouTube Video
Mick Goodrick: The jazz guitarist taught at Berklee College of Music and the New England Conservatory. His book, The Advancing Guitarist, is considered an essential tome for modern jazz guitarists. Many of his students have gone on to very influential careers in the world of modern jazz.
Danny Kalb: Kalb was the lead guitarist for the New York-based 1960s band the Blues Project. He was a pioneer at the edge of what would be called blues-rock.
YouTube Video
Joyce Bryant: She was beautiful and had a voice to match and she was glamorous and fetishized in a sexist and racist society, but she was great. Famously, she stuck out by using radiator paint to turn her head silver. According to Bryant she did this in the hope of standing out from the two largest Black stars of the day, Josephine Baker and Lena Horne. “After them, who was going to listen to me? I knew I had to do something different.” It worked. Bryant received even more vociferous pushback compared with other contemporary Black female artists singing sensual and emotional songs—it has been suggested the reason was because Bryant was far darker-skinned than someone like Dorothy Dandridge.
Bryant told newspapers that she ended up going back to school and teaching in part because of her Christian upbringing as well as the inhumane treatment she received within the business from people—even her manager. She returned to the stage to sing in later years but stayed under the radar of popular fame. In 1953, during her rise as a nightclub singer, Bryant told TIME Magazine, "People tell me I should never end a show with such a sad number. Most entertainers end with a life-of-the-party number. Not me. I leave them way down. Sometimes I see people crying in the audience. I guess people like to cry."
YouTube Video
J.J. Barnes: A Detroit native, he was a R&B singer with a career in front of and behind the scenes at Motown.
Angelo Badalamenti: Badalamenti was teaching junior high school in Brooklyn, New York, when he was tapped to compose music for David Lynch. Actually, he was tapped to vocal coach Blue Velvet actress Isabella Rossellini. That work quickly turned into writing songs for the film and grew into a career of writing tons of music for all of Lynch’s projects, as well as for other television shows.
Stanley Drucker: He was the Principal Clarinet of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. He played in the orchestra for 60 years.
Thom Bell: He wrote and arraigned music for people like the Delfonics, The Spinners, O’Jays, and Elton John. Here’s a song you might remember.
YouTube Video
Charlie Gracie: Gracie was a rockabilly star from Philadelphia, probably best known for his number 1 hit, that influenced a generation a musicians, “Butterfly.” Here he is doing “Cool Baby.”
YouTube Video
Bertha Barbee-McNeal: Barbee-McNeal was a child prodigy pianist and songwriter. She co-founded the Velvelettes. They were one of the early Motown signings with hits like “He Was Really Saying Something.”
Terry Hall: He was the frontman of ska band The Specials. They were an English band, and Hall an Englishman, but they were important in America for their music and the “2-tone” interracial band scene they helped create.
YouTube Video
Irene Cara: She was every single one of us for a generation of kids growing up in the late 1970s and 1980s. Irene Cara was a child star performer who sang 1980s anthems like “Fame” and “What a Feeling.” She was right: We will remember her name.
YouTube Video
Below I will list some of the names of musicians who passed away in 2022. It will be a solid list, and I’ll link to larger and more robust obituaries throughout, but it’s almost entirely made up of American artists and people who found success in America. I ask your forgiveness in advance for the people I miss. I mean no disrespect and would appreciate their mentions in the comments, or stories you may have that are related to any of the music-makers listed below.
This is the final part of a three-part series.
Loretta Lynn: The coal miner’s daughter herself. Lynn had a long and illustrious career, and got to enjoy being a living legend for decades. Part of her legend was fed by her curiosity and generosity with younger performers. She never did forget the well where she drew water.
YouTube Video
Herschel Sizemore: Sizemore was a bluegrass player known for his mandolin work. He grew up near the famous Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and by 14 was working as a musician playing school and square dances.
YouTube Video
Harry Sheppard: He started his in the New York jazz scene, playing with the likes of Billie Holiday, Benny Goodman, and Duke Ellington. He moved down to Houston for the second half of his life and was ubiquitous as a “virtuosic vibraphonist.”
Jesse Powell: Powell was a R&B singer who hit with the song “You” in the 1990s.
YouTube Video
Jim Post: He started his songwriting and singing career with the folk group the Rum Runners back in the early 1960s. He subsequently hit the charts in 1968 with the song “Reach Out of the Darkness” in the duo Friend and Lover.
Anton Fier: He was a drummer for bands like the Feelies, Lounge Lizards, and the Golden Palominos. He was also a composer and sought-after New York musician who played with everyone from Herbie Hancock to Yoko Ono, and Mick Jagger to Gil Scott-Heron.
Pharaoh Sanders: A saxophone jazz legend, Pharaoh made his bones as a member of various John Coltrane groups in the 1960s. Amiri Baraka said of Sanders: “Sanders has consistently had bands that could not only create a lyrical near-mystical Afro-Eastern world but [also] sweat hot fire music in continuing display of the so-called 'energy music' of the '60s.”
Kevin Locke: Locke was a flute player, hoop dancer, and educator. A member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, he had been performing for 40 years, right up until he passed.
YouTube Video
Coolio: He was a West Coast rapper who hit it big with the song “Gangsta’s Paradise” back in the 1990s. His music tended to draw from 1970s soul and R&B classics, a harbinger of the music that Kanye West would later draw from to become a mega star in the hip hop world. Coolio hit the popular music scene a little later than many and brought with him a born-again Christianity that he said had helped him recover from early addiction issues.
David Malachowski: He was a guitarist and musical director for Shania Twain. He also toured in the pit bands of Broadway musicals like Mamma Mia! and Rent.
Keith Johnson: Johnson was known in the gospel world as “Wonderboy,” with various radio hits and quite a few albums over the years. He was known for his gospel quartets, started his career in New York City, and migrated recently to Atlanta.
Lenny Lipton: He was more of a poet and technological developer, but as freshman engineering major at Cornell University wrote a poem that was subsequently discovered—left in a schoolmate’s typewriter—by Peter Yarrow. Yarrow was the Peter of Peter, Paul, and Mary, and that poem became the lyrics to a song we call “Puff The Magic Dragon.”
Ivy Joe Hunter: He was a songwriter in the Motown machine, working on such hits as “Dancing in the Streets,” on which he played a set of tire chains slapping a piece of wood.
Jody Miller: The country singer hit it big with her crossover hit “Queen of the House” (an early music response to Roger Miller’s “King of the Road”). It was a different time. Even though Miller’s hit was accepted by all, her followup 1965 song, an “empathetic ode to a boy who is bullied and barred from school” because he’s basically become a hippie, was banned from some country stations.
YouTube Video
Ronnie Cuber: A baritone jazz saxophonist, he played all over, and even as a part of the Saturday Night Live band for a time. Cuber played all kinds of reed instruments, but he told journalist Bret Primack in 2016 that he began playing the baritone when he auditioned for Marshall Brown’s Newport Youth Band at the age of 17. “He asked me if I would consider playing baritone. I said, ‘Well, I don’t have a baritone.’ He said, ‘Well, kid, if I buy you one, will you play it?’” The rest, as they say, is music history.
Anita Kerr: Kerr was a singer and arranger known as one of the creators of the “Nashville sound” era of country music. You might remember her and the Anita Kerr Singers as the background vocal chanting heard on Roy Orbison’s “Only the Lonely.” Her daughter wrote of her passing, “Such sad news and what a great loss for the music industry. Anita was a legend in her time but first and foremost she was my mother. May you rest in peace. I will forever miss you but I am comforted in knowing that you are now singing with angels. You are forever in my heart.”
Angela Lansbury: She was a murderous baker, a television detective, and the most famous singing teapot of all time, among many other things. Have a little priest pie from Mrs. Lovett’s Pie Shop, on her behalf.
YouTube Video
Danny “Monsta O” Devoux: When the West Coast rap collective Boo-Yaa T.R.I.B.E. hit the scene they were quite a revelation, both visually and audibly. The West Coast scene relied far more on funk samples than the more dominant East Coast hip hop world, and a huge crew of tatted-up Samoan dudes was not something seen on television in the late 1980s.
Thomas Sleeper: Professor Sleeper was “the Frost Symphony Orchestra conductor for 25 years and served as Director of the Florida Youth Orchestra for 27 years.” One of his students, a successful conductor in his own right, Cristian Măcelaru, had this to say about Sleeper: “Thom understood that the quality of one's education is directly linked to exposure to a multitude of styles and genres...Those lucky to get to know Thom will remember him as a bright composer and conductor, an inspired professor, and a wonderful human being. He was a committed father and partner, a skilled carpenter, a tinkerer of many things, and a great cook. Though our hearts feel empty today knowing of Thom's passing, our lives remain full for having known him. We thank him for everything. He will be greatly missed.”
Grand Daddy I.U.: He was a hip hop legend. He came up in the 1980s, as a rapper and a producer, with Cold Chillin’ Records. He hit with songs like “Sugar Free,” and the ear worm “Something New.”
YouTube Video
Robert Gordon: Called a rockabilly revivalist, Gordon brought his throwback stylings to the New York punk scene in the 1970s.
Lucy Simon: Two of the three Simon sisters passed away this year. Lucy Simon was known as a Broadway composer and singer who kept a lower profile than her famous sister Carly.
Joanna Simon: A television correspondent and a former acclaimed opera singer. While the latter half of her career was on television, the first part of her career was on the stage singing classics.
Bettye Crutcher: She was a songwriter at Stax Records, creating hits for artists like Johnnie Taylor, The Staple Singers, Sam & Dave, and Albert King. In a 2019 interview, she talked about being the sole female songwriter on the staff at Stax. “To be the only female songwriter for Stax was quite an event,” Crutcher recalled in a 2019 interview. “You’re talking about the sexist ‘60s, and I really think the guys thought the girls couldn't do it.” But she could. And she did.
YouTube Video
Gregg Philbin: He was the bassist for REO Speedwagon before the advent of MTV. Philbin was too progressive rock for the direction the band wanted to go, but he found his freedom.
Geraldine Hunt: Hunt was a Chicago-raised singer and performer who hit in the 1970s and 1980s. As the disco era came to a close, Hunt was able to straddle the two decades with her “Can’t Fake The Feeling.”
YouTube Video
D.H. Peligro: Peligro grew up in St. Louis and joined the Dead Kennedys in 1981, replacing their first drummer. Peligro played with a variety of legendary punk and underground groups over the years, including the Hellations, Feeders, and the Red hot Chili Peppers.
YouTube Video
Paul Haggerty: Haggerty was a country music singer-songwriter who led the very proud Lavender Country group, the first openly gay country music outfit. The band got together around 1973, and being open about his sexuality meant Haggerty was an activist because his honesty in a world filled with bigotry made his music that much more courageous. Haggerty grew up in the 1940s and 1950s on a dairy farm in Washington. He said he knew he was gay at an early age and was lucky to have a father who was also an open-minded and supportive man. Earlier this year, he told Pitchfork in an interview, “It’s really quite astonishing, to have come full circle and realize that my anti-fascist work and my art get to be combined into the same me. I get to go out on stage and be a screaming Marxist bitch, use all of my artistry and hambonedness to do my life’s work. I get to be exactly who I am.”
Takeoff: He was one-third of the wildly successful hip hop group Migos. Takeoff, whose real name was Kirshnik Khari Ball, died young—a casualty of American gun violence. Takeoff and the group Migos’ ascent to the heights of hip hop popularity was meteoric and unfortunately too short.
YouTube Video
Don Lewis: He was a synthesizer pioneer, creating a name for himself in the music and engineering world when he created a Live Electronic Orchestra. “Designed in 1974 and finally completed three years later, this complex project involved Lewis linking multiple synths together so that he could control them simultaneously for live performances - and all without the aid of MIDI, which had yet to be invented.” Lewis worked on a number of synthesizers over the decades as a “consultant,” but he was so much more than that.
Vimeo Video
Hurricane G: Her real name was Gloria Rodriguez, and she was a Puerto Rican MC who hit in 1997 with the song “Somebody Else.” She also was an early bilingual rap pioneer, fusing the legitimacy of her New York City rap roots with her Puerto Rican heritage.
Jeff Cook: He was a founding member of the country music power band Alabama. Cook sang, played guitar and fiddle, and even added keyboards in the band that was too big not to be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2005.
YouTube Video
Keith Levene: He was a Brit, but his reach in America was important with groups like Public Image Ltd (PiL) and The Clash. Levine founded The Clash and then left the formed band that would go on to to incredible success while founding Public Image Ltd with Sex Pistols’ front man John Lydon.
Gene Cipriano: Called “Cip,” the saxophonist played music on many televisions shows and films. His instrument can be heard on Batman, The Flintstones, M*A*S*H*, Star Trek, The Simpsons, American Dad, and Mission Impossible. Actor Tony Curtis is great and all in Some Like It Hot, but he couldn’t play the saxophone—that’s Cip making all that music.
YouTube Video
Ned Rorem: Rorem lived a very long life and composed a lot of important American music. He won the Pulitzer Prize for some of his more than 500 art songs. But Rorem composed everything from symphonies to operas. Rorem also had a very voluminous written diary that he was known for, where his opinions on music and life provoked much thought.
YouTube Video
Mick Goodrick: The jazz guitarist taught at Berklee College of Music and the New England Conservatory. His book, The Advancing Guitarist, is considered an essential tome for modern jazz guitarists. Many of his students have gone on to very influential careers in the world of modern jazz.
Danny Kalb: Kalb was the lead guitarist for the New York-based 1960s band the Blues Project. He was a pioneer at the edge of what would be called blues-rock.
YouTube Video
Joyce Bryant: She was beautiful and had a voice to match and she was glamorous and fetishized in a sexist and racist society, but she was great. Famously, she stuck out by using radiator paint to turn her head silver. According to Bryant she did this in the hope of standing out from the two largest Black stars of the day, Josephine Baker and Lena Horne. “After them, who was going to listen to me? I knew I had to do something different.” It worked. Bryant received even more vociferous pushback compared with other contemporary Black female artists singing sensual and emotional songs—it has been suggested the reason was because Bryant was far darker-skinned than someone like Dorothy Dandridge.
Bryant told newspapers that she ended up going back to school and teaching in part because of her Christian upbringing as well as the inhumane treatment she received within the business from people—even her manager. She returned to the stage to sing in later years but stayed under the radar of popular fame. In 1953, during her rise as a nightclub singer, Bryant told TIME Magazine, "People tell me I should never end a show with such a sad number. Most entertainers end with a life-of-the-party number. Not me. I leave them way down. Sometimes I see people crying in the audience. I guess people like to cry."
YouTube Video
J.J. Barnes: A Detroit native, he was a R&B singer with a career in front of and behind the scenes at Motown.
Angelo Badalamenti: Badalamenti was teaching junior high school in Brooklyn, New York, when he was tapped to compose music for David Lynch. Actually, he was tapped to vocal coach Blue Velvet actress Isabella Rossellini. That work quickly turned into writing songs for the film and grew into a career of writing tons of music for all of Lynch’s projects, as well as for other television shows.
Stanley Drucker: He was the Principal Clarinet of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. He played in the orchestra for 60 years.
Thom Bell: He wrote and arraigned music for people like the Delfonics, The Spinners, O’Jays, and Elton John. Here’s a song you might remember.
YouTube Video
Charlie Gracie: Gracie was a rockabilly star from Philadelphia, probably best known for his number 1 hit, that influenced a generation a musicians, “Butterfly.” Here he is doing “Cool Baby.”
YouTube Video
Bertha Barbee-McNeal: Barbee-McNeal was a child prodigy pianist and songwriter. She co-founded the Velvelettes. They were one of the early Motown signings with hits like “He Was Really Saying Something.”
Terry Hall: He was the frontman of ska band The Specials. They were an English band, and Hall an Englishman, but they were important in America for their music and the “2-tone” interracial band scene they helped create.
YouTube Video
Irene Cara: She was every single one of us for a generation of kids growing up in the late 1970s and 1980s. Irene Cara was a child star performer who sang 1980s anthems like “Fame” and “What a Feeling.” She was right: We will remember her name.
YouTube Video