In Memoriam – March 2011
The Grim Reaper must be in need of a holiday after his brutally busy month.In fact, we’re still finding his victims from last month. For example, the 20 February death of doo wop singer Willie Davis was announced only last week.
Among this month’s dead are Carl Bunch, a drummer who toured with Buddy Holly & the Crickets in early 1959. He was in hospital due to frostbite sustained on the unheated tourbus which Buddy, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper tried to rescape by taking the flight that killed them.
Austrian disco-rocker Kurt Hauenstein’ Supermax featured in the Stepping Back series just a few days after his death (which at that point had passed me by; a reader alerted me to it). And with death of St Clair Lee, both male voices of The Hues Corporation are now silent. Another disco voice now gone is Loleatta Holloway, whose Love Sensation was copiously sampled from for Black Box’s 1989 hit Ride On Time ““ including her vocals (“performed” in the video by a slim, young thing). Holloway had more than that in her repertoire, as the slow-burning soul track in this mix, a b-side from 1971, shows.
Country music lost steel guitar maestro and composer Ralph Mooney (whose Crazy Arms was one of the great hits of the 1950s), composers Joe Taylor and Todd Cerney, Opry member Mel McDaniel, bluegrass musician and songwriter Harley Allen and, above all, Ferlin Husky, who with Buck Owen and Jean Shepard pioneered the Bakersfield sound that produced the likes of Merle Haggard and Gram Parsons.
Nate Dogg’s singing-rap style was, in my view, underappreciated. To my chagrin, in his Summer Night On Hammer Hill, Jens Lekman excluded Nate’s contribution to the ’90s hip hop classic Regulate altogether, mentioning only Warren G.
Of all deaths this month (and probably most others), that of London reggae man Smiley Culture is the most bizarre: he reportedly stabbed himself in the heart during a raid by the police, who suspected him of dealing in cocaine. In that light, his humorous 1984 hit Police Officer, about being searched for ganja in his Lancia, is almost spooky.
Willie Davis, 78, tenor of doo wop group The Cadets (also recording as The Jacks, on February 20
The Cadets – Stranded In The Jungle (1956) Read more…
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