Sheila Byars on FB, 01/07/16: Just heard the news that we had lost a great man David Webb. You will be missed very much. I am sending love and strength to his wife Gail Tweed Webb and the rest of his family. I will always have fond memories of all the great times when you played with Hot Posse and sending Robert Bangert and I cool animal videos through messaging. I wished I could have said good bye. Love you Dave, Hugs my friend R.I.P
Steve Pavey So sorry to hear this. I had the chance to play with him several times and he was a really good bassist. He was also a nice guy. He’ll be missed.
Rhonda Logsdon: March 17, 1988 – This was the night I met Dave, through Chuck Millette & Robert Dunn. We started dating that night and we were together 2 ½ years. It just didn’t work out – I wasn’t the right girl for him. A few months later he met Gail – she was the right girl for him & they had a sweet family & a good life. RIP Dave. You have a place in my heart. Gail, Aaron and Brandon – you’re in my prayers.
* * * * *
DAVID BOWIE, SUPER CREATIVE, INNOVATOR, DIES
David Robert Jones (8 January 1947 – 10 January 2016), known professionally as David Bowie, was an English singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, record producer, arranger, painter, and actor. Bowie was a figure in popular music for over four decades, and was known as an innovator, particularly for his work in the 1970s. His androgynous appearance was an iconic element of his image, principally in the 1970s and 1980s.
Born and raised in South London, Bowie developed an early interest in music although his attempts to succeed as a pop star during much of the 1960s were frustrated. Bowie’s first hit song, “Space Oddity”, reached the top five of the UK Singles Chart after its release in July 1969. After a three-year period of experimentation, he re-emerged in 1972 during the glam rock era with the flamboyant, androgynous alter ego Ziggy Stardust, spearheaded by the hit single “Starman” and the album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Bowie’s impact at that time, as described by biographer David Buckley, “challenged the core belief of the rock music of its day” and “created perhaps the biggest cult in popular culture”. The relatively short-lived Ziggy persona proved to be one facet of a career marked by reinvention, musical innovation and visual presentation.
In 1975, Bowie achieved his first major American crossover success with the number-one single “Fame” and the hit album Young Americans, which the singer characterized as “plastic soul”. The sound constituted a radical shift in style that initially alienated many of his UK devotees. He then confounded the expectations of both his record label and his American audiences by recording the electronic-inflected album Low, the first of three collaborations with Brian Eno. Low (1977), “Heroes” (1977), and Lodger (1979)—the so-called “Berlin Trilogy” albums—all reached the UK top five and received lasting critical praise. After uneven commercial success in the late 1970s, Bowie had UK number ones with the 1980 single “Ashes to Ashes”, its parent album Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps), and “Under Pressure”, a 1981 collaboration with Queen. He then reached a new commercial peak in 1983 with Let’s Dance, which yielded several hit singles. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Bowie continued to experiment with musical styles, including blue-eyed soul, industrial, adult contemporary, and jungle. He stopped touring after his 2003–04 Reality Tour, and last performed live at a charity event in 2006. Bowie released the studio album Blackstar on 8 January 2016, his 69th birthday, just two days before his death from liver cancer.
Bowie also had a successful, but sporadic film career. His acting roles include the eponymous character in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), Jareth, the Goblin King in Labyrinth (1986), Pontius Pilate in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), and Nikola Tesla in The Prestige (2006), among other film and television appearances and cameos.
David Buckley said of Bowie: “His influence has been unique in popular culture—he has permeated and altered more lives than any comparable figure.” In the BBC’s 2002 poll of the 100 Greatest Britons, Bowie was placed at number 29. Throughout his career, he has sold an estimated 140 million records worldwide. In the UK, he has been awarded nine Platinum album certifications, eleven Gold and eight Silver, and in the US, five Platinum and seven Gold certifications. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996.
Read more about Mr. Bowie’s long and storied career here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bowie
* * * * *
OTIS CLAY, AMERICAN R&B AND SOUL SINGER, DIES
Otis Clay (February 11, 1942 – January 8, 2016) was an American R&B and soul singer, who started in gospel music. In 2013, Clay was inducted to the Blues Hall of Fame.
Clay was born in Waxhaw, Mississippi to a musical family, who moved in 1953 to Muncie, Indiana. After singing with local gospel group, the Voices of Hope, he returned to Mississippi to sing with the Christian Travelers, before settling in Chicago in 1957. There, he joined a series of gospel vocal groups including the Golden Jubilaires, the Famous Blue Jay Singers, the Holy Wonders, and the Pilgrim Harmonizers, before making his first solo secular recordings in 1962. They were unissued, and Clay joined the Gospel Songbirds, who recorded in Nashville in 1964 and who also included Maurice Dollison who sang R&B under the name Cash McCall, and then the Sensational Nightingales.
In 1965 Clay signed with One-derful! Records in Chicago, to make secular recordings. After releasing a series of gospel-tinged soul records, his first hit came in 1967 with “That’s How It Is (When You’re In Love)”, which reached # 34 on the US Billboard R&B chart, followed by “A Lasting Love” (# 48 R&B). In 1968 the record company folded and his contract was bought by Atlantic Records, who launched their subsidiary Cotillion label with Clay’s version of the Sir Douglas Quintet hit, “She’s About A Mover”, produced at the FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals. The record became Clay’s biggest pop hit, reaching # 97 on the Billboard Hot 100 (# 47 R&B). However, follow-ups on Cotillion, including “Hard Working Woman” produced by Syl Johnson, and “Is It Over?” produced by Willie Mitchell in Memphis, were less successful.
Clay moved to Mitchell’s Hi Records in 1971, and made many of his best known soul blues records for the label. His biggest hit came in late 1972 with “Trying To Live My Life Without You,” a #102 hit on the Billboard Hot 100, #70 on Cash Box, and #24 R&B, which he followed up with “If I Could Reach Out”. “Tryin’ To Live My Life Without You” was later covered by Bob Seger, whose version hit #5 on the pop chart in 1981. After several more Hi singles and the album I Can’t Take It, Clay moved to Kayvette Records, where he had his last national hit single in 1977, “All Because Of Your Love” (#44 R&B). He later recorded for the Elka and Rounder labels, as well as his own Echo Records for whom he recorded the original version of “The Only Way Is Up” in 1980.
He remained a popular live act in Europe and Japan, as well as the US, and recorded three live albums, Soul Man: Live in Japan, Otis Clay Live (also in Japan on Victor VDP-5111), and Respect Yourself, recorded live at the Lucerne Blues Festival in Switzerland. In the 1990s he also recorded two soul albums for Bullseye Blues: I’ll Treat You Right and the Willie Mitchell-produced This Time Around. In 2007, he recorded the gospel album Walk a Mile in My Shoes.
He was a nominee for a Grammy for Best Traditional R&B Vocal Performance. As a resident of Chicago’s West Side, he was actively involved in community-based economic and cultural initiatives, including the development of The Harold Washington Cultural Center. On August 11, 2012 he was one of several acts that performed at Lincoln Center Out of Doors Summer Concerts in New York City. He was backed by the band Platinum. Clay was joined on stage for the finale by William Bell and Teenie Hodges. Clay was one of the 2013 inductees to the Blues Hall of Fame.[1] In 2015 Otis published with Billy Price the album This Time For Real.
On January 8, 2016, Clay died in Chicago, Illinois, at the age of 73 of a heart attack.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otis_Clay
* * * * *
Kitty Kallen (May 25, 1921 – January 7, 2016) was an American popular singer whose career spanned from the 1930s to the 1960s—to include the Swing era of the Big Band years, the post-WWII pop scene and the early years of rock ‘n roll. She performed with some of the most popular big bands of the 1940s, including those of Jimmy Dorsey and Harry James, before striking out on a solo career.
She is widely known for her 1954 solo recording ‘”Little Things Mean a Lot” — a song that stayed at the U.S. number one spot for nine consecutive weeks, charted in the U.S. for almost seven months, hit #1 on the UK singles chart, and sold more than two million copies. AllMusic called the recording a “monster hit”, and music historian Jonny Whiteside said the song “ably characterizes Kallen’s impressive, and graceful, transition from classic big band swing to modern post-war pop”.
Voted “most popular female singer” in 1954 in both Billboard and Variety polls, Kallen lost her voice at the Palladium in 1955 at the top of her career and left singing for four years, suffering paralyzed vocal cords. After testing her voice under a pseudonym in small town venues, she ultimately returned and went on to achieve 13 top-ten career hits.
Kallen performed at numerous prominent live venues including Manhattan’s Copacabana, Morris Levy’s Versailles, the Capitol Theater, the Maisonette Room at the St. Regis, the Cafe Rouge at the Hotel Pennsylvania and the Plaza Hotel’s Persian Room. As well, she starred on Broadway in Finian’s Rainbow; in the 1955 film The Second Greatest Sex and on numerous television shows including The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, The Big Beat with singer-host Richard Hayes, American Bandstand, and Fred Allen’s Judge for Yourself. In 1951, Kallen appeared with Buster Crabbe as the Queen and King of Winter at the Lake Placid resort.
During the height of her popularity, three imposters billed themselves as “Kitty Kallen”. When one of them — Genevieve Agostinello — died in 1978, it was incorrectly reported that Kallen herself had died. On February 8, 1960, Kallen received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (located on the north side of Hollywood Boulevard at #7021).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitty_Kallen
* * * * *
GARY WAYNE SCHELTON, a/k/a TROY SHONDELL, DIES
Gary Wayne Schelton (May 14, 1939 – January 7, 2016), known by his stage name Troy Shondell, was an American vocalist, who achieved a modicum of fame and recognition in the early 1960s. He became a transatlantic one-hit wonder, by releasing a single that made the record charts in both the US and the UK. The song, “This Time” (or sometimes billed as “This Time (We’re Really Breaking Up)” sold over one million records, earning gold disc status. In a single year, sales were over three million copies.
Shondell was born in 1939, raised in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and educated at Valparaiso and Indiana universities. He wrote his first song at age 14, which was recorded by Little Anthony & the Imperials. Shondell also learned to play five musical instruments. His professional music career started as a teenager. Mercury Records released his first single, “My Hero”, from The Chocolate Soldier, which he recorded in 1958 under the name Gary Shelton, which was close to his real name, Gary Schelton.
He followed the next year with “Kissin’ at the Drive-In”, a rockabilly song that went on to become a drive-in theater standard. Still performing as Gary Shelton, he seemed to be on his way, at least in the Midwest. Chicago’s Brass Rail, a major nightclub that usually hosted jazz and blues acts, brought him in for its first foray into rock and roll. The successful gig stretched to 16 weeks. In 1959, Mark Records released “The Trance” and “Goodbye Little Darlin'”. These sold well in the Midwest and a few other areas, but neither made it into the Top 40 of the national Billboard record chart. The singer cited his father as a major influence, among others. A song he wrote about his father’s death in 1960 from a heart attack, “Still Loving You”, became a country hit when it was recorded by Bob Luman. His father’s demise caused his career to falter, and he briefly returned to help run the family business.
Around this time, he began using a new stage name, Troy Shondell, partly because of the popularity of actor Troy Donahue. In April 1961, he recorded “This Time”, a song written by Chips Moman and first recorded by Thomas Wayne. The record was released during the last week in June on the tiny Gaye label and picked up by the small Los Angeles Goldcrest label, selling ten thousand copies during the first week. Six weeks after being released and played in Chicago, Shondell flew to Los Angeles and signed with Liberty Records. It finally hit the Billboard charts the third week of September and landed in the Top 10 five weeks later at its number six peak, and it stayed in the charts for a total of thirteen weeks. The track reached no. 22 in the UK Singles Chart at the end of that year.
“Tears From An Angel” was his follow-up recording, released in March 1962. No further chart action was forthcoming, and Shondell quietly slipped away from the music industry the following year, despite his third single “Na-Ne-No”, being produced by Phil Spector. However, in 1963, Tommy Jackson changed the name of his high school band from “Tom and the Tornados” to “The Shondells” in honor of Shondell (one of his musical idols). Jackson became “Tommy James” and international fame followed for the act. Chicago band the Ides of March originally named themselves the Shon-dells, also in tribute to Troy. Shortly before their debut single, “You Wouldn’t Listen”, was released, the label found out that James had been using the name first, so they were forced to change it. In 1968, Shondell became a songwriter for Acuff-Rose Music in Nashville, Tennessee, and the first recording artist for TRX Records, a branch of Hickory Records, for whom Shondell recorded some gramophone record discs until 1969, when he went into the music publishing field. In October 1969, Shondell was appointed as Assistant Regional Director for ASCAP’s Southern Regional Office in Nashville.
In 2001, Shondell still performed at shows and other events. Along with Jimmy Clanton, Ronnie Dove, and Ray Peterson, Shondell was a member of the Masters of Rock ‘n’ Roll. On October 2, 2007, Shondell traveled to Collins, Mississippi, to deliver a musical tribute to his fallen rock and roll colleague Dale Houston, who, with musical partner Grace Broussard, had reached no. 1 in 1963 with “I’m Leaving It Up to You” as the musical duo Dale & Grace. Shondell died from complications of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease on January 7, 2016.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy_Shondell
* * * * *
JIT SUKHA SAMAROO, STEELPAN MUSICIAN, DIES
Jit Sukha Samaroo (24 February 1950 – 7 January 2016) as a Trinidadian composer and steelpan musician.
Jit Samaroo was born in Surrey, [Trinidad], the seventh of 13 children in a family of East Indian origin. At the age of 10, he joined the shortlived Village Boys pan-round-the-neck side. His mother, who loved playing the [dholak], died in 1962, and so, young Jit, appointed the task of taking care of younger siblings, formed the Samaroo kids combo.
They were initially [Parang] players but by the age of 14, already a self-confessed “slave to [steelpan]”, Jit joined the Lever Brothers Canboulay Steelband. There he learned and mastered all the orchestra’s instruments. Recognizing young Jit’s talent, the musical director Landeg White allowed him to help arrange the band’s calypsos, and also arranged for him to have music lessons.
He was hailed as the country’s most clinically accurate [arranger], arranging one tune by the instrument and composing additional tunes to accompany it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jit_Samaroo
* * * * *
Other Notable Musicians’ Deaths…
January 2016:
12: Anti Marguste, 84, Estonian composer.
10: John Berry, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (Idaho) (death announced on this date); David Bowie, 69, English singer-songwriter (“Space Oddity”, Ziggy Stardust, “Heroes”), record producer and actor (Labyrinth), liver cancer; Hernán Gamboa, 69, Venezuelan musician (Serenata Guayanesa), cancer.
9: Cielito del Mundo, 80, Filipino singer, actress and politician, heart attack; Janis Vaišla, 46, Latvian musician (Pirates of the Sea), cardiac amyloidosis.
8: Otis Clay, 73, American R&B and soul singer (“Tryin’ to Live My Life Without You”, “The Only Way Is Up”), heart attack; Red Simpson, 81, American country singer-songwriter (“I’m a Truck”), complications from a heart attack; Brett Smiley, 60, American singer-songwriter.
7: Robert M. Cundick, 89, American organist and composer; Kitty Kallen, 94, American singer (“Little Things Mean a Lot”); Jit Samaroo, 65, Trinidadian Steelpan musician and arranger; Troy Shondell, 76, American singer, complications from Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease.
5: Pierre Boulez, 90, French composer and conductor; Elizabeth Swados, 64, American composer and writer (Runaways), complications from surgery.
4: Long John Hunter, 84, American blues guitarist and singer-songwriter; Achim Mentzel, 69, German musician and television presenter; Robert Stigwood, 81, Australian band manager (Bee Gees, Cream) and film producer (Grease, Saturday Night Fever, Evita).
* * * * *