Nick Ashford, of "Ashford and Simpson" also just passed away.
(What's going on with songwriters now?)
Nick Ashford

NEW YORK -- Nick Ashford, one-half of the legendary Motown songwriting duo Ashford & Simpson that penned elegant, soulful classics for the likes of Diana Ross and Marvin Gaye and funk hits for Chaka Khan and others, died Monday at age 70, his former publicist said.

Ashford, who along with wife Valerie Simpson wrote some of Motown's biggest hits, died in a New York City hospital, said publicist Liz Rosenberg, who was Ashford's longtime friend. He had been suffering from throat cancer and had undergone radiation treatment, she told The Associated Press.

Though they had some of their greatest success at Motown with classics like "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" and "Reach Out And Touch Somebody's Hand" by Ross and "You're All I Need To Get By" by Gaye and Tammi Terrell, Ashford & Simpson also created anthems for others, like "I'm Every Woman" by Khan (and later remade by Whitney Houston). Ashford & Simpson also had success writing for themselves: Perhaps the best-known song they sang was the 1980s hit "Solid As A Rock."...

I remember the Ashford/Simpson duo but wasn't aware that he also was an established songwriter.

I always associated Leiber with Elvis, but know he's got many more very famous tunes to his credit.

What a shame.


TIS

Below is a list of some great song Jerry Leiber co wrote.. One of the great songwriters of the 20th Century.. RIP


"There Goes My Baby" (with Ben E. King (as Benjamin Nelson), Lover Patterson, and George Treadwell)
"Hound Dog"
"Kansas City"
"Smokey Joe's Cafe"
"Yakety Yak"
"Poison Ivy"
"Charlie Brown"
"Ruby Baby"
"Stand By Me" (with Ben E. King)
"Jailhouse Rock"
"Love Potion No. 9"
"Searchin'"
"Young Blood" (with Doc Pomus)
"Is That All There Is?"
"I'm a Woman"
"Lucky Lips"
"On Broadway" (with Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil)
"Spanish Harlem" (Jerry Leiber and Phil Spector)

David "Honeyboy" Edwards, the last of the original Delta bluesmen, was found dead today in his apartment.

From the Associated Press:

******************************************



Bluesman David "Honey Boy"' Edwards
Dead at 96
By CARYN ROUSSEAU, 08.29.11, 08:31 PM EDT

CHICAGO -- Grammy-winning Blues musician David "Honey Boy" Edwards, believed to be the oldest surviving Delta bluesman and whose roots stretched back to blues legend Robert Johnson, died early Monday in his Chicago home, his manager said. He was 96.

Edwards had a weak heart and his health seriously declined in May, when the guitarist had to cancel concerts scheduled through November, said his longtime manager, Michael Frank of Earwig Music Company.

Born in 1915 in Shaw, Miss., Edwards learned the guitar growing up and started playing professionally at age 17 in Memphis.

He came to Chicago in the 1940s and played on Maxwell Street, small clubs and street corners. By the 1950s Edwards had played with almost every bluesman of note - including Howlin' Wolf, Little Walter, Charlie Patton and Muddy Waters. Among Edwards' hit songs were "Long Tall Woman Blues," "Gamblin' Man" and "Just Like Jesse James."

Edwards played his last shows in April at the Juke Joint Festival in Clarksdale, Miss., Frank said.

"Blues ain't never going anywhere," Edwards told The Associated Press in 2008. "It can get slow, but it ain't going nowhere. You play a lowdown dirty shame slow and lonesome, my mama dead, my papa across the sea I ain't dead but I'm just supposed to be blues. You can take that same blues, make it uptempo, a shuffle blues, that's what rock 'n' roll did with it. So blues ain't going nowhere. Ain't goin' nowhere."

Edwards won a 2008 Grammy for traditional blues album and received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement award in 2010. His death represents the loss of the last direct link to the first generation of Mississippi blues musicians, Frank said.

"That piece of the history from that generation, people have to read about it from now on," Frank said. "They won't be able to experience the way the early guys played it, except from somebody who's learned it off of a record."

Edwards was known for being an oral historian of the music genre and would tell biographical stories between songs at his shows, Frank said. He was recorded for the Library of Congress in Clarksdale, Miss., in 1942.

"He had photographic memory of every fine detail of his entire life," Frank said. "All the way up until he died. He had so much history that so many other musicians didn't have and he was able to tell it."

Edwards gathered those stories in the 1997 book "The World Don't Owe Me Nothing: The Life and Times of Delta Bluesman Honeyboy Edwards." He wrote in the book that his father bought a guitar for $8 from a sharecropper and Edwards learned to play in 1929.

"I watched my daddy play that guitar, and whenever I could I would pick it up and strum on it," Edwards wrote.

Edwards was known for his far-ranging travels and played internationally. In his 90s, he was still playing about 70 shows a year. Edwards would visit with the audience after every show, taking pictures, signing autographs and talking with fans, Frank said.

Edwards earned his nickname "Honey Boy" from his sister, who told his mother to "look at honey boy" when Edwards stumbled as he learned to walk as a toddler. He is survived by his daughter Betty Washington and stepdaughter Dolly McGinister.

"He had his own unique style," Frank said. "But it was a 75-year-old style and it was a synthesis of the people before him and in his time."

Wow. 96. He had a long life. I have some of his music but I think it's mostly things featuring him as a sideman.

actor cliff robertson has passed away at the age of 88. he is best remembered as playing john f kennedy in PT-109 and his leading role in 'charly'.

http://movies.yahoo.com/news/oscar-winner-cliff-robertson-dies-ny-88-004551369.html

I always thought Robertson to be a handsome leading man. I remember him most in PT109 & Charly. Oh, and believe it or not I do remember him in Gidget as the "Big Kahuna". Decent actor. RIP


TIS

Don't forget his Spiderman performance. He also did a TV miniseries in the 70s I believe where he played the CIA Director poised against a Richard Nixon type President.

Oh yea Spiderman. I only recently saw that (last couple years) on tv. I'm trying to think of the mini series you speak of. It sounds familiar but I can't think of it.


TIS

Teddy Kennedy's daughter, Kara, died at 51 yesterday. And in a strange coincidence, Walter Mondale's daughter, Eleanor, also 51, died this morning. Not a good day to be the 51 year old daughter of a politician, I guess.

Yea, I just heard today too. I can't say I knew much about Kara, except she was Ted's daughter. I guess she had lung cancer? And Mondale's daughter I can't say I remember at all. But yes, it is a strange coincidence. Too bad.


TIS

Actually, Tis, they say Kara had been cancer free for six years, and that she had been as healthy as a horse. Her death was totally unexpected.

Kennedy curse?

Oh really? I did read a brief headline that it was a heart attack. Geez, survive cancer only to die shortly after of an unexpected heart attack. Wow and both ladies so young.



TIS

Dolores Hope dies at 102. Wow! Article said she had been in relatively good health until the last several months. Bob Hope died at 100 in 2003. RIP


TIS


http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20529802,00.html

(Reuters) - The Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, who was once described by Martin Luther King Jr. as "the most courageous civil rights fighter in the South," died in Birmingham, Alabama, on Wednesday at age 89.

Shuttlesworth, who had been in declining health, passed away at the Princeton Baptist Medical Center, hospital spokeswoman Jennifer Dodd told Reuters.

A major leader in the civil rights movement, Shuttlesworth was beaten, bombed and injured by fire hoses for his public stances against segregation in Birmingham in the 1950s and 1960s.

Though he and King worked closely together and both helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Shuttlesworth often bristled against his more contemplative counterpart.

"He was sometimes slow in doing things. Too slow for me," Shuttlesworth said in an interview at age 85. "He'd meditate on things a lot and agonize over them. I think if things need doing, be about them."

Shuttlesworth, who served as pastor of the Bethel Baptist Church and several other churches in Birmingham, began hammering away at that city's hard shell of segregation in the early 1950s.

He formed the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights in May 1956 and urged its members to take a stand against segregated buses. He refused to relent even after his home was bombed on Christmas Day in 1956. He and his family escaped unharmed.

"When he came out covered in rubble, we knew he was anointed to lead the movement," the late Rev. Abraham Woods, a fellow activist, said in a 2007 interview.

Warned by a Klansman police officer to vacate the city, Shuttlesworth said he shot back: "I wasn't saved to run."

The minister later was beaten by a mob with baseball bats, chains and brass knuckles as he tried to enroll his children in an all-white school and hospitalized after being sprayed by fire hoses during a demonstration against segregation.

Shuttlesworth once told Reuters he had expected to die by age 40 for his civil rights efforts. He had vowed "to kill segregation or be killed by it."

For his own safety, he left Alabama in 1961 to lead a church in Cincinnati, Ohio. But he still marshaled forces for change in the South, including helping organize the historic march for voting rights from Selma to Montgomery in 1965.

The march ended in a bloody police attack, sparking civil rights protests.

During a commemoration of "Bloody Sunday" in March 2007, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama pushed Shuttlesworth in his wheelchair across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where the attack occurred.

"We have truly lost a great soldier, a warrior for civil rights," Jefferson County Commission President Pro tem Sandra Little Brown said. "I am serving on the back of the changes that he was a part of for people of color."
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/05/us-obit-shuttlesworth-idUSTRE7944JG20111005

Steve Jobs Died

Steve Jobs, the mastermind behind Apple's iPhone, iPad, iPod, iMac and iTunes, has died in California. Jobs was 56.

The homepage of Apple's website contained a full-page image of Jobs with the text, "Steve Jobs 1955-2011."

Jobs co-founded Apple Computer in 1976 and, with his childhood friend Steve Wozniak, marketed what was considered the world's first personal computer, the Apple II.

How sad and only 56? I hear pancreatic cancer is one of the most painful. I didn't realize he had it as long as he did. So sad.

RIP



TIS

Can't believe it. VERY sad day for nerds like me.

I "think" it was Mayor Bloomberg who said yesterday the Jobs "would go down in history as the Edison of today. Kind of true no?

I knew nothing much about him personally, but yesterday they played a portion of a speech he gave at a graduation ceremony and he seemed so "normal" and down to earth. He left a wife and four children.



TIS

No question he is ranked with Edison and the other great inventors. The term "genius" was overused, but in Jobs' case there is no question he was a true genius. R.I.P.

So sad about both passings listed here. Jobs went from Apple to Pixar and back to Apple. Amazing man.

The struggles of men like Shuttleworth are too easily forgotten today. It wasn't that long ago that the violence he experienced was an all-too-common experience.

Derrick Bell, Law Professor and Rights Advocate, Dies at 80
By FRED A. BERNSTEIN
Derrick Bell, a legal scholar who saw persistent racism in America and sought to expose it through books, articles and provocative career moves he gave up a Harvard Law School professorship to protest the school's hiring practices, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 80 and lived on the Upper West Side.

The cause was carcinoid cancer, his wife, Janet Dewart Bell, said.

Mr. Bell was the first tenured black professor at Harvard Law School and later the first black dean of a law school that was not historically black. But he was perhaps better known for resigning from prestigious jobs than for accepting them.

While he was working at the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department in his 20s, his superiors told him to give up his membership in the N.A.A.C.P., believing it posed a conflict of interest. Instead he quit the department, ignoring the advice of friends to try to change it from within.

Thirty years later, when he left Harvard Law School, he rejected similar advice. At the time, he said, his first wife, Jewel Hairston Bell, had asked him, "Why does it always have to be you?" The question trailed him afterward, he wrote in a 2002 memoir, Ethical Ambition,” as did another posed by unsympathetic colleagues: "Who do you think you are?"

Professor Bell, soft-spoken and erudite, was not confrontational by nature, he wrote. But he attacked both conservative and liberal beliefs.

Oakland Raider's owner Al Davis passed away at the age of 82.

http://sports.yahoo.com/nfl/news?slug=ap-obit-davis

Looks like they got Gaddaffi

Yes I am following the news. Though not yet confirmed by the U.S., it sounds like they got him. I heard one report that the rebels pulled him out of a pipe (?) where he was hiding?

Btw, what exactly is the correct spelling of his name? LOL I seem to wing it cause I've seen a few different spellings.


TIS

The President deserves credit for Gaddafi's new residence.

That's funny SB. Add yet another... MSNBC has it spelled Khaddafy on it's news banner. No matter how you spell it, it sure "looks" like he's history.


TIS

Don't know if this is accurate but they are reporting this 18 year old Boy is the one who killed Gadhafi


TIS


[img]http://twitpic.com/735a2i[/img]

How perfectly symbolic.