Carrie Smith performing at Avery Fisher Hall in 1992.

By BRUCE WEBER

Published: May 26, 2012

Carrie Smith, a jazz and blues singer who brought a warm stage presence and lustrous voice to Broadway in the musical revue “Black and Blue,” died on May 20 at the Lillian Booth Actors Home of the Actors Fund in Englewood, N.J. She was 86.

The cause was cancer, said a friend, the singer Antoinette Montague.

Ms. Smith began as a gospel singer, performing at the 1957 Newport Jazz Festival and on other stages with the Back Home Choir of the Greater Harvest Baptist Church in Newark. In 1961 she gave a solo concert at Town Hall in Manhattan.

“Miss Smith has a full-bodied, robust contralto voice,” Robert Shelton wrote in his review in The New York Times. “While many gospel singers, repeating vibrant phrases to stir their congregants, become emotion-driven shouters, Miss Smith never lost sense of her role as a musician. She had her pitch and tone securely in hand, even in the most uninhibited climaxes of her musical sermons.”

Beginning in the late 1960s Ms. Smith sang with the pianist Big Tiny Little’s band, and later with a sextet led by the trombonist Tyree Glenn. She also began to develop a solo jazz career. In 1974 she was part of a salute to Louis Armstrong at Carnegie Hall, singing “St. Louis Blues,” a tune recorded by both Armstrong and Bessie Smith.

The program, organized by the pianist Dick Hyman and the New York Jazz Repertory Company, was repeated in Europe and the Soviet Union. From then on Ms. Smith performed the songs of Bessie Smith (they were not related) often, earning a reputation as a singer as a blues belter, though her repertory was wider than that; her voice, darkly mellifluous and gentle with a melody, was equally suited to jazz and pop.

“She had a beautiful voice on the lower side and a perfect knowledge of blues and gospel singing,” Mr. Hyman said in an interview on Thursday. “She had perfect time.”

Ms. Smith’s career gathered momentum through the 1980s and ’90s, gaining more popularity in Europe than in the United States. She found her widest American audience on Broadway in “Black and Blue,” a gaudy song-and-dance tribute to black blues and jazz artists that ran for 829 performances from 1989 to 1991. In that show she sang the standards “Big Butter and Egg Man” and “I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues.”

Carrie Louise Smith was born in Fort Gaines, Ga., on a date most often reported as Aug. 25, 1941, apparently because, once her singing career began, she wanted it that way. She was coy about her age, but a spokesman for the Actors Home gave her birth date as Aug. 25, 1925.

Her friend Ms. Montague said Ms. Smith’s mother had moved to Newark with Carrie to escape an abusive husband. Once there, she said, the mother joined the cultlike church of Father Divine and left Ms. Smith to be brought up by older cousins. Ms. Smith left school after the eighth grade. She sang in church and taught herself piano while working in a number of jobs, including train announcer at the Newark train station.

Ms. Smith has no immediate survivors. Ms. Montague said Ms. Smith had been married once, briefly, to a mason and small-time hustler who was known around Newark as Swindler Joe.

SOURCE

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H. H. BROOKINS, A.M.E. BISHOP AND CIVIL RIGHTS MENTOR

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Published: May 25, 2012

Michael Ellison-Lewis, a spokesman for the church, announced the death.

Bishop Brookins marched with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the South; helped start the political career of Tom Bradley, a five-term Los Angeles mayor; was a principal strategist in the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s 1984 presidential campaign; and in 1990 prayed with Mayor Marion Barry of Washington when Mr. Barry was convicted of drug possession.

“A whole generation of us, in some sense, grew up under the bishop,” Mr. Jackson said in an interview with The Los Angeles Times in 1985. “He has the touch, the green thumb.”

As a young minister and then a bishop in Los Angeles, Bishop Brookins helped start and was president of the United Civil Rights Council, an umbrella organization of 75 groups, which helped the black community recover from the Watts riots in 1965. Starting with a building fund of $8, he built a multimillion-dollar church and called it a cathedral. It grew to 19,500 members.

He did it all with such style that he came to be called the Hollywood bishop. He rallied stars like Bob Hope and politicians like Robert F. Kennedy to his causes, and organized the first interfaith service at the Hollywood Bowl. His spirited preaching, from whispering in the valleys to roaring from the mountaintops, was renowned.

He drove a Mercedes-Benz and made the best-dressed lists of Ebony and Jet magazines. He smoked, drank and told off-color stories. Bishop Brookins had a knack for getting to the point in a pithy way. “Everyone has a right to be equal, even in mediocrity,” he told The Los Angeles Times.

He called Mr. Jackson’s 1984 presidential bid “the best thing since ice cream.”

But allegations of financial mismanagement and fraud dogged him in Los Angeles, and later in subsequent postings in Arkansas and Washington. The common accusation was that church funds had ended up in his personal accounts.

In 1993, 25 local ministers and lay leaders in the Washington area petitioned the Council of Bishops to demote him, saying he had taken out mortgages on church property for personal use. Though he denied having done so, he was reassigned to head the denomination’s office of ecumenical and urban affairs, a job often given to bishops under fire or in ill health.

In 2000, delegates to the church’s national convention put a new bishop in his seat in Washington but allowed him to serve on an at-large basis for four more years.

In an interview, Mr. Ellison-Lewis said Bishop Brookins was never formally charged with any crime.

“All these matters were resolved in his favor,” he said.

Bishop Brookins retired in 2004 after being bishop in five districts and serving as president of his church.

Hamel Hartford Brookins was born in Yazoo City, Miss., on June 8, 1925, the seventh of 10 children of sharecroppers. For a while he attended Campbell College (now closed) in Jackson, Miss., where he became pastor of his first church.

“It had about 18 members,” said Otis Jackson, who sang with Bishop Brookins in a sextet called Brookins and the Hungry Five. “The collection wouldn’t be but $2 or $3, but he would go down there and preach his heart out, just as if he were preaching to 300 or 400 people.”

He earned bachelor’s degrees from Wilberforce University and the nearby Payne Theological Seminary, both of them historically black institutions in Ohio, and by 1954 was a minister in Wichita, Kan. He was elected the first black president of the 200-member interracial ministerial council there, and led meetings to unite religious and civic leaders following the Supreme Court’s order to desegregate the Topeka, Kan., public schools.

He was transferred to Los Angeles in 1959 and by the time of the Watts riots in 1965 was one of the most visible black leaders in the city. He organized Dr. King’s first Los Angeles appearance, which drew 60,000 people. He helped Mr. Bradley win election to the City Council in 1963 and as mayor in 1973.

In 1972, Mr. Brookins was elected bishop and sent to Rhodesia, where he actively supported forces fighting the white-minority government. He was kicked out of the country, now known as Zimbabwe. In the 1980s, while based in Arkansas, he befriended Bill Clinton, the governor at the time.

“I’ve seen it all,” he once said, “and I’ve been part of 80 percent of it.”

Bishop Brookins’s first two marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, the Rev. Rosalynn Kyle Brookins; two sons, Sir-Wellington Hartford Brookins and Steven Hartford Brookins; and a daughter, the Rev. Francine A. Brookins.

SOURCE

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WESLEY BROWN, FIRST BLACK NAVAL GRADUATE

By PAUL VITELLO

Published: May 24, 2012

Wesley A. Brown, a retired Navy lieutenant commander who endured intense racial hazing to become the first black graduate of the United States Naval Academy, died Tuesday in Silver Spring, Md. He was 85.

United States Naval Academy

Wesley A. Brown in 1949.

The cause was cancer, said his wife, Crystal.

Mr. Brown, who entered the academy in 1945 and graduated in 1949, was the sixth black man admitted in the 100-year history of the Annapolis military college but the first to withstand the kind of hazing that had forced the others to leave within a year, according to Navy historians.

White midshipmen refused to sit next to Mr. Brown, racial epithets were whispered behind his back, and fellow plebes barred him from joining the choir — all of it mixed with and hidden behind a torrent of regular hazing that underclassmen were expected to bear. He told interviewers that not a day passed when he did not consider quitting.

But unlike his predecessors, he said, Mr. Brown had the support of a handful of fellow midshipmen, who were friendly to him despite receiving threats from hostile classmates, and from the academy commandant, who intervened to protect him from excessive harassment.

“If not for that, I’m not sure I would have made it,” Mr. Brown told an interviewer.

One midshipman who visited his dorm room to talk and encouraged him to “hang in there,” Mr. Brown said, was Jimmy Carter, the future president, who was then an upperclassman and fellow member of the academy’s cross-country team.

In a speech last year at a Naval Academy event, Mr. Carter recalled Midshipman Brown as part of “my first personal experience with total integration.”

“A few members of my senior class attempted to find ways to give him demerits so that he would be discharged,” Mr. Carter said, “but Brown’s good performance prevailed.”

Blacks had served in the American armed forces since the Revolution. But for the most part they remained in segregated units until 1948, when President Harry S. Truman ordered the integration of the services. Attempts to integrate the academies, beginning after the Civil War, had met intense resistance. Only a half-dozen blacks had graduated from West Point, for instance, by the time Mr. Brown decided to seek a commission as the first black graduate of the naval academy.

Mr. Brown’s career as a naval midshipman was widely covered in both black newspapers and mainstream ones. When he graduated, he told The New York Times that he had “really enjoyed” his four years as a midshipman — except for the publicity, which he called “a bad angle.”

“I feel it is unfortunate the American people have not matured enough to accept an individual on the basis of his ability and not regard a person as an oddity because of his color,” he said. “My class standing shows that around here, I am an average Joe.” He was ranked 370th in a class of 790.

He first publicly discussed his hazing with the Navy historian Robert J. Schneller Jr., who interviewed him for his 2005 book, “Breaking the Color Barrier: The U.S. Naval Academy’s First Black Midshipmen and the Struggle for Racial Equality.” In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Schneller expanded on Mr. Brown’s version of why he made it through four years when others had not.

“He made it because he was a gentle guy, and a hard worker, who came from a community where they taught their children not to believe the bull white people gave them about the black man’s ‘limited abilities’ — who taught them that they could do what they wanted,” Mr. Schneller said.

Wesley Anthony Brown was born in Washington on April 3, 1927, the only child of William and Rosetta Brown. His father drove a truck for a produce market, and his mother worked in a laundry. During most of Mr. Brown’s childhood the family shared a large house near Logan Circle, owned by his grandmother Katie Shepherd, with many other relatives.

Mr. Brown became active in the neighborhood church, a nexus for community activists, including the district’s congressional representative. He recommended Mr. Brown to the Harlem congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., who wanted to appoint a black candidate for the naval academy.

As a Navy civil engineer, Mr. Brown served in the Korean and Vietnam Wars and worked on Navy construction projects around the world before retiring in 1969. He was a facilities manager and planner at Howard University in Washington until 1988.

In 2008, the Naval Academy dedicated a new facility for athletic programs, the Wesley Brown Field House. The $25 million structure was built with many innovative features, academy officials said, including a skinlike shell made from blastproof glass.

Besides his wife, he is survived by two daughters, Wiletta Scott and Carol Jackson; two sons, Wesley Jr., and Gary; and seven grandchildren.

Throughout his life Mr. Brown loyally attended class reunions. In a 2006 interview with The Baltimore Sun, he described former classmates who sometimes approached him. “They’ll say, ‘I was very mean and ugly to you when you were a midshipman,’ ” he said. “Lots of times I’ll say, ‘I don’t remember you and don’t remember you doing anything like that, so forget it.’ ”

He added: “You remember the good stuff. A lot of the bad stuff — I can’t relate to it.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 25, 2012

An earlier version of this obituary referred incorrectly to Mr. Brown as a cadet; he was a midshipman, at the United States Naval Academy.

SOURCE

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HAL JACKSON, PIONEER IN RADIO AND RACIAL PROGRESS

By MEL WATKINS

Published: May 24, 2012

Hal Jackson, a veteran broadcaster who broke down racial barriers, becoming one of the first black disc jockeys to reach a large white audience and an omnipresent voice on New York City radio for more than 50 years, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 96.

His death was announced by WBLS (107.5 FM), the New York station where he continued to host a weekly program until a few weeks before his death.

Mr. Jackson, whose eclectic musical taste and laid-back manner helped define black radio, began his career in the late 1930s, when it was a challenge for a black announcer just to get a foot in the door.

At a time when segregation was widespread, he was a familiar voice to black and white listeners alike. At one point in the 1950s, he was hosting three shows — one rhythm-and-blues, one jazz and one pop — on three different New York radio stations.

As a radio executive, he helped found Inner City Broadcasting and establish the urban contemporary format, rooted in black music but appealing to a racially diverse audience. In the 1970s, it came to dominate the airwaves, first in New York City — where WBLS became the No. 1 station in the market — and then across the country.

He was the first African-American inducted into the National Association of Broadcasters Hall of Fame, in 1990, and among the first five inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame, in 1995.

“Hal was the constant voice of black America,” the Rev. Al Sharpton said Thursday. “From M.L.K. to a black president, he literally was the one who connected those dots.”

Harold Baron Jackson was born in Charleston, S.C., probably on Nov. 3, 1915. (He explained in his autobiography, “The House That Jack Built,” that his birth, like that of many Southern blacks in those years, was not officially recorded.) He was one of five children of Eugene Baron Jackson, a tailor, and the former Laura Rivers. Both his parents died when he was a child, and he lived with relatives in Charleston and New York before settling in Washington, where he graduated from Dunbar High School and attended classes at Howard University.

Avidly interested in sports, he approached the management of WINX, owned by The Washington Post, in 1939 about covering black sports events for the station. Told that station policy prohibited hiring black announcers, he took a different tack: he persuaded a white-owned advertising agency to buy time on WINX for a 15-minute interview and entertainment show, without revealing that he was involved. As he recalled, he showed up in the studio at the last possible moment and was on the air with “The Bronze Review” before management could stop him.

“When I started, the business was so segregated,” Mr. Jackson said in 2008. “Fortunately, that didn’t last long.”

Indeed, once the station’s color line had been broken, Mr. Jackson went on to host a music show there and to broadcast Howard University football and Negro league baseball. He also became a sports entrepreneur, assembling an all-black basketball team, the Washington Bears, which won the invitational World Professional Basketball Tournament in 1943.

By the end of the decade Mr. Jackson could be heard on four different stations in the Washington area, most notably WOOK in Silver Spring, Md., where he established his warm, low-key radio persona with the music show “The House That Jack Built.” That approach, in contrast to the hyperkinetic jive-talking style of other black announcers, influenced generations of disc jockeys.

“How are you?” he would begin. “This is Hal Jackson, the host that loves you the most, welcoming you to ‘The House That Jack Built.’ We’re rolling out the musical carpet, and we’ll be spinning a few just for you. So come on in, sit back, relax and enjoy your favorite recording stars from here to Mars.”

While in Washington he was also a civil rights fund-raiser and broke into television as host of a local variety show broadcast live from the Howard Theater in the spring and summer of 1949.

Mr. Jackson moved to New York in 1954, and within a few years he was broadcasting almost around the clock, juggling three shows on three stations, including WABC’s live midnight broadcast from the jazz nightclub Birdland. (He was the first black announcer to host a continuing network radio show.) In the late 1950s, he also briefly had his own Sunday morning children’s television show.

Mr. Jackson’s hectic schedule was interrupted in 1960 when he was caught up in the so-called payola scandal, charged with accepting bribes to play certain records and forced off the air for a while in New York. The charges were eventually dropped.

He began his long career as an executive in the early 1960s as program director of the Queens station WWRL. He went on to produce and host concerts at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, in Central Park and at Palisades Amusement Park in New Jersey. He helped establish the Miss Black Teenage America pageant, later renamed Hal Jackson’s Talented Teens International. He also organized fund-raising events for civil rights causes and was among the first to lobby for making the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a national holiday.

In 1971 he was one of a group of black entertainers, businessmen and politicians, among them Percy Sutton, the Manhattan borough president, who formed Inner City Broadcasting and bought WLIB-AM and its FM sister station, which became the first black-owned radio station in the city.

As vice president of the FM station, which was renamed WBLS, Mr. Jackson hired the disc jockey Frankie Crocker as program director and oversaw the station’s shift from jazz to what Mr. Crocker christened urban contemporary radio: a slick blend of rhythm-and-blues, dance music and other genres designed to appeal to young listeners across racial lines. (In later years hip-hop was added.) When Mr. Crocker left, Mr. Jackson became program director; by the mid-1970s, WBLS was the No. 1 station in New York.

Working behind the scenes at Inner City rather than behind the microphone, Mr. Jackson helped shape programming at stations acquired by the company around the country as it grew into the first black-owned radio empire. But when a slot opened on Sunday mornings at WBLS, he decided to return to the air.

His “Sunday Morning Classics,” a mix of music from different eras and genres, made its debut in 1982. Originally two hours, it grew at one point to an eight-hour extravaganza. As “Sunday Classics,” the program was most recently on from noon to 4 p.m.

Mr. Jackson’s co-host on “Sunday Classics” was his fourth wife, the former Debi Bolling. His previous three marriages ended in divorce. His wife survives him, as do two daughters, Jane and Jewell; a son, Hal Jackson Jr., a former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice; and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

“Hal Jackson was one of the last living links to when black voices were as rare on radio as they were on the silver screen,” the author and filmmaker Nelson George said Thursday. “He connected several generations of listeners to the bounty of great African-American music by not always observing the artificial boundaries between jazz, blues, Broadway, and rhythm and blues.”

Mr. George, whose books include “The Death of Rhythm and Blues,” said Mr. Jackson had “helped black people see the best in themselves, both before and after the civil rights movement.”

In recent years, Inner City Broadcasting fell on hard times. In 2011, the company, under legal pressure from its creditors, agreed to enter Chapter 11 bankruptcy. (It has since been bought by the investment group YMF Media.) As part of the process, the company proposed hiring a chief restructuring officer. The one stipulation Inner City requested was that the officer be forbidden to fire four specific people. One of the four was Hal Jackson.

Peter Keepnews and Rebecca R. Ruiz contributed reporting.

SOURCE

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ROBIN GIBB, A BEE GEE WITH A TACITURN MANNER

By BEN SISARIO

Published: May 20, 2012

Robin Gibb, one of the three singing brothers of the Bee Gees, the long-running Anglo-Australian pop group whose chirping falsettos and hook-laden disco hits like “Jive Talkin’ ” and “You Should Be Dancing” shot them to worldwide fame in the 1970s, died on Sunday in London. He was 62 and lived in Thame, Oxfordshire, England.

Sean O’Meara/Getty Images

Robin Gibb, center, with his brothers Barry and Maurice in 1971.

Tracy Brand/Associated Press

Robin Gibb performed in Dubai in 2008.

The cause was complications of cancer and intestinal surgery, his family said in a statement.

Mr. Gibb had been hospitalized for intestinal problems several times in the last two years. Cancer had spread from his colon to his liver, and in the weeks before his death he had pneumonia and for a while was in a coma.

Mr. Gibb was the second Bee Gee and third Gibb brother to die. His fraternal twin and fellow Bee Gee, Maurice Gibb, died of complications of a twisted intestine in 2003 at 53. The youngest brother, Andy, who had a successful solo career, was 30 when he died of heart failure, in 1988.

With brilliant smiles, polished funk and adenoidal close harmonies, the Bee Gees — Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb — were disco’s ambassadors to Middle America in the 1970s, embodying the peacocked look of the time in their open-chested leisure suits and gold medallions.

They sold well over 100 million albums and had six consecutive No. 1 singles from 1977 to 1979. They were also inextricably tied to the disco era’s defining movie, “Saturday Night Fever,” a showcase for their music that included the hit “Stayin’ Alive,” its propulsive beat in step with the strut of the film’s star, John Travolta.

But the group, whose first record came out in 1963, had a history that preceded its disco hits, starting with upbeat ditties inspired by the Everly Brothers and the Beatles, then with lachrymose ballads like “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart.”

Barry, the oldest brother, was the dominant Bee Gee for most of the group’s existence. But the lead singer for many of the early hits was Robin, whose breaking voice, gaunt frame and gloomy eyes were well suited to convey adolescent fragility. “I Started a Joke” (with the second line, “Which started the whole world crying”), “I’ve Gotta Get a Message to You,” “Massachusetts” and other heavy-hearted songs brought the Bee Gees to the top of the charts as one of the British Invasion’s most musically conservative groups.

“While other guys, like Ray Davies of the Kinks, were writing about social problems, we were writing about emotions,” Robin Gibb told a British newspaper last year. “They were something boys didn’t write about then because it was seen as a bit soft. But people love songs that melt your heart.”

Robin Hugh Gibb and his twin, Maurice, were born on Dec. 22, 1949, on the Isle of Man, a British dependency in the Irish Sea. (Barry was born there in 1946.) The boys largely grew up in Manchester, England, where the family lived on the edge of poverty. Their father, Hugh, a drummer and bandleader, encouraged his sons to sing. Their mother, Barbara, was also a singer.

According to Bee Gees lore, the boys’ first performance was sometime in the mid-1950s, and unplanned. They had been scheduled to perform as a lip-synching act at a movie theater in Manchester when the record broke, forcing them to sing for real.

The family moved to Australia in 1958, and before long the brothers, performing as the Bee Gees — for Brothers Gibb — began scoring local hits and appearing on television. They left for London in early 1967 and within weeks had signed with Robert Stigwood, the impresario who guided them in their peak years.

The band’s first single in Britain, “New York Mining Disaster 1941,” was released in April 1967 and reached the Top 20.

In performance, Robin and Maurice usually played second fiddle to Barry, and Robin’s taciturn manner was part of his public persona. On “The Barry Gibb Talk Show,” a recurring skit on “Saturday Night Live,” Barry, played by Jimmy Fallon, would repeatedly ask Robin, played by Justin Timberlake, if he had anything to add to his talks with congressmen and Supreme Court justices. “No,” Robin would reply softly. “No, I don’t.”

But in private Robin was far from dull. He and his wife, Dwina Murphy, who survives him, lived in a 12th-century former monastery in Oxfordshire that he had restored and filled with statues of Buddha and suits of armor. In Miami, his mansion was open to celebrities and politicians like Tony Blair.

Robin briefly left the group in 1969 and tried out a solo career. After he rejoined his brothers, they scored their first No. 1 in the United States with “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” in 1971. But with harder rock taking over, the Bee Gees’ popularity ebbed, reaching bottom in 1974 with a series of supper-club gigs in England to pay off tax debts.

At that point their label, Atlantic, sent the brothers to Miami for musical experimentation. There, with the 1975 album “Main Course,” they reinvented the Bee Gees’ sound with Latin and funk rhythms, electronic keyboards and vocals that owed a debt to Philadelphia soul. It brought the band its first hits in years: “Nights on Broadway” and “Jive Talkin’,” which went to No. 1.

From there it moved further toward disco. The soundtrack to “Saturday Night Fever,” in 1977 — with “You Should Be Dancing,” “How Deep Is Your Love?,” “Stayin’ Alive” and “Night Fever,” all No. 1’s — became the biggest-selling album ever. (It was overtaken by Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” in 1984.)

For many listeners, the Gibbs were the face of disco. Even “Sesame Street” got caught up in the trend, with Robin singing on the disco-themed album “Sesame Street Fever.” It went gold.

The Bee Gees’ 1979 album, “Spirits Having Flown,” produced three more No. 1 singles, “Too Much Heaven,” “Tragedy” and “Love You Inside Out.” Then, in 1980, the band filed a $200 million lawsuit against Mr. Stigwood, saying he had swindled them out of royalties. Mr. Stigwood countersued for defamation and breach of contract. They settled out of court and publicly reconciled.

In the ’80s the band’s popularity waned in the United States but remained strong abroad. Robin released three solo albums, with limited success. The Bee Gees returned with some moderate hits in the late 1990s and were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997. With his brothers, Mr. Gibb won six Grammys.

In addition to his wife and his brother Barry, Robin Gibb is survived by his sons, Spencer and Robin-John, known as R J; his daughters, Melissa and Snow; a sister, Lesley; and his mother. An earlier marriage, to Molly Hullis, ended in divorce.

Mr. Gibb had recently been working on a classical piece, “The Titanic Requiem,” with Robin-John. It had its premiere in London on April 10, played by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, but Robin was too ill to attend.

Despite the Bee Gees’ close association with disco, the Gibb brothers had long insisted that they had no stake in the genre. They had simply written songs that suited their voices and caught their fancy, they said.

“We always thought we were writing R&B grooves, what they called blue-eyed soul,” Robin said in 2010. “We never heard the word disco; we just wrote groove songs we could harmonize strongly to, and with great melodies.”

“The fact you could dance to them,” he added, “we never thought about.”

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FROM THE ARCHIVES

J. Edgar Hoover, F.B.I.  Chief, Dies at 77

(May 2, 1972)

Marlene Dietrich, Symbol of Glamour, Dies at 90

(May 6, 1992)

Joan Crawford, Screen Star, Dies at 69

(May 10, 1977)

Erik Erikson, Who Reshaped Views of Human Growth, Dies at 91

(May 12, 1994)

Rita Hayworth, Movie Legend, Dies at 68

(May 14, 1987)

Jeannette Rankin, First Woman in Congress, Dies at 92

(May 18, 1973)

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, First Lady, Dies at 64

(May 19, 1994)

Frank Sinatra, Matchless Pop Stylist, Dies at 82

(May 14, 1998)

Jane Addams, a Foe of War and Need, Dies at 74

(May 21, 1935)

Langston Hughes, Writer, Dies at 65

(May 22, 1967)

John D. Rockefeller, Oil Tycoon, Dies at 98

(May 23, 1937)

Mrs. C. J. Walker, First Black Woman Millionaire, Dies at 51

(May 25, 1919)

Edward VIII, Who Abdicated Throne, Dies at 77

(May 28, 1972)

Boris Pasternak, Who Wrote ‘Dr. Zhivago,’ Dies at 70

(May 30, 1960)

Claude Pepper, Fiery Fighter for Elderly, Dies at 88

(May 30, 1989)

Jacques Monod, Nobel Biologist, Dies at 66

(May 31, 1976)

Jack Dempsey, Boxing Champion, Dies at 87

(May 31, 1983)

Timothy Leary, Piper of Psychedelic ’60s, Dies at 75

(May 31, 1996)

Dear Iowa,

I used to think you were a pretty straight-ahead place, what with all that flat land and healthy vegetables and honest living. I mean, Iowans rejected slavery 20 years before the Civil War and they approved interracial marriage a century before the Supreme Court. Homosexuality was decriminalized almost 30 years before the 2003 Lawrence vs. Texas decision did so nationwide. Today, control of the state’s legislature is split between Democrats and Republicans and, a few characters aside, it is not particularly known for political extremism. Like the corn it produces in such copious amounts, Iowa generally seemed a healthy and sensible place.

That idea of the state ended for me this morning, when I read the proposed platform released on Monday by the Platform Committee of the Republican Party of Iowa.

Are you people totally insane?

The platform, as first pointed out by ThinkProgress, is absolutely thick with ideas from the extreme right, lunatic conspiracy theories, and barely concealed hatred for President Obama and anything that smacks of multiculturalism. It sneers at science, is down on poor people, and despises, really despises, the United Nations.

Here’s a sampling of the deep-thinking goals of the Iowa GOP:

• Require candidates for president to prove that they are “natural born citizens,” beginning with the 2012 election. After all, non-citizens serving as president have been a longstanding problem in American politics.
• Reject the “claims” of global warming, which are “based on fraudulent, inaccurate information” and pushed by people using “extremist scare tactics.” The Iowa GOP “recognizes” that policies and laws designed to combat global warming are really “a plan to take our freedoms and liberties away.”
• Oppose “the diabolical collusion of the United Nations” in promoting its Agenda 21, a non-binding global sustainability plan signed by President George H.W. Bush and the leaders of 177 other nations in 1992. Like the Republican National Committee, the Iowa GOP apparently believes Agenda 21 is part of an effort to impose global political control on the U.S.
• Allow Iowa to “nullify” any federal laws it doesn’t like. Nullification was a failed legal argument made by opponents of the civil rights movement.
• Eliminate the Federal Reserve Act and implement a “sound commodity-backed currency” with a gold or silver standard.
• Fight the North American Union, “which would do away with our borders and sovereignty, and … [battle] the Amero, which would do away with our currency.” Although there actually are no secret plans to merge Mexico, the United States and Canada into a single entity — and replace our dollars with “Ameros” — that hasn’t stopped the conspiracy theorists.
• In the same vein, “oppose so-called ‘World Government.’”
• Entirely eliminate the departments of Agriculture, Education, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Health and Human Services, Energy, Interior, Labor and Commerce, along with the Transportation Safety Administration, the Food and Drug Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Endowment for the Arts, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
• Likewise, abolish the Internal Revenue Service and repeal the 16^th Amendment, which legalized the federal income tax.
• Require judges to instruct jurors that in addition to judging cases, they may pass on the law at issue. Commonly known as “jury nullification,” this is a highly controversial notion that is embraced by the radical right.
• Oppose federal anti-bullying legislation because, after all, “students have the right and responsibility to stand up for themselves.”
• Pass a “stand your ground” law, like the one that many believe led to the death of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Fla. By a large margin, most prosecutors and police oppose such laws, which make prosecuting many killings difficult.
• Allow parents to refuse to have their children immunized.
• Reject the teaching of multiculturalism.
• Only teach evolution as a theory, along with creationism.
• Repeal compulsory school attendance laws.
• Outlaw pornography.
• Impose “more severe consequences” for convicted juvenile offenders.
• Eliminate the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which oversees job safety.
• Repeal smoking bans because, as the platform statement asserts, “We believe this to be an issue of liberty.” Air quality in all businesses should be left up to owners’ “freedom to choose.”
• Repeal all hate crime laws.
• Oppose the imposition Shariah, or Islamic religious law, in the United States, along with any other foreign or “United Nations Law.”
• Build a fence along the entire U.S. border with Mexico.
• Eliminate no-fault divorce laws and require “good cause” to get a divorce.
• End minimum wage laws.
• Oppose abortion and reject the Supreme Court’s decision authorizing it. Encourage adoption and aid to unwed mothers — but only if every dollar of support comes from the private sector.
• End subsidies to agriculture.

There’s more, but I’m getting tuckered out, what with sorting through this grab-bag of ridiculous conspiracy theories and just plain mean-spiritedness — an ideology that the Iowa platform committee says is all about the party’s main goal, which is “nothing more or less than a world set free.”

Set free, that is, from any connection to reality, critical thinking, or common sense.

SOURCE

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“End subsidies to agriculture.”

Yes, by all means, end those federal subsidies, remove the tariffs against foreign subsidies (corn, wheat, to name a few), and see just where that will get you.

“Entirely eliminate the departments of Agriculture, Education, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Health and Human Services, Energy, Interior, Labor and Commerce, along with the Transportation Safety Administration, the Food and Drug Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Endowment for the Arts, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.”

Translation:  Go back to washing clothes in a river with a handheld wash board; dismantle interstate and intrastate legislation of commerce, be it on buses crossing state lines, or public accommodations, such as gas stations, inns and hotels; continue to let cities across America rot and decay from lack of revitalization and restructuring; get rid of the regulation of the foods and drugs that are consumed, allowing Big Pharma to put on the market drugs whose efficacy is unknown; get rid of the regulation of refineries and other companies, allowing them to dump harmful pollutants and chemicals  into rivers, lakes, estuaries and to bury highly radioactive contaminants anywhere they so desire; and most especially, get rid of grants and endowments made to up-and-coming artists. What the hell, who needs art and enrichment in their lives? Such a hassle.

“Pass a “stand your ground” law, like the one that many believe led to the death of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Fla. By a large margin, most prosecutors and police oppose such laws, which make prosecuting many killings difficult.”

By all means, pass a “Stand Your Ground Law”. What’s a little thing like killing someone because you felt they were going to do you in before you did them in? Be prepared to see much bloodshed with the passage of such a vigilante type law.

“Allow parents to refuse to have their children immunized.”

Let’s hear it for more measles, mumps,  and scarlet fever. Not to mention the return of rampant polio and the greatest scourge of all time–smallpox. Just because such diseases have been literally stamped out of America does not mean America should not go back to the Dark Ages of disease and suffering. Children:  who cares about their health? Obviously not these ReThuglicans.

“Eliminate the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which oversees job safety.”

Whoo-oo! Injured on the job? Arm chewed off by malfunctioning machinery? So what. Take an aspirin and keep on working. The company you work for does not store hazardous chemicals properly, and looks the other way when you suffer from severe burns from improperly labeled bottles? Shut yer yap and slap a bandage on it. Companies that commit reckless disregard for their employees, well they do not have to worry about anymore $10,000-per-bottle fines when they flout and break every law that could have protected their employees.

“Build a fence along the entire U.S. border with Mexico.”

Just build it at the U.S.-Mexico border? Why leave Canada out of this grand gesture? Surely you do not want to hurt their feelings, do you now?

And just what type of fence should that be:  chain link; wrought iron; or white picket? Six feet high? Fifteen feet high? Fifty feet high?

Let me guess: Great Wall of China Fence.

But I’m sure the Iowa GOP has forgotten how long it took to build that particular fence. What the heck, it was such a piece of cake to construct.

“Oppose abortion and reject the Supreme Court’s decision authorizing it. Encourage adoption and aid to unwed mothers — but only if every dollar of support comes from the private sector.”

Yes, a return of the “It Takes a Village to Raise a Child” mantra. America never has been that way towards all of her citizens, and the repealing of Roe v. Wade will most definitely show that up. “Every dollar of support comes from the private sector”. Well, those mommies-to-be had better be prepared to take care of themselves. Somehow, barefoot-and-pregnant will be the least of their worries….which brings me to my favourite platform initiative of them all:

“End minimum wage laws.”

No more wages that get a young person’s foot into the door. No more pay commensurate with one’s skill. Hey employers, you can pay whatever you want.

Sorta like when Black women had to work as domestics-maids-cooks-wet nurses during Jane Crow segregation all for a whopping $2.00-$4.00 a day. I’m sure many employees cannot wait to see this law enacted.

Iowa crazy?

Well, let’s just say that if there is any question that America is slowly destroying herself from within, then this platform answers any questions on what the future holds for this nation.

Donna Summer performed in Norway in 2009. More Photos »

By JON PARELES

Published: May 17, 2012

Donna Summer, the multimillion-selling singer and songwriter whose hits captured both the giddy hedonism of the 1970s disco era and the feisty female solidarity of the early 1980s, died on Thursday at her home in Naples, Fla. She was 63.

Multimedia

The cause was cancer, her publicist, Brian Edwards, said.

With her doe eyes, cascade of hair and sinuous dance moves, Ms. Summer became the queen of disco — the music’s glamorous public face — as well as an idol with a substantial gay following. Her voice, airy and ethereal or brightly assertive, sailed over dance floors and leapt from radios from the mid-’70s well into the ’80s.

She riffled through styles as diverse as funk, electronica, rock and torch song as she piled up 14 Top 10 singles in the United States, among them “Love to Love You Baby,” “Bad Girls,” “Hot Stuff,” “Last Dance” and “She Works Hard for the Money.” In the late ’70s she had three double albums in a row that reached No. 1, and each sold more than a million copies.

Her combination of a church-rooted voice and up-to-the-minute dance beats was a template for 1970s disco, and, with her producers Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte, she pioneered electronic dance music with the synthesizer pulse of “I Feel Love” in 1977, a sound that pervades 21st-century pop. Her own recordings have been sampled by, among others, Beyoncé, the Pet Shop Boys, Justice and Nas.

Ms. Summer won Grammy Awards for dance music, R&B, rock and gospel. Her recorded catalog spans the orgasmic moans of her first hit, “Love to Love You Baby,” the streetwalker chronicle of “Bad Girls,” the feminist moxie of “She Works Hard for the Money” and the religious devotion of “Forgive Me,” a gospel song that earned her another Grammy.

Through it all, Ms. Summer’s voice held on to an optimistic spirit and a determination to flourish. She garnered loyal fans. In 2009 she performed in Oslo at the concert honoring the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to President Obama.

On Thursday, the president released a statement, saying, “Her voice was unforgettable, and the music industry has lost a legend far too soon.”

Jon Landau, the chairman of the nominating committee at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, also issued a statement — an unusual one in which he said it was unfortunate that the hall had never inducted her.

“There is absolutely no doubt that the extraordinary Donna Summer belongs in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,” Mr. Landau wrote. “Regrettably, despite being nominated on a number of occasions, our voting group has failed to recognize her — an error I can only hope is finally and permanently rectified next year.”

LaDonna Adrian Gaines was born Dec. 31, 1948, in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, one of seven children. She grew up singing in church and decided in her teens to make music her career. In the late 1960s she joined the Munich company of the rock musical “Hair” and relocated to Germany, where she became fluent in German and worked as a studio vocalist, in musical theater and briefly as a member of the Viennese Folk Opera. She married an Austrian actor, Hellmuth Sommer, in 1972, and after they divorced she kept his name but changed the spelling. She had already recorded her first single under the name Donna Gaines, an unsuccessful remake in 1971 of the Jaynetts’ “Sally Go ’Round the Roses.”

Her work as a backup singer brought her to the attention of Mr. Moroder and Mr. Bellotte. Her 1974 debut album with them, “Lady of the Night,” was released only in Europe. But with “Love to Love You Baby” in 1975, Ms. Summer became a sensation. She said she recorded that song’s breathy, moaning vocals lying on her back on the studio floor with the lights out, thinking about how Marilyn Monroe might coo its words.

The American label Casablanca signed her after hearing the song in its initial European version, titled “Love to Love You,” and asked her to extend it for disco play. The resulting 17-minute single contains more than 20 simulated orgasms and became an international hit, reaching No. 2 on the American pop chart. Ms. Summer quickly released two more albums, “A Love Trilogy” and “Four Seasons of Love,” a concept album tracing a romance over the course of a year.

But she was increasingly uncomfortable being promoted as a sex goddess. “I’m not just sex, sex, sex,” she told Ebony magazine in 1977. “I would never want to be a one-dimensional person like that.”

She became so depressed that in late 1976 she attempted suicide, she wrote in her 2003 autobiography, “Ordinary Girl: The Journey,” written with Marc Eliot. She began taking medication for depression and seeking consolation in religion, becoming a born-again Christian in 1979.

“I Remember Yesterday,” one of two albums Ms. Summer released in 1977, revolved around the concept of mixing disco with the sounds of previous decades. But it was a song representing the future, “I Feel Love,” that would make the most impact. Its all-electronic arrangement was a startling new sound for a pop song, and its contrast of human voice versus synthetic backdrop would echo through countless club hits in its wake.

Ms. Summer was still demonstrating her versatility. She followed up with an orchestral album, “Once Upon a Time,” a set of songs telling a Cinderella story, and then a live album in 1978, “Live and More,” which yielded a hit with a version of “MacArthur Park.” That was the first of four No. 1 singles she would have in a year, followed by “Hot Stuff,” “Bad Girls” and a duet with Barbra Streisand, “No More Tears (Enough Is Enough).” Ms. Summer won her first Grammy Award — for best R&B vocal performance, female — with “Last Dance,” a song by Paul Jabara. It was introduced on the soundtrack to the 1978 movie “Thank God It’s Friday” and has ended many a wedding party ever since.

Disco as a fad was peaking, and Ms. Summer strove to outlast it. Her 1979 double album, “Bad Girls,” put some rock guitar into songs like “Hot Stuff”; it won a Grammy for best rock vocal performance, female. Her first collection of hits, “On the Radio: Greatest Hits Volumes 1 and 2,” also reached No. 1 in 1979, and the newly recorded title song was a Top 10 single.

Another hit from 1979, “Heaven Knows,” reached No. 4 on the pop chart, with personal repercussions. Ms. Summer recorded it with the group Brooklyn Dreams, and she married its co-founder, Bruce Sudano, in 1980. He survives her, along with three daughters — Brooklyn Sudano, Amanda Sudano and Mimi Dohler — and four grandchildren. She is also survived by a brother, Ricky Gaines, and four sisters: Dara Bernard, Mary Ellen Bernard, Linda Gaines and Jeanette Yancey.

“On the Radio” was Ms. Summer’s last album for Casablanca. As disco receded, she moved to Geffen Records, seeking to hold her broader pop audience. She tried new wave rock on “The Wanderer” in 1981, then switched to the R&B produced by Quincy Jones for “Donna Summer” in 1982. But she would reach her 1980s commercial peak with “She Works Hard for the Money” in 1983, collaborating with the producer Michael Omartian. It was her last Top 10 album, and amid its gleaming pop productions it included “He’s a Rebel,” an indirect Christian rock song — “He’s a rebel, written up in the lamb’s book of life” — that won a Grammy for best inspirational performance.

Ms. Summer’s career waned in the mid-1980s. Pop fans paid little attention to two albums from that period, “Cats Without Claws” and “All Systems Go,” and she alienated gay fans when she was quoted as having described AIDS as divine punishment for an immoral lifestyle. Though she repeatedly denied making that statement, many gay listeners boycotted her music, and by the time she had reconciled with gay organizations, her hitmaking streak was broken. Her last Top 10 hit, “This Time I Know It’s for Real,” was in 1989.

But she continued to record and perform. She and Mr. Sudano moved to Nashville (they maintained homes there and in Florida) and wrote songs together, including a No. 1 country single for Dolly Parton, “Starting Over Again.” A 1997 remix of a song Ms. Summer recorded in 1992 with Mr. Moroder, “Carry On,” won her the first Grammy given for best dance music. Well into the 2000s, she continued to appear on the dance-music charts: three songs from her last studio album, “Crayons,” in 2008, reached No. 1 on that chart, as did her final single, “To Paris With Love,” in 2010.

“This music will always be with us,” Ms. Summer told The New York Times in 2003. “I mean, whether they call it disco music or hip-hop or bebop or flip-flop, whatever they’re going to call it, I think music to dance to will always be with us.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 17, 2012

A previous version of this article misstated Jon Landau’s title as chairman of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He is the chairman of its nominating committee.

SOURCE

“Someone found a letter you wrote me, on the radio

And they told the world just how you felt

It must have fallen out of a hole in your old brown overcoat

They never said your name But I knew just who they meant.
Oh, I was so surprised and shocked, and I wondered too

If by change you heard it for yourself I never told a soul just how Ive been feeling about you

But they said it really loud They said it on the air

On the radio whoa oh oh On the radio whoa oh oh

On the radio whoa oh oh On the radio whoa oh oh now, now.”

I first heard the beautiful Ms. Donna Summer on the radio. Unique she was, with a sultry and vibrant voice.

She was the epitome of disco, a dance and music genre that people either loved or hated. I for one loved disco and its energetic music and dancing. I especially loved Ms. Summer and the profound impact she had on the world of music. Her tenacity. Her elan, her vivacity.

Yes, disco is no longer with us.

Ms. Summer is no longer with us.

Now we have only videos, records, and compact discs to remember her image by.

But, her spirit and voice will live on inside those of us who were her many admiring and loyal fans.

To you Ms. Summer, here is your eternal dance that will not be the last dance.

Dance…that…dance.

Rest in peace, Ms. Summer.

Rest in peace.

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CHUCK BROWN, GODFATHER OF GO-GO

Hiroyuki Ito

Chuck Brown performing in New York in 2001.

By BEN SISARIO

Published: May 18, 2012

Chuck Brown, who became a local hero in Washington for creating go-go music — a strutting funk variant that is the city’s signature dance genre — and kept the beat going for decades, died on Wednesday in Baltimore. He was 75.

The cause was multiple organ failure as a result of sepsis, Tom Goldfogle, his manager, said.

Known as the godfather of go-go, and almost invariably dressed, onstage and off, in a slick black suit, fedora and shades, Mr. Brown was as much a celebrity on the streets of Washington as any national politician. With steady, midtempo beats that could be extended for hours in concert, his biggest songs, like “Bustin’ Loose” and “We Need Some Money,” became unofficial anthems, even if they never crossed over to a wider national audience.

On Wednesday evening impromptu vigils formed outside Washington landmarks like the Howard Theater, and local officials like Mayor Vincent C. Gray praised Mr. Brown’s role in the city’s cultural scene.

“Go-go is D.C.’s very own unique contribution to the world of pop music,” Mayor Gray said. “Today is a very sad day for music lovers the world over.”

In the mid-1970s, with disco luring dancers away from live bands, Mr. Brown drew on James Brown’s funk, Latin rhythms and the crowd-pleasing good humor of Cab Calloway-era big bands to create go-go.

Playing bluesy guitar and leading call-and-response chants in a grainy baritone, Mr. Brown wove the beat seamlessly from one song to the next, keeping people on their feet all night. He also made whimsical musical connections, dotting his go-go sets with the “Woody Woodpecker” theme and jazz standards like “Moody’s Mood for Love.”

The style got its name, Mr. Brown once said, because “the music just goes and goes.”

Charles Louis Brown was born on Aug. 22, 1936, in Gaston, N.C., and was raised in poverty by his mother, Lyla Louise Brown, a housekeeper. He never knew his father.

As a teenager in Washington he drifted into crime and served eight years in prison for shooting a man in what he said was self-defense. While there, he traded another inmate five cartons of cigarettes for a guitar.

On his release, in 1962, he began to play music around Washington, first at backyard barbecues and churches — his parole officer would not let him play anyplace that served liquor — and eventually in clubs. He scored a few minor hits in the early 1970s, including “We the People” and “Blow Your Whistle,” before developing his go-go sound.

Led by Mr. Brown and his band, the Soul Searchers, the sound spread throughout Washington with groups like Trouble Funk and Rare Essence. But despite a blip in the mid-1980s, when it drew the interest of major record companies and could be heard in a Hollywood movie (“Good to Go” in 1986) , go-go’s extended jams never fit into pop radio formats, and it remained a regional phenomenon. “Bustin’ Loose” was Mr. Brown’s only single to reach Billboard’s Top 40, in 1979, although it held at No. 1 on the R&B chart for four weeks.

With its repetitive, sing-speak vocals, go-go is sometimes cited as an influence on early rap. In 2002 the rapper Nelly sampled “Bustin’ Loose” in his No. 1 song “Hot in Herre.”

In recent years Mr. Brown often performed with his daughter, Takesa Donelson, a rapper known as KK. He continued to tour and release records, most recently “We Got This” in 2010. But wider success was elusive.

By the 2000s Mr. Brown had come to be seen as a hometown treasure in Washington. In 2005 the National Endowment for the Arts gave him a National Heritage Fellowship award, and in 2009 the city gave the honorary name Chuck Brown Way to a block of Seventh Street in the Northwest section of the city, near the Howard Theater. In 2011 he was nominated for his first Grammy Award, for best rhythm and blues performance by a duo or group with vocals, for his song “Love,” featuring the singer Jill Scott and the bassist Marcus Miller.

Besides his daughter, Mr. Brown is survived by his wife, Jocelyn, and three sons, Nekos Brown, Wiley Brown and Bill Thompson. Another son, Charles Jr., died in the 1990s.

SOURCE

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DUCK DUNN, BASSIST IN BOOKER T. AND THE MG’S

By PETER KEEPNEWS

Published: May 13, 2012

Duck Dunn, whose simple but inventive bass playing anchored numerous hit records and helped define the sound of Memphis soul music, died early Sunday in Tokyo, where he had been on tour. He was 70.

Duck Dunn, who worked with Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett and the Blues Brothers.

Associated Press

From left, Al Jackson, Booker T. Jones, Duck Dunn and Steve Cropper, who were also the core of the Stax studio band.

His death was announced online by the guitarist Steve Cropper, a longtime associate and fellow member of the instrumental quartet Booker T. and the MG’s, who said Mr. Dunn died in his sleep but did not specify a cause. Mr. Dunn and Mr. Cropper had been performing at the Tokyo Blue Note with a Stax Records alumni band.

As the resident bassist at Stax’s studio in Memphis for much of the 1960s, Mr. Dunn provided the solid, bluesy foundation for classic soul records like Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour,” Sam & Dave’s “Hold On, I’m Coming,” Albert King’s “Born Under a Bad Sign” and a long string of hits by Otis Redding, with whom he and other Stax studio musicians also performed at the Monterey International Pop Festival in 1967.

Stax recordings were known for their raw, down-home soulfulness, a striking contrast to the urbane slickness of Stax’s friendly rival, Motown. Mr. Dunn’s playing was an essential element of the Stax sound.

Booker T. and the MG’s (the initials stood for Memphis Group), whose members — Mr. Dunn, Mr. Cropper, the drummer Al Jackson and the organist Booker T. Jones — were also the core of the Stax studio band, had a few memorable hit singles on its own, among them “Hip Hug-Her” and “Time Is Tight.” (Mr. Dunn did not play on the group’s first and biggest hit, “Green Onions,” which reached No. 3 on the Billboard chart in 1962; at the time he was a member of another instrumental ensemble, the Mar-Keys, which had a No. 3 hit of its own in 1961 with “Last Night.”) The group was unusual for the era in that it was racially integrated: Mr. Dunn and Mr. Cropper were white, Mr. Jones and Mr. Jackson were black.

After Booker T. and the MG’s disbanded in the early 1970s, Mr. Dunn remained active at Stax as a session musician and occasional producer. He also performed or recorded with a long list of well-known artists, including Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, Levon Helm, John Fogerty and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. Reviewing a concert by Mr. Clapton in 1985, Robert Palmer of The New York Times praised Mr. Dunn as “perhaps rock’s most impeccably springy bassist” and said that his presence raised the band’s “level of playing all by itself.”

One of Mr. Dunn’s most high-profile sideman jobs was with the band that backed John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd in their incarnation as the Blues Brothers, playing a repertory that mixed Chicago-style electric blues with Stax-style R&B. The members of the band, who also included Mr. Cropper, had speaking as well as musical roles in the 1980 movie “The Blues Brothers” and were also in the belated sequel, “Blues Brothers 2000” (1998), which starred Mr. Aykroyd and John Goodman.

“Other than Booker’s band, that’s the most fun band I’ve ever been in,” Mr. Dunn told Vintage Guitar magazine in 2007.

Booker T. and the MG’s reunited periodically, although they were without a regular drummer after Mr. Jackson was fatally shot in 1975. Their later appearances included a tour as Neil Young’s backing band in 1993. The band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992 and received a lifetime achievement Grammy Award in 2007.

Donald Dunn was born in Memphis on Nov. 24, 1941, and acquired his nickname as a child. After Mr. Cropper, a childhood friend, began playing guitar, Mr. Dunn took up the electric bass — because, he liked to say, it had two fewer strings than a guitar — and the two were working around town while still in high school with the band that would become the Mar-Keys. He followed Mr. Cropper into the Stax studios and was a member of Booker T. and the MG’s by the mid-1960s.

Survivors include his wife, June; his son, Jeff; and a grandson.

SOURCE

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MIKE MCGRADY, KNOWN FOR A LITERARY HOAX

By MARGALIT FOX

Published: May 14, 2012

Mike McGrady, a prizewinning reporter for Newsday who to his chagrin was best known as the mastermind of one of the juiciest literary hoaxes in America — the best-selling collaborative novel “Naked Came the Stranger,” whose publication in 1969 made “Peyton Place” look like a church picnic — died on Sunday in Shelton, Wash. He was 78 and lived in Lilliwaup, Wash.

Associated Press

Mike McGrady in 1969.

The cause was pneumonia, said Harvey Aronson, who with Mr. McGrady was a co-editor of the novel, written by 25 Newsday journalists in an era when newsrooms were arguably more relaxed and inarguably more bibulous.

Intended to be a work of no redeeming social value and even less literary value, “Naked Came the Stranger” by all appearances succeeded estimably on both counts.

Originally issued by Lyle Stuart, an independent publisher known for subversive titles, the novel was a no-holds-barred chronicle of a suburban woman’s sexual liaisons, with each chapter recounting a different escapade:

She has sex with a mobster and sex with a rabbi. She has sex with a hippie and sex with at least one accountant. There is a scene involving a tollbooth, another involving ice cubes and still another featuring a Shetland pony.

The book’s cover — a nude woman seen from behind — left little to the imagination, as, in its way, did its prose:

“Ernie found what Cervantes and Milton had only sought. He thought the fillings in his teeth would melt.”

The purported author was Penelope Ashe, who as the jacket copy told it was a “demure Long Island housewife.” In reality, Mr. McGrady had dreamed up the book as ironic commentary on the public’s appetite for Jacqueline Susann and her ilk.

For interviews and public appearances, Mr. McGrady conscripted his sister-in-law Billie Young to pose as Mrs. Ashe.

“Naked Came the Stranger,” which remains in print, has sold about 400,000 copies, according to its current publisher, Barricade Books, which rereleased it in 2004.

That year, The Village Voice rapturously described the book as being “of such perfectly realized awfulness that it will suck your soul right out of your brainpan and through your mouth, and you will happily let it go.”

First published in summer 1969, “Naked Came the Stranger” quickly sold 20,000 copies. Later that summer, Mr. McGrady and his co-conspirators came clean, and news of the book’s genesis made headlines round the world. By the end of the year, the novel had spent 13 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list.

“What has always worried me,” Mr. McGrady told Newsday in 1990, “are the 20,000 people who bought it before the hoax was exposed.”

Michael Robinson McGrady was born in New York City on Oct. 4, 1933. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Yale; in 1968 and 1969, he studied at Harvard as a Nieman fellow.

For Newsday, Mr. McGrady covered the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. His series of columns from the front, “A Dove in Vietnam,” won an Overseas Press Club Award in 1967 and was published as a book.

Mr. McGrady conceived “Naked Came the Stranger,” fittingly, in bed.

“It came after a night of reading ‘Valley of the Dolls,’ ” he later told Newsweek, “which I couldn’t put down because I was asleep.”

Surely, he reasoned, a newsroom full of journalism’s best and brightest could together produce something just as schlocky — and just as successful. He fired off a memo to his colleagues.

“As one of Newsday’s truly outstanding literary talents, you are hereby officially invited to become the co-author of a best-selling novel,” it read. “There will be an unremitting emphasis on sex. Also, true excellence in writing will be quickly blue-penciled into oblivion.”

Two dozen journalists — mostly men and a few women — signed on, each contributing a chapter. True to his word, Mr. McGrady rejected submissions that were too well written.

Among the contributors was Bob Greene, Newsday’s distinguished investigative reporter; Gene Goltz, a Pulitzer Prize winner; and George Vecsey, a sportswriter who went on to work for The Times.

Reviewing the novel in The Times before the hoax was divulged, Martin Levin wrote, “In the category of erotic fantasy, this one rates about a C,” a quotation that quickly found its way into the book’s print advertisements.

Neither Mr. McGrady nor his co-authors were involved in the cinematic adaptation of “Naked Came the Stranger,” a pornographic film released in 1975.

Mr. McGrady was later a film and restaurant critic for Newsday. His other books include two as-told-to memoirs by the pornographic film actress Linda Lovelace, “Ordeal” (1980) and “Out of Bondage” (1986), and an instructional manual, “Stranger Than Naked: Or, How to Write Dirty Books for Fun and Profit” (1970).

After an early marriage that was dissolved, Mr. McGrady wed Corinne Young. She survives him, along with two sons, Sean and Liam; a daughter, Siobhan Benoit; a brother, Seamus; and five grandchildren.

Also surviving is Mr. McGrady’s sister-in-law Billie, who went on to write books of her own under the name Penelope Ashe.

SOURCE

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CARLOS FUENTES, MEXICAN MAN OF LETTERS

By ANTHONY DePALMA

Published: May 15, 2012

Carlos Fuentes, Mexico’s elegant public intellectual and grand man of letters, whose panoramic novels captured the complicated essence of his country’s history for readers around the world, died on Tuesday in Mexico City. He was 83.

Henry Romero/Reuters

Carlos Fuentes at home in Mexico City in 2001.

Henry Romero/Reuters

Mr. Fuentes, left, and the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez in 2008.

His death was confirmed by Julio Ortega, his biographer and a professor of Hispanic studies at Brown University, where Mr. Fuentes taught for several years. He died at the Angeles del Pedregal hospital after his doctor, Arturo Ballesteros, found him in shock in his Mexico City home, The Associated Press reported. The doctor told reporters that Mr. Fuentes had had an internal hemorrhage.

Mr. Fuentes was one of the most admired writers in the Spanish-speaking world, a catalyst, along with Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and Julio Cortázar, of the explosion of Latin American literature in the 1960s and ’70s, known as El Boom. He wrote plays, short stories, political nonfiction and novels, many of them chronicles of tangled love.

Mr. Fuentes received wide recognition in the United States in 1985 with his novel “The Old Gringo,” a convoluted tale about the American writer Ambrose Bierce, who disappeared during the Mexican Revolution. It was the first book by a Mexican novelist to become a best seller north of the border, and it was made into a 1989 film starring Gregory Peck and Jane Fonda.

In the tradition of Latin American writers, Mr. Fuentes was politically engaged, writing magazine, newspaper and journal articles that criticized the Mexican government during the long period of sometimes repressive single-party rule that ended in 2000 with the election of an opposition candidate, Vicente Fox Quesada.

Mr. Fuentes was more ideological than political. He tended to embrace justice and basic human rights regardless of political labels. He supported Fidel Castro’s revolution in Cuba, but turned against it as Mr. Castro became increasingly authoritarian. He sympathized with Indian rebels in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas and skewered the administration of George W. Bush over its antiterrorism tactics and immigration policies, calling them unduly harsh.

He was also critical of Venezuela’s leftist leader, Hugo Chávez, however, calling him a “tropical Mussolini,” and of his own country’s failure to stem its rampant drug violence. On the day he died the newspaper Reforma published a hopeful essay by him on the change of power in France.

Mr. Fuentes was appointed the Mexican ambassador to France in 1975, but he resigned two years later to protest the appointment of Gustavo Díaz Ordaz as ambassador to Spain. Mr. Díaz Ordaz had been president of Mexico in 1968 when Mexican troops opened fire on student protesters in Mexico City.

But it was mainly through his literature, Mr. Fuentes believed, that he could make his voice heard, and he did so prolifically and inventively, tracing the history of modern Mexico in layered stories that also explored universal themes of love, memory and death. In “The Death of Artemio Cruz,” a 1962 novel that many call his masterpiece, his title character, an ailing newspaper baron confined to his bed, looks back at his climb out of poverty and his heroic exploits in the Mexican Revolution, concluding that it had failed in its promise of a more egalitarian society.

His novels remained ambitious and topical. His last, “Destiny and Desire” (2011), is a sprawling work that Michael Wood, writing in The New York Times Book Review, described as “not exactly a parody of ‘War and Peace,’ but certainly a spectral, playful revision of the idea of a novel that competes with history.”

He added, “It offers lavish quantities of comedy, satire, allegory, fantasy and brilliant political commentary; makes coded allusions to recognizable celebrities like the communications magnate Carlos Slim; evokes the work of Spinoza and Machiavelli; includes ghosts, graves, murders, a voluble flying prophet and a talking severed head.”

The severed head had fallen victim to Mexico’s drug-gang wars, which Mr. Fuentes believed pose an ever-graver threat to Mexican society. The head speaks in darkly comic tones.“I speak of my body because I’ve lost it,” the character says, then adds: “I am a 27-year-old man, one meter seventy-eight centimeters tall. Every morning I look at myself naked in my bathroom mirror and caress my cheeks in anticipation of the daily ceremony: Shave my beard and upper lip, provoke a strong response with Jean-Marie Farina cologne on my face, resign myself to combing black, thick, untamable hair. Close my eyes. Deny to my face and head the central role my death will be certain to give them. Concentrate instead on my body. The trunk that is going to be separated from my head. The body that occupies me from my neck to my extremities, covered in skin the color of pale cinnamon and tipped with nails that will continue to grow for hours and days after death, as if they wanted to scratch at the lid of the coffin and shout I’m here, I’m still alive, you made a mistake when you buried me.”

Though Mr. Fuentes wrote in just about every genre, including opera (a 2008 work inspired by the life of Gen. Antonio López de Santa Anna, the wooden-legged president of Mexico during the Texas Revolution), he declined to write an autobiography.

“One puts off the biography like you put off death,” he once said. “To write an autobiography is to etch the words on your own gravestone.”

Carlos Fuentes was born on Nov. 11, 1928, in Panama, the son of Berta Macías and Rafael Fuentes, a member of Mexico’s diplomatic corps. As his father moved among Mexican embassies, Mr. Fuentes spent his early childhood in several South American countries. Then, in 1936, the family was transferred to Washington, where Mr. Fuentes learned to speak English fluently while enrolled in a public school.

In 1940 the family was transferred again, this time to Santiago, Chile, where he began to experiment with writing. In an interview with The Times in 1985, Mr. Fuentes said he first had to decide “whether to write in the language of my father or the language of my teachers.” He chose Spanish, he said, because he believed that it offered more flexibility than English. There was also a practical reason. English, he said, “with a long and uninterrupted literary tradition, did not need one more writer.”

He was 16 when his family finally returned to Mexico. He knew his homeland through the stories that his grandmothers had told during the summers he spent with them.

“I think I became a writer because I heard those stories,” he said in 2006 in an interview with the Academy of Achievement, a nonprofit organization in Washington. His grandmothers fascinated him with their tales of bandits, revolution and reckless love. “They had the whole storehouse of the past in their heads and hearts,” Mr. Fuentes said. “So this was, for me, very fascinating, this relationship with my two grannies — the two authors of my books, really.”

When he told his family that he wanted to be a writer, his father was encouraging, but insisted that he also study law, which he did in Mexico and Switzerland.

After completing his degree, Mr. Fuentes entered Mexico’s diplomatic service, while also carving out time for his fiction. His first novel, “Where the Air Is Clear,” was published in 1958 when he turned 30. It was a literary sensation, mixing biting social commentary with interior monologues and portrayals of the subconscious. His reputation established, Mr. Fuentes left government service to devote all his energies to writing.

As an author, he said, he did not spend much time rewriting and never suffered from writer’s block. He liked to write on the right-hand pages of lined notebooks, making changes and corrections on the left-hand pages before sending a manuscript to be typed.

Professor Ortega called Mr. Fuentes “an unleashed cultural force” who avoided some of the trappings of literary celebrity. In a retrospective book that he wrote about Mr. Fuentes’s life when the writer turned 80 in 2008, Mr. Ortega wrote, “Fuentes detests the literary life, its obligations and commitments.”“He hasn’t created his own group, and he belongs neither to parties nor ideologies,” Mr. Ortega added. “He isn’t controlled by either the power of the state nor the power of the market.”

Mr. Fuentes’s independent thought and reputation for supporting leftist causes led to his being denied visas to enter the United States in the early 1960s. When he was refused permission to come to New York in 1963 for a presentation of an English translation of one of his books, he reacted angrily, saying, “The real bombs are my books, not me.”

Congress intervened in 1967, and the restrictions against him were lifted. Later he traveled to the United States frequently, teaching at several Ivy League universities.

Mr. Fuentes is survived by his wife, Silvia Lemus, and a daughter, Cecilia, by a previous marriage to the actress Rita Macedo, who died in 1993. Two children from his marriage to Ms. Lemus, Carlos and Natasha, both died of illness before they were 30.

For much of his career Mr. Fuentes competed for recognition and influence in Mexico and abroad with another titan of Mexican letters, the poet Octavio Paz. Mr. Fuentes received the National Order of Merit, France’s highest civilian award given to a foreigner; Spain’s Prince of Asturias Award for literature in 1994; and, in 1987, the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world’s highest literary honor. Mr. Paz, however, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1990. Mr. Fuentes, a perennial on the shortlist for the honor, never did.

The two became friends in 1950, when Mr. Paz published his landmark work on Mexican identity, “The Labyrinth of Solitude.” They worked together on several literary projects. But by the mid-1980s their political opinions had started to differ. Mr. Fuentes supported the Sandinistas, the leftist rebel group in Nicaragua, but Mr. Paz, who had more conservative views, condemned them. Then, in 1988, the literary magazine Vuelta, which Mr. Paz directed, published an article fiercely critical of Mr. Fuentes, accusing him of lacking true Mexican identity. That set off an often public feud that lasted until Mr. Paz died in 1998. Neither man apologized, diminishing the reputations of both.

Still, in his later years, Mr. Fuentes became an elder statesman of international letters. On his 80th birthday hundreds gathered at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to celebrate his life and work. He was introduced by Rubén Beltrán, the consul general of Mexico in New York at the time.

“To speak about Carlos Fuentes is to engage inexorably in Mexican history and culture,” Mr. Beltrán said. “We cannot fathom a debate on Mexican literary and humanistic traditions in which his name and work are absent.”

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