IN REMEMBRANCE: 10-4-2009

SAM CARR, DRUMMER WHO WAS AN ANCHOR IN THE BLUES SCENE

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JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Sam Carr, a drummer who was considered an anchor in the blues scene that continues to draw fans to the poverty-stricken Delta region where the music form was born, died Monday. He was 83.

Carr died of congestive heart failure, said John Andrews, director of Century Funeral Home in Clarksdale.

Carr had a reputation as one of the best blues drummers in the country, but he made his living in the Mississippi Delta where he was raised.

At one time or another, Carr had backed big names like Sonny Boy Williamson II and Buddy Guy.

Carr had received multiple honors, including the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts in 2007. He also received several awards from Living Blues magazine.

Carr’s father was 1930s blues guitarist and vocalist Robert Nighthawk who made famous the song, “Sweet Black Angel.” Early in his career Carr often played with father.

Carr was born Samuel Lee McCollum in 1926 near Marvell, Ark. His name was changed after he was adopted as a toddler by a Mississippi family with a farm near Dundee, according to a biography written by Barretta.

He moved back to Arkansas at age 16 and collected money at door of clubs where his father performed.

He worked as a sharecropper before turning his full attention to blues music, moving to St. Louis and playing bass with harmonica player Tree Top Slim.

He returned to Mississippi in the early 1960s and formed the Jellyroll Kings.

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press

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MAREK EDELMAN, LAST SURVIVING MEMBER OF THE 1943 WARSAW GHETTO REVOLT

WARSAW, Poland (AP) – Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of the ill-fated 1943 Warsaw ghetto revolt against the Nazis, died Friday at the age of 90.

Edelman died of old age at the family home of his friend Paula Sawicka, where he had lived for the past two years.

“He died at home, among friends, among his close people,” Sawicka told The Associated Press.

Most of Edelman’s adult life was dedicated to the defense of human life, dignity and freedom. He fought the Nazis in the doomed Warsaw ghetto revolt and later in the Warsaw city Uprising. And then for decades he fought communism in Poland.

His heroism earned him the French Legion of Honor and Poland’s highest civilian distinction, the Order of the White Eagle.

One of the few survivors of three weeks of uneven struggle in the Warsaw ghetto, he felt obliged to preserve the memory of the fallen heroes of that first large-scale Jewish revolt against the Nazis. Each year, on the revolt’s anniversary, he laid flowers at Warsaw’s monument to the ghetto heroes, and called for tolerance.

‘Man is evil, by nature man is a beast,” he said, and therefore people “have to be educated from childhood, from kindergarten, that there should be no hatred.”

He also felt obliged to appeal repeatedly to the world for freedom and peace – even when it had to be won in a fight.

“When you cannot defend freedom through peaceful means, you have to use arms to fight Nazism, dictatorship, chauvinism,” Edelman said in an 2008 interview with The Associated Press in his apartment in the central city of Lodz, which was filled with portraits of Jews and of scenes reminiscent of the Holocaust.

He worked at a city hospital Lodz, almost to his last day.

Edelman was born Jan. 1, 1919 in Homel, which was then in eastern Poland and is now in Belarus. His family soon moved to Warsaw.

When the Nazis invaded Poland on Sept.1, 1939, Edelman was member of Bund, a Jewish socialist organization that later masterminded plans for resistance against the occupying Germans.

The Germans set up the Warsaw ghetto in November 1940, cramming some 460,000 Jews from the city and from across Poland in inhuman conditions. After a year, almost half the people there had died of disease and starvation.

The resistance plans were implemented April 19, 1943, when the Nazis moved to liquidate the ghetto by killing or sending some remaining 60,000 residents to the death camps. Thousands were put on regular transports to the death camps of Treblinka, Majdanek and Sobibor.

But that April, the well-trained German troops encountered unexpectedly fierce resistance from a few hundred young, poorly armed Jewish civilians, determined to die fighting rather than in gas chambers.

At the age of 23, Edelman took command of a brush-makers unit, based at a brush factory.

“No one believed they would be saved,” Edelman said. “We knew t h e struggle was doomed, but it showed the world there was resistance against the Nazis, that you could fight the Nazis.”

They had few guns and no food but were driven by a goal.

The Nazis “wanted to destroy the people and we fought to protect the people in the ghetto, to extend their lives by a day, or two or five,” he said.

The ghetto fighters inflicted heavy losses on the Germans, but eventually succumbed. More than 55,000 people were killed or deported to Nazi concentration camps when the uprising failed.

The uprising’s leaders were rounded up in a bunker and, seeing no chance of escape, committed suicide on May 8, 1943.

The Nazis razed the ghetto street by street, as part of their so-called “final solution” in which they killed 6 million people in their efforts to wipe out European Jewry.

Edelman was not in the bunker. With a small group of survivors, he left through the sewers to the Aryan side of Warsaw, where he found places to hide a nd helped coordinate Jewish partisan groups in nearby forests.

The deadly struggle was “worth it … even at the price of the fighters’ lives,” he said later. “They could not be saved, anyway.”

In August and September of 1944, Edelman fought in the Warsaw Uprising, another ill-fated revolt meant to free the capital from Germans ahead of the advancing Red Army.

After the war, Edelman became a cardiologist in Lodz. He joined the democratic opposition and the Solidarity freedom movement, and was interned under the Dec.13, 1981, martial law aimed against Solidarity.

In the end, the Solidarity movement led to the ouster of communists from power in Poland in 1989.

Edelman’s wife, Alina Margolis-Edelman, worked as a nurse in the Warsaw ghetto and after the war became a pediatrician. With their son, Aleksander, and daughter, Anna, she left Poland for France following the communist-sponsored anti-Semitic purges of 1968. She died in Paris on March 23, 200 8 .

But Edelman never wanted to leave Poland.

“When you were responsible for the life of some 60,000 people, you don’t leave and abandon the memory of them,” he told the AP.

He held honorary doctorate of the Yale University.

He is survived by his son, Aleksander, his daughter, Anna, and grandchildren Liza and Tomek.

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press

ATLANTA (AP) — The former fiance of a cast member from “The Real Housewives of Atlanta” died Friday night after a fight outside an Atlanta strip club, and police said they had charged a man in his death.

Atlanta police spokesman James Polite said Fredrick Richardson was charged with voluntary manslaughter in the death of Ashley “A.J.” Jewell, who died from massive head injuries after the fight in the parking lot of the Body Tap Club.

Jewell was engaged to “Housewives” cast member Kandi Burruss until August. He appeared in several episodes of the television show, which follows the lives of metro Atlanta socialites.

Police say Jewell worked at the strip club, but they are not sure what started the fight.

Richardson was in the hospital, and police didn’t immediately know his age or whether he had an attorney.

Burruss, a Grammy award-winning songwriter who penned TLC’s hit “No Scrubs,” posted a message on her Twitter account early Saturday.

“im just in one of those moods where i dont wanna talk, i dont wanna b held & told its gonna b ok. i just wanna cry myself 2 sleep, alone,” wrote the 33-year-old Burruss, who was also was a member of 1990s R&B group Xscape. “I could never n a million years imagine this happening. please pray for AJ’s children.”

Burruss told Essence.com in an interview last month that she was caring for Jewell’s 12-year-old twin daughters.

“He would have taken them with him, but they needed a strong female role model and wanted to stay with me,” she said.

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press

LONDON (AP) — Lucy Vodden, who provided the inspiration for the Beatles’ classic song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” has died after a long battle with lupus. She was 46.

Her death was announced Monday by St. Thomas’ Hospital in London, where she had been treated for the chronic disease for more than five years, and by her husband, Ross Vodden. Britain’s Press Association said she died last Tuesday. Hospital officials said they could not confirm the day of her death.

Vodden’s connection to the Beatles dates back to her early days, when she made friends with schoolmate Julian Lennon, John Lennon’s son.

Julian Lennon, then 4 years old, came home from school with a drawing one day, showed it to his father, and said it was “Lucy in the sky with diamonds.”

At the time, John Lennon was gathering material for his contributions to “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” a landmark album released to worldwide acclaim in 1967.

The elder Lennon seized on the image and developed it into what is widely regarded as a psychedelic masterpiece, replete with haunting images of “newspaper taxis” and a “girl with kaleidoscope eyes.”

Rock music critics thought the song’s title was a veiled reference to LSD, but John Lennon always claimed the phrase came from his son, not from a desire to spell out the initials LSD in code.

He sent her flowers and vouchers for use at a gardening center near her home in Surrey in southeast England, and frequently sent her text messages in an effort to buttress her spirits.

“I wasn’t sure at first how to approach her,” Julian Lennon told the Associated Press in June. “I wanted at least to get a note to her. Then I heard she had a great love of gardening, and I thought I’d help with something she’s passionate about, and I love gardening too. I wanted to do something to put a smile on her face.”

In recent months, Vodden was too ill to go out most of the time, except for hospital visits.

She enjoyed her link to the Beatles, but was not particularly fond of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”

“I don’t relate to the song, to that type of song,” she told the Associated Press in June. “As a teenager, I made the mistake of telling a couple of friends at school that I was the Lucy in the song and they said, ‘No, it’s not you, my parents said it’s about drugs.’ And I didn’t know what LSD was at the time, so I just kept it quiet, to myself.”

Vodden is the latest in a long line of people connected to the Beatles who died at a relatively young age.

The list includes John Lennon, gunned down at age 40, manager Brian Epstein, who died of a drug overdose when he was 32, and original band member Stuart Sutcliffe, who died of a brain hemorrhage at 21.

A spokeswoman for Julian Lennon and his mother, Cynthia Lennon, said they were “shocked and saddened” by Vodden’s death.

Angie Davidson, a lupus sufferer who is campaign director of the St. Thomas’ Lupus Trust, said Vodden was “a real fighter” who had worked behind the scenes to support efforts to combat the disease.

“It’s so sad that she has finally lost the battle she fought so bravely for so long,” said Davidson.

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press