Pick a Day

Music History Events: Deaths

June 17, 1954 Danny Cedrone, guitarist featured on Bill Haley & His Comets' "Rock Around The Clock," dies at age 33 after falling down stairs and breaking his neck.

May 19, 1954 Modernist composer Charles Ives dies of a stroke.

June 3, 1953 Florence Beatrice Price, the first African American composer to have a composition played by a major orchestra, dies of a stroke at age 66.

May 16, 1953 Jazz guitarist and composer Django Reinhardt dies of a brain hemorrhage at age 43.

January 1, 1953 Hank Williams dies of a heart attack in the back seat of a Cadillac while traveling to a concert in Ohio. He was 29.

July 13, 1951 Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg dies at age 76.

October 23, 1950 Al Jolson, one of the most popular entertainers of the 1920s, dies at 64 after having a heart attack during a card game in San Francisco, California.

December 6, 1949 Blues musician Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbetter dies of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) at age 60.

April 20, 1949 Phil Spector's father commits suicide when Phil is just 9 years old. The title of the song "To Know Him Is To Love Him," which Phil Spector wrote for the Teddy Bears, comes from the inscription on his father's headstone.

June 1, 1948 The Chicago-based blues musician Sonny Boy Williamson is murdered during a robbery at age 34. A different musician based in the South who has been imiating him continues to use the name and becomes the best known Sonny Boy Williamson after writing songs like "One Way Out" and "Help Me" that are widely recorded.

January 26, 1947 Actress/singer Grace Moore dies in a plane crash in Copenhagen at age 48. Her life inspires the 1953 movie So This Is Love, starring Kathryn Grayson.

September 15, 1945 Austrian composer/conductor Anton Webern is killed outside his home by a US Army soldier during the Allied occupation of Austria. The soldier, wracked with guilt, would die of alcoholism in 1955.

December 27, 1944 Amy Beach, composer and popular concert pianist, dies of heart disease at age 77.

December 15, 1944 Glenn Miller, a world-famous bandleader who joined the Army in 1942 and has been entertaining troops with his Army Air Force Band, vanishes when the plane taking him from England to Paris disappears over the English Channel. The plane is never found; Miller, age 40, is presumed dead.

April 13, 1944 French composer and pianist Cécile Chaminade dies in Monte Carlo at age 86.

December 15, 1943 Jazz pianist Fats Waller dies of pneumonia at age 39. Composed "Ain't Misbehavin'" and "Honeysuckle Rose."

May 28, 1943 Vaughn De Leath, a female crooner who was one of the first artists to record "Are You Lonesome Tonight," dies at age 42.

March 28, 1943 Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff dies of melanoma at age 69.

November 5, 1942 George M. Cohan, a fixture on Broadway as an entertainer and composer, dies of cancer at age 64. Wrote the standards "Over There," "The Yankee Doodle Boy," and "You're A Grand Old Flag."

May 14, 1942 Film composer Frank Churchill - who wrote several classic Disney numbers including "Heigh-Ho" from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs - dies of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at age 40.

July 10, 1941 Jazz icon Jelly Roll Morton, whose "Jelly Roll Blues" was the first published jazz composition, dies at age 50.

December 22, 1939 Blues singer Ma Rainey - known as "The Mother of the Blues" - dies of a heart attack in Rome, Georgia, at age 53.

August 16, 1938 Blues legend Robert Johnson dies after being poisoned by a jealous man. Like many famous musicians who died young, he was 27 when he passed.

September 26, 1937 Bessie Smith dies of severe injuries she sustained in a late-night car accident near Clarksdale, Mississippi, at age 43. The story goes that she was refused admission to a whites-only hospital, and she bled to death. In actuality, two ambulances showed up at the scene - one for the white hospital, one for the black hospital - and being in the Deep South during segregation, she was taken to the latter, where her arm was amputated before she died. Had she been taken to the white hospital, however, she would not have been treated.

July 11, 1937 Composer George Gershwin dies at 37 following surgery to remove a brain tumor.

June 10, 1934 English composer Frederick Delius dies at age 72.

May 25, 1934 English composer Gustav Holst, known for his orchestral suite The Planets, dies of heart failure after an operation for an ulcer.

April 28, 1934 Delta blues musician Charley Patton dies of a mitral valve disorder.

May 26, 1933 Country singer Jimmie Rodgers dies at age 35 after a long battle with tuberculosis (which he sings about in "T.B. Blues.")

March 15, 1929 Alabama blues pianist Pinetop Smith is shot and killed at age 24.