Forty years after Rhoads’s death, small rock venues across the nation still host tribute shows honoring him. This new documentary explains why.As those of a certain generation (OK, boomer) are well aware, a sobering number of rock greats met their ends in aviation catastrophes. The documentary “Randy Rhoads: Reflections of a Guitar Icon” delves into the 1982 plane crash that took Rhoads’s life. Just 25, and still the relatively new guitarist for Ozzy Osbourne, Rhoads didn’t much like flying. But, wanting to take some aerial photos to send his mom, he accepted a ride in a private plane piloted by a guy who thought it was funny to fly dangerously close over the tour bus in which Osbourne and crew were sleeping.It’s a sad end to a story that, as told in this movie directed by Andre Relis, is weirdly lopsided. Rhoads made both his name and arguably his best music over a period of only two years or so, with Osbourne on the albums “Blizzard of Ozz” and “Diary of a Madman.” Before that, he had been a founding member of the band Quiet Riot. Relis’s movie spends a lot of time on the pre-superstardom Riot years, which are replete with tales of internecine weirdness and elusive record deals redolent of “This Is Spinal Tap.”While his eclectic, sometimes classically inflected approach is heard to memorable effect on the Osbourne records — his riff for the song “Crazy Train” is one for the ages — attempts here to pin down what made Rhoads great vary. One friend marvels that he could play “fast,” “slow,” “crunchy” and “blues.” A guitar tech, Brian Reason, on the other hand, gives a nicely wonky breakdown of Rhoads’s showstopping solo style, with insights into his use of effects and the volume control.Rhoads comes off as a pleasant guy (never a big partyer; he tried to counsel Osbourne on his excessive drinking) and a genuine ax savant who died with a lot more music in him.Randy Rhoads: Reflections of a Guitar IconNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

Sébastien Izambard exerted “coercive control” over Renée Izambard and subjected her to years of psychological abuse and torture, she said.A tenor in the classical crossover group Il Divo was sued Monday by his ex-wife, who accused him of domestic violence, sexual assault and battery and described his behavior toward her over the years as “a textbook example of coercive control.”In the suit, filed in state court in Los Angeles, Renée Izambard said that her ex-husband, the singer Sébastien Izambard, had subjected her to “years of dangerous psychological abuse and torture, and intense sexual, physical and emotional abuse, bringing her to the doorstep of death.”Ms. Izambard, 43, an Australian native who was a music publicist before she married Mr. Izambard, 48, charged in the lawsuit that over the years he had tracked her movements, withheld medical care, subjected her to sex acts without her consent, and threatened to stop supporting their three school-age children.“Really, she’s just fighting to be free of abuse,” Devin McRae, a lawyer for Ms. Izambard, said. He said that his client had been motivated to file the suit both to end what she saw as a campaign of terror that continued after she filed for divorce in 2018, and to shed light on how intractable coercive control is.Il Divo’s management and label have not responded to repeated requests for comment, nor did a lawyer who has represented Mr. Izambard in the past. A booking agent for the group had no comment. The group, which has sold some 30 million records, is due out with another one, celebrating the music of Motown, in July.In January, California enacted a law that defined coercive control, making it easier for behavior like isolating a partner to be introduced in family court as evidence of domestic violence. Pallavi Dhawan, director of domestic violence policy for the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office, said her office has been tracking the results. “I have heard that family lawyers are getting more success in getting restraining orders using coercive control, because they have been able to argue that it’s codified,” she said.Some legal experts believe that the law could open the door to make examples of coercive control admissible in other cases, such as the civil claim that Ms. Izambard is filing, though they warn that proving emotional and psychological abuse remains challenging. Still, said Ms. Dhawan, whose office was involved in drafting the law, “we wanted to start the conversation and name the harm, so that survivors would have the language” to describe their experiences.The Izambards met in Australia in 2005, when Il Divo, the wildly popular international pop-opera crossover quartet formed by Simon Cowell, was on tour there; by the following year, they were a couple, and Ms. Izambard left her job to move to France with Mr. Izambard, a Paris native. They married in 2008, shortly after the birth of a twin son and daughter, in a pregnancy that was fraught with medical complications.Mr. Izambard’s controlling behavior began before they were married, according to the suit. On a 2005 vacation to Thailand, he brought her to a brothel and, over her protestations, asked her to watch while he “had a sex act performed on him by two Thai prostitutes,” according to the suit. It was the first of many sexual demands that Mr. Izambard made against Ms. Izambard’s wishes, including pressuring her to have sex in front of other people, urinating on her against her will, and ejaculating on her feet while she slept, the lawsuit said.Ms. Izambard, who had been Il Divo’s Australian publicist, gave up that career when she became involved with Mr. Izambard, and he at times kept her from working again, refusing to permit her to get a work visa when the couple lived in London from 2010-2013: “Sébastien told Renée her visa would affect his offshore tax scheme,” the suit says. He did not put her name on their bank accounts or property portfolio for many years after they married, the suit says.He also sought to isolate and control her in other ways, the suit claims: “Sébastien would fly into a jealous rage when Renée called her family or friends in Australia or even if Renée fell asleep or went to bed before Sébastien. When driving in the car together, Sébastien demanded Renée hold his hand at all times.” He watched her on the CCTV system inside their home and tracked her movements outside using the Tesla app, the suit says. He did not permit her to read books in his presence, the suit says.Ms. Izambard attempted to leave him several times throughout their relationship, the suit says; at first, he promised to change to win her back (he eventually joined a group for sex addicts, according to the suit).But his behavior continued, and she suffered a “severe emotional breakdown” in 2017, the suit said. Afterward, the suit claims, he denied her medical treatment, kept her in their home and pressured her to make “pornographic video content.”In an earlier, ongoing case, Ms. Izambard sued her ex-husband and the insurer State Farm for damages related to the 2018 Woolsey fire in California, which destroyed the couple’s Malibu home just days after she filed for divorce. In that suit she charged that Mr. Izambard improperly controlled access to the insurer and its payouts.The lawsuit filed Monday says that Ms. Izambard and her children “require intensive therapy to deal with the psychological and physical trauma” of Mr. Izambard’s behavior.Mr. McRae, her attorney, said Ms. Izambard was cleareyed about what her lawsuit might mean for her ex-husband’s career and ultimately for her. “His whole earning capacity might disappear,” Mr. McRae said. But he said that she had filed the suit anyway, out of a belief that such misconduct should be identified, so it can potentially be stopped. More

Hundreds of painted sets were discovered after a century in the attic of the Tabor Opera House in Leadville, Colo.LEADVILLE, Colo. — One summer day three years ago, Wendy Waszut-Barrett stumbled onto quite the discovery at the Tabor Opera House, high in the Colorado Rockies.“I still get excited about it now,” she said in a recent interview, “and I get all flushed.”Waszut-Barrett, a specialist in period theatrical painting who runs the company Historic Stage Services, was visiting various venues on a drive from her home near Minneapolis to Santa Fe, N.M. She made a stop here in Leadville, about 100 miles west of Denver, to check out the Tabor, which opened in 1879 and has since been designated a National Treasure by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Waszut-Barrett had heard rumors about old scenery being stored on the top floor of the Italianate theater, and asked if she could poke around.Scaffolding covers the exterior of the 19th-century opera house, right, which is undergoing a gut renovation.Benjamin Rasmussen for The New York Times“Basically I got, ‘Sure, but you’re by yourself,’” she said. “So I went up there and it was unreal.”What she found may not have looked like much to the untrained eye: Greg Labbe, the mayor of Leadville, recently said, with laconic wonder, that “there were dusty rolls of stuff in the attic.”Waszut-Barrett knew better: “It was this amazing scope of scenery from 1879 to 1902, which is unheard-of in North America,” she said. The Tabor’s hitherto hidden collection held samples illustrating both the wing-and-shutter system of theatrical design (in which sets move horizontally across the floor) and the fly system that replaced it (in which they move vertically, with ropes and pulleys).The trove holds samples illustrating both the wing-and-shutter system of theatrical design (in which sets are moved horizontally across the floor) and the fly system that replaced it (in which they move vertically, with ropes and pulleys).Benjamin Rasmussen for The New York TimesAnd all this because the local Elks put the old scenery away when they bought the opera house in 1901, and everybody just forgot about it.On a longer trip last fall, Waszut-Barrett, by then documenting her findings for the Tabor Opera House Preservation Foundation, unearthed wings and shutters; flats stacked against walls; and painted sets as big as 12 feet wide and 16 feet high — a mountain vista, a parlor room, a forest. All in all, reflecting the fact that some of them were double-sided, there were around 250 “painted compositions.”Tagging along on one of Waszut-Barrett’s visits to the Tabor earlier this month — the building is open for regular guided tours while it is being gut-renovated, and performances resume next year — I gaped at large painted canvases stretched out as if ready to be moved to the stage, while others were rolled up.Wendy Waszut-Barrett, a specialist in period theatrical design, gentlys clean a piece of scenery.Benjamin Rasmussen for The New York TimesBrushing delicately with a dry sponge, Waszut-Barrett demonstrated how she could reveal images lurking under decades’ worth of soot. A century-old piece of scenery would be revived, and what was remarkable is that if you looked at it through your phone’s camera, it magically acquired three-dimensional depth: “Sets were painted so both distance and stage lighting would make them pop, and the camera performs a similar function,” Waszut-Barrett explained.Design was a vital part of the Tabor audience’s enjoyment. In 1899, a local paper ran an ad for a weeklong engagement by the Kyle Thomas Comic Opera Company (“The Chimes of Normandy,” “H.M.S. Pinafore,” “The Pirates of Penzance” and “Olivette”) that boasted “new and magnificent costumes” and an “augmented cast” of 25 artists.A set element representing the door of a shack had been used in a performance of the Viennese operetta “Fatinitza,” and might have been left behind by the visiting Bostonians company after their performance in Leadville in 1889. Or perhaps it was forgotten in 1893 by the Calhoun Opera Company, which descended on the Tabor with, according to a newspaper ad, “a strong cast of principals, a strong chorus and THEIR OWN ORCHESTRA, under the baton of Carl Martens.”Pigments and brushes used in the restoration of the sets.Benjamin Rasmussen for The New York TimesBenjamin Rasmussen for The New York TimesWalking around the opera house is like being teleported back to its glory days, when you might have settled down for a melodrama, a circus show, an Oscar Wilde lecture or the musical “Out of Bondage,” by the African American Hyers Sisters, whom an ad in a Colorado paper described as “the distinguished serio-comic queens of song and operatic prima donnas.”Or you might have seen the superstar soprano Emma Abbott, whom Katherine K. Preston, author of the book “Opera for the People,” called a “cultural activist” in a recent video chat — because Abbott had made opera accessible to the American masses by singing in English.“The history of the Tabor Opera House is utterly fascinating and the fact that we can physically share it through the historic building and stage scenery is remarkable,” said Jenny Buddenborg, president of the opera house’s preservation foundation, which operates the building in partnership with its current owner, the city of Leadville.The theater was used for operas, vaudeville, lectures, circus shows, concerts and more.Benjamin Rasmussen for The New York TimesOnly a select few today will recognize the name of the theater’s dedicatee, Horace Tabor, but he played a significant role in the cultural history of the American West. Back in the 1880s, Leadville was riding high on altitude (its elevation is just over 10,000 feet) and mining money, and Tabor was a top dog. He had made a huge fortune in silver — the town also turned J.J. and Molly Brown, of “unsinkable” fame, into millionaires — and like many rich men, he decided to spend some of it on a temple to entertainment, “the largest and best west of the Mississippi.”The Tabor Opera House quickly grabbed the attention of a bustling, rowdy city full of competing theaters, saloons and brothels. (The tycoon opened the even bigger Tabor Grand Opera House in Denver in 1881, but it was torn down in 1964.)Tabor did not just present shows; he became one. He scandalously traded his wife Augusta for a younger woman, the former Elizabeth McCourt Doe, and lost all his money when silver collapsed. After his death, in 1899, Baby Doe, as she was nicknamed, moved to a shack next to Horace’s old mine. Colorado’s harsh winter dealt the last blow, and one day she froze to death; the saga became the subject of the 1956 Douglas Moore and John Latouche opera “The Ballad of Baby Doe,” one of Beverly Sills’s finest turns. Riding a bike by the mine site, on the Mineral Belt Trail, was oddly moving, the setting’s isolation underlining the outlandishness of the whole Tabor story.Scenery stacked backstage in the Tabor Opera House.Benjamin Rasmussen for The New York TimesThe discovery of the sets adds a new chapter. Not only do they give us a rare glimpse of American scenic design in the 19th century, but they also evoke a time when entertainment was not as siloed as it is now, and what we call classical music was part of the vernacular, along with vaudeville and plays.“The artists that were painting this scenery were painting opera, World’s Fair midway exhibits, grand circus spectacles for Ringling Brothers, the Wild West show by Buffalo Bill,” Waszut-Barrett said. “They were creating the same visual aesthetic.”As exciting as all this is, the sets have created a new headache for the small foundation that runs the Tabor, since it now has to figure out how to restore and look after them, in addition to fixing up the building. Waszut-Barrett brought up as a potential inspiration the Drottningholm Palace Theater near Stockholm, which presents stagings using 18th-century machinery and sets.“Ideally, we’d love to continue using the sets in productions and sharing them with the public through our building tour program and other educational programming,” Buddenborg said. “We’re still wrapping our heads around what we have.” More

Six former University of Michigan students have filed legal papers accusing a former lecturer of sexually harassing them and the school of not doing enough to protect them.During 16 years teaching at the University of Michigan, Bruce Conforth stocked his lectures with tales from a life filled with boldfaced names: He had rubbed elbows with Bob Dylan, played music alongside B.B. King, apprenticed for the abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning and befriended the poet Allen Ginsberg.Students clamored to enroll in his courses on blues music and the American counterculture, later raving about how he had changed their lives.A musician, scholar and founding curator of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Mr. Conforth was a riveting lecturer who, in his trademark black vest and jeans, could discuss everything from Buddhism to psychedelics, and who, in 2012, was chosen teacher of the year by students.“There was almost a celebrity-like aura around him,” said Amelia Brown, who took a Conforth class called “Beatniks, Hippies and Punks” in 2016. “It wasn’t a normal class. He would go on these long tangents about life and spirituality.”But there was a dark side to Mr. Conforth, according to Ms. Brown and other women who said the teacher used his charisma and, sometimes, Svengali-like manipulation to sexually harass his students.Six of the former Michigan students have filed court papers saying they plan to sue the school, asserting it failed to protect them from sexual harassment.  Erin Kirkland for The New York TimesIn 2008, one recent graduate complained to the university that Mr. Conforth, a lecturer in the American Culture Department, had propositioned her when she was a student. The university put him on formal notice but quietly resolved the complaint. Two more women came forward, though, in 2016, to report that Mr. Conforth had worked to engage them in sexual relationships when they were his students, and, in the midst of the university’s investigation, he agreed to quietly leave his faculty position.Now six former Michigan undergraduates — the three women who previously complained and three others — have filed court papers announcing their intention to sue him and the university, asserting he engaged in a litany of sexual misconduct and the school failed to protect them.“He should have been fired,” said Isabelle Brourman, one of the women. “But they allowed him to thrive. They allowed him to win awards.”Ms. Brourman says, according to the court papers, that Mr. Conforth pressured her into a series of sexual encounters, some of them in his campus office, and later, after she had graduated, raped her in his Ann Arbor apartment.A second former student, Ms. Brown, said she was pressured into a sexual encounter with Mr. Conforth after he told her he had feelings for her and pursued her for several weeks. A third woman said he aggressively kissed her. The other plaintiffs say Mr. Conforth propositioned them to have sexual relationships, at times sending them sexually-charged messages or emails and persisting even after they said no. One woman said he gave her a raccoon penis, suggesting it was a talisman.Mr. Conforth declined to discuss the accusations. “I’ve tried to move on with my life,” he said in a brief phone conversation. “This is a past issue.”The university said it handled the 2008 complaint against Mr. Conforth appropriately and set firm restrictions on his behavior. When the subsequent complaints came in, it said it took swift action to investigate and that Mr. Conforth would have faced dismissal proceedings if he hadn’t agreed to retire in early 2017.“You will note in the separation agreement that the university took immediate and lasting action to assure that Mr. Conforth would not be in any further contact with U-M students, even after his employment ended,” a university spokesman said.Sexual misconduct allegations at universities across the country have sparked calls for policies that hold faculty and student offenders accountable. Last year, Michigan fired David Daniels, an opera star and voice professor, after he and his husband were charged with sexually assaulting a singer.Also last year, the university reached a $9.25 million settlement with women who accused Martin Philbert, then the school’s provost, of sexual harassment.The university said it is constantly working to improve its sexual misconduct policies in a statement that cited a number of changes it has made in recent years.Mr. Conforth arrived at Michigan in 2001 with a doctorate in ethnomusicology from Indiana University and a résumé that included his work as the founding curator with the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, which he left in 1993.Since leaving Michigan, Mr. Conforth, 70, has co-written an award-winning biography of the blues singer and guitarist Robert Johnson and helped narrate a Netflix documentary about the musician.While at Michigan, Mr. Conforth was so popular that students chose him as the winner of the “Golden Apple” teaching award in 2012.But four years earlier, Katherine McMahan, a recent university graduate, had told the school about a disturbing incident the previous fall. Ms. McMahan, then 22, said she had attended a blues concert connected to Mr. Conforth’s course and, at a bar after the concert, she said he cornered her outside the bathroom, put his hand around her waist, pulled her closer to him and asked her to come home with him to sleep over. She said she declined but that he persisted until she pushed him away. (Ms. McMahan is a New York Times employee who works outside the newsroom.)Katherine McMahan, left, and Isabelle Brourman, both accuse their former teacher, Bruce Conforth, of sexual misconduct.Kholood Eid for The New York TimesMs. McMahan later received an email from a Michigan official that said the university was taking steps that “it feels are likely to deter future behavior of this nature towards students.” University records, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, show that after McMahan’s complaint, the school had Mr. Conforth sign a “Last Chance” agreement, which stipulated requirements he would need to fulfill to avoid termination.Other former students recount similar experiences, though they did not report them to the university. Cassie McQuater said that in 2007, when she was 20, Mr. Conforth, who was not her teacher and whom she had met only briefly, began sending her emails, declaring his love. In one, she said, he included an erotic drawing of a man and a woman with her name at the bottom. When she eventually agreed to get dinner with him, he asked her to return home with him; she declined.Lauren Lambert, who said she plans to join the intended lawsuit, said that starting in 2011, while she was his student and afterward, Mr. Conforth sent her sexually charged messages, saying he had fantasies about her.Two women said that as part of the effort to engage with them sexually, Mr. Conforth had employed the ruse of suggesting he was a member of the so-called “Order of the Illuminati,” a secret society whose mysteries were popularized in Dan Brown’s novel “Angels & Demons.” The women, Ms. Brourman and her friend, Maya Crosman, said they believed he was responsible for emails they received, purportedly from Illuminati leadership, that recommended they engage in relationships with Mr. Conforth, whom the emails called the “Chosen One.”Ms. Crosman kept a copy of one of the emails — sent from an email address designed to be anonymous — in which a person who identified themselves as Grandmaster Setis recommends she return the “intensely profound love” that Mr. Conforth had for her.The women said they thought Mr. Conforth had the potential to be a kind of spiritual and artistic mentor, but then things grew strange. In legal papers filed in a Michigan court, Ms. Brourman said Mr. Conforth invited them to an arboretum on campus where he engaged in a mysterious ritual that involved cutting off pieces of their hair and giving Ms. Brourman a series of objects, including the raccoon penis, seeds and some kind of medallion. She was warned to keep them with her, or there would be “repercussions,” the court papers said.Both women said they received what appeared to be homemade horoscopes in which it was predicted they were romantically compatible with Mr. Conforth.Ms. Crosman said Mr. Conforth inundated her with messages online, declaring his love. One included a Pablo Neruda poem that said, “I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.” At the end of the semester, she said he forcibly kissed her and stuck his tongue in her mouth during a visit to his office.The two women said they feared reporting their encounters to the university at the time.“We were trying to protect ourselves in ways where we didn’t have to insult him, we didn’t have to fight him,” Ms. Crosman said.Maya Crosman, left, and Cassie McQuater, said that Mr. Conforth inundated them with messages, declaring his love. Ms. Crosman said he aggressively kissed her.Joyce Kim for The New York TimesThe court papers say Brourman felt intimidated by the strange emails she received, including ones that directed her to “service” Mr. Conforth. In 2014, she said they had a sexual encounter in his office on campus. After that encounter, Ms. Brourman and Mr. Conforth met regularly for “spiritual lessons” that required sex beforehand, the papers said. Ms. Brourman said in an interview that at the time, she was confused and thought she might have feelings for Mr. Conforth, but in retrospect, she said she recognizes that she was being manipulated.In fall 2017, after she had graduated, Ms. Brourman said in court papers that Mr. Conforth raped her at his apartment in Ann Arbor. She did not report it, she said, because she feared retaliation, but in February filed a complaint with the police.The two women whose complaints played a role in Mr. Conforth’s departure from Michigan approached the university after learning about each other’s accounts. Shaina Mahler had been 22 in 2014 when she said Mr. Conforth, her favorite teacher, began sending her messages on Facebook. She was flattered at first, but then the messages escalated into expressions of how attracted he was to her.When Ms. Mahler told him that she was starting to feel “confused and anxious” about his messages, Mr. Conforth apologized and said they could be friends, writing, “Please please don’t ruin my life here.” But a few days later, Mr. Conforth sent her more sexually charged messages, saying he wanted to “kiss” and “touch” her, according to court papers.Ms. Mahler let it slide until two years later, when she spoke with Ms. Brown, who recounted a nearly identical experience of being pursued by Mr. Conforth. Ms. Brown, then 21, told him several times his advances were “inappropriate,” according to notes taken by a Title IX coordinator who interviewed her. But one day in his office, when he insisted they hug, they ended up kissing too, she said.That semester, their interactions escalated into a sexual encounter in his office, and Ms. Brown told the coordinator that, at first, she believed it was consensual. She acknowledged having feelings for Mr. Conforth but told the coordinator that she quickly became anxious and conflicted after their sexual encounter. She soon recognized, she said, that she had been manipulated, especially after learning from a friend — another student in his class at the time — that Mr. Conforth had left a note for her saying that he found her attractive.Ms. Brown and Ms. Mahler reported their interactions with Mr. Conforth to the university at the end of 2016 and he retired shortly thereafter.The university said its policy is to share the school’s investigative findings with complainants and that it could not comment on individual cases. But both of the women said that the university did not alert them to the outcome of its review until last year, when Ms. Mahler said she checked in after hearing complaints from other women.“I let it go for a while,” she said, “but I always wondered.”Sheelagh McNeill contributed research. More

Henry Choate, an 18-year-old Black man, was hanged outside the Maury County Courthouse in Tennessee in 1927 after he was falsely accused of attacking a white girl.The new video for the country singer Jason Aldean’s song “Try That in a Small Town” takes place outside a courthouse in Tennessee where, nearly a century ago, an 18-year-old Black man was attacked by a mob and lynched.Mr. Aldean was criticized after releasing the video, which included violent news footage of looting and unrest during protests in American cities. Country Music Television pulled the video this week after accusations surfaced on social media that its lyrics and message were offensive.“I think there is a lack of sensitivity using that courthouse as a prop,” said Cheryl L. Keyes, chair of the department of African American studies and a professor of ethnomusicology at U.C.L.A.The teenager who was lynched, Henry Choate, had traveled from his home in Coffee County, Tenn., where he worked in road construction, to visit his grandfather in nearby Maury County on Nov. 11, 1927 — Armistice Day, as it was known at the time, or Veterans Day today.While he was there, he was accused — falsely, historians now believe — of raping a 16-year-old white girl.According to an account in “Lynching and Frame-Up in Tennessee,” a book by Robert Minor that was published in 1946, the girl’s family called the county sheriff, who responded by rounding up a pack of bloodhounds to track down the girl’s attacker.Before the hounds arrived, however, a group of white people went to Mr. Choate’s grandfather’s house, “called out” Mr. Choate and took him to the girl, who did not identify him as her attacker, according to Mr. Minor’s book.Once the hounds were brought in, they were “given the scent” on a street called Hicks Lane, where the attack was alleged to have taken place. But the scent did not lead the dogs to Mr. Choate’s grandfather’s house.Instead, “the trail faded out in another direction,” Mr. Minor wrote, “and the girl again said she did not recognize Henry Choate as her assailant.”One man, however, announced that he had seen Mr. Choate returning to his grandfather’s home from the direction of Hicks Lane. Mr. Choate’s arms were tied with ropes and he was led away. Eventually, he was turned over to the sheriff, who arrested him.After Mr. Choate was brought to the jail, a cook there told him to pray because “the mob is coming to lynch you,” according to Mr. Minor’s book.The courthouse in Maury County, Tenn., in 1946.Associated Press“I know they are,” Mr. Choate said.According to Mr. Minor’s account, a mob of white men gathered outside the jail, demanding the keys. The sheriff’s wife, with whom the sheriff had left the keys, initially refused because she believed Mr. Choate was innocent, Mr. Minor wrote.The mob attempted to enter the jail twice, and failed, according to a contemporaneous account of the episode in The Tennessean.One member of the mob left and returned with a sledgehammer and began beating the jailhouse door with it, Mr. Minor wrote.Terrified that the mob would dynamite the jailhouse, the sheriff’s wife relented, and the first deputy sheriff unlocked the door. Mr. Choate was beaten with a sledgehammer and dragged out of the jail.The mob used a rope to tie him to the bumper of a car and dragged him to the Maury County courthouse in Columbia, Tenn., where they hanged him from a window, according to news reports.There were about 250 men in the mob, according to research from the University of North Carolina.Two pastors, two lawyers and James I. Finney, the editor of The Tennessean, had begged members of the mob to spare Mr. Choate’s life, but to no avail, the International News Service reported.Others denounced the actions of the mob.The executive committee of a body called the Tennessee Inter-Racial Commission later said in a statement that “all available information indicates that the sheriff of Maury County failed to meet his obligations as an officer,” The Tennessean reported a little over a week after the lynching.The Maury County sheriff, who was identified in news accounts at the time as Luther Wiley, said in a statement in the days after the lynching that he was honoring a promise.“I had an agreement with the mother, brothers and the little girl not to take the criminal away from our county, but to give him a speedy trial,” he said, according to a 1927 account in The Tennessean. “And I kept my promise steadfastly.”He added that he was “overpowered by all classes of weapons,” referring to members of the mob who had armed themselves with crowbars, sledgehammers and dynamite.Ultimately, a grand jury declined to indict anyone involved with the lynching, according to a wire article that was published in The Philadelphia Tribune in December 1927.As the details of Mr. Choate’s death resurfaced this week, Mr. Aldean responded on Twitter to the criticism of his music video by denying that he had released “a pro-lynching song.”“These references are not only meritless, but dangerous,” he wrote. “There is not a single lyric in the song that references race or points to it — and there isn’t a single video clip that isn’t real news footage — and while I can try and respect others to have their own interpretation of a song with music — this one goes too far.”TackleBox Films, the company that produced the video, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Alain Delaquérière More