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      Michael Watford, a Minister of Gospel House Music, Dies at 64

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      His signature hit, “So Into You,” was omnipresent in 1994 — the rare record “you heard at every club,” one D.J. said. But his time at the top was brief.Michael Watford, a church-trained club singer whose baritone boomed over the world’s dance floors for much of the early 1990s, and in the process helped birth a subgenre of club music known as gospel house, died on Jan. 26 in Newark. He was 64.His cousin Lorie Watford said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was dementia.Mr. Watford’s signature hit was “So Into You,” a jubilant ditty that paired his romantic, yearning vocal, inspired by Luther Vandross, with insistent strings, a lush piano line, and frequent handclaps and drum rolls. It hit No. 1 on the Billboard dance chart in April 1994, only to be replaced a week later by Barbara Tucker’s “Beautiful People” — on which Mr. Watford provided backing vocals.“There were different styles among house D.J.s, and different songs that appealed to their particular crowds,” said Tony Humphries, a D.J. and producer who helped push Mr. Watford to the top of the dance-music heap by playing his early records on his weekly radio show on WRKS (Kiss-FM) and during his marathon sets at Club Zanzibar in Newark (where the video for “So Into You” was shot). “But there was a smaller number of records everyone had to have, songs you heard at every club, and ‘So Into You’ was absolutely one of those.”Little Louie Vega, a producer and D.J. who between 1992 and 1994 had his hand in more than a dozen songs that reached the top of the dance charts, said of Mr. Watford: “He comes from church. You could tell that from the way he sings, and he brought that to the music.” Mr. Vega worked with Mr. Watford on “My Love,” a song from his first and only album, “Michael Watford,” released by EastWest/Atlantic in 1994.Michael Wayne Watford was born in Suffolk, Va., on July 20, 1959, but grew up largely in Newark. His mother, the Rev. Betty Brower of the Clinton Memorial AME Zion Church, was a gospel singer who performed in the 1970s with the Alvin Darling Ensemble. His stepfather, George Brower, was also a gospel singer.He is survived by his mother; two younger brothers, Duncan and Terrance Artis Watford; his children, Michael Watford Jr., Symphony Watford and Taylor Watford; and two stepsiblings, Ruby Washington and Erroll Brower. His marriage to Joanne Collins ended in divorce. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Looking to Watch Movies and Make Friends? Join the Club.

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      Around New York City, there’s a robust circle of film enthusiasts showing offbeat movies in bars and shops, where lingering afterward is welcomed.At Heart of Gold, a cozy bar in Queens, a mad scientist recently brought to life a corpse that went on a blood-drenched rampage. But the people nursing their beers there didn’t call the authorities. They cheered.That’s because the undead were marauding on a screen, set up at the front of the bar, that was illuminated by “Re-Animator,” Stuart Gordon’s 1985 horror-science fiction splatterfest. The occasion was a Monday night gathering of the Astoria Horror Club, which meets regularly to watch scary movies over hot dogs, mulled wine and other anything-but-popcorn concessions.Before the film, Tom Herrmann and Madeleine Koestner, the club’s co-founders, introduced “Re-Animator” with a trigger warning about a sexual assault scene and a reminder to generously tip the staff. About 35 people watched the movie seated, but others stood, complementing the onscreen mayhem with shrieking, gasping and, as a decapitated head got tossed around, an explosion of applause.The Astoria Horror Club is just one of many film clubs that, while not new in concept, are quietly thriving in and around New York City. At many of these events, movies are shown not in traditional theaters but in bars, shops and other makeshift spaces, for small groups of people, many of whom arrive early for good seats and stay afterward to gush and vent.The screenings are open to the public, but mostly it’s Gen Zers and millennials who are joining strangers to watch movies that, in many cases, are for niche tastes and were made before streaming was a thing.These kinds of films are programmed regularly at the city’s revival houses, like Film Forum and Metrograph. But what these film clubs offer is ample space and time, where debate and friendships can blossom without leaving your seat. For cheap, too: At chain theaters, tickets can be more than $20 apiece, not including food and drinks. Many of these film clubs are free to attend, although patrons are asked to pony up for beer or bites.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Marlena Shaw, Venerable Nightclub Chanteuse, Dies at 84

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      She sang jazz (with Count Basie, among others) and later funk and disco, frequently in intimate venues, where she regaled audiences with tales of old love affairs.Marlena Shaw, who cultivated a sultry stage presence and husky voice from the final echoes of the big-band era, to the go-go Playboy Clubs of the 1960s, to the rise of funk, to disco and finally to the modern cabaret circuit, died on Jan. 19. She was 84.Her daughter MarLa Bradshaw announced her death on social media but did not share any further details.Ms. Shaw first came to public notice in the mid-1960s, when she performed at Playboy Clubs around the country. Describing one of those performances in 1966, The Los Angeles Times labeled her a “pretty girl singer” but also called her “the surprise of the bill.” That same year, Jet magazine reported that “three record companies were waving contracts in her face” after a New York engagement.She signed with Cadet Records, which in 1967 released her recording of “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy,” a vocal version of the Joe Zawinul tune that had been a hit for Cannonball Adderley. It reached No. 58 on the Billboard pop chart and 33 on the R&B chart.It also got the attention of Count Basie, who invited Ms. Shaw to try out for a job singing with his band.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Prosecutors in Nashville Drop Charges Against Country Singer Chris Young

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      The country singer had been charged with disorderly conduct, assaulting an officer and resisting arrest after an altercation at a downtown bar.Prosecutors on Friday dropped all charges that had been brought against the country music singer Chris Young in connection with an altercation with an Alcoholic Beverage Commission agent at a Nashville bar.“After a review of all the evidence in this case, the Office of the District Attorney has determined that these charges will be dismissed,” Glenn R. Funk, the Nashville district attorney, said in a statement.Mr. Young, 38, had been charged with disorderly conduct, assaulting an officer and resisting arrest following the episode on Monday night.“Mr. Young and I are gratified with the D.A.’s decision clearing him of the charges and any wrongdoing,” Bill Ramsey, the musician’s lawyer, said in a statement.The episode that led to the charges occurred as Tennessee Alcoholic Beverage Commission agents were checking IDs at the DawgHouse Saloon, a downtown bar. Mr. Young was accused of hitting one of the agents, according to an arrest affidavit filed with a criminal court in Nashville. Agents handcuffed Mr. Young after he did not comply with their orders, the affidavit says.Mr. Young’s representatives previously shared surveillance footage showing that the singer was standing by the bar when agents walked past him.In the video, as one of the agents walks by, Mr. Young places a hand on him, walks backward with the agent and apparently says something. The agent pushes Mr. Young with two hands, and Mr. Young staggers backward and hits his back on a corner of the bar table, causing him to briefly fall, the video shows.He then gets up, raises both of his hands in the air and walks backward away from the agents.Mr. Young rose to stardom after winning the country-music reality TV competition “Nashville Star” in 2006, and his second album, “The Man I Want to Be,” released in 2009, reached the platinum sales mark in the United States. He has been a familiar presence on the Billboard country charts since.John Yoon More

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      Country Singer Chris Young Is Arrested at a Nashville Bar

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      The musician was released on bond for charges of disorderly conduct, assaulting an officer and resisting arrest.Chris Young, the country music singer, was arrested on charges of disorderly conduct, assaulting an officer and resisting arrest after an altercation at a bar in Nashville on Monday night, the authorities said.While Tennessee Alcoholic Beverage Commission agents were looking at IDs in a downtown Nashville bar, Mr. Young, 38, struck one of the agents, according to an arrest affidavit filed with a criminal court in Nashville. Agents handcuffed Mr. Young after he did not comply with their orders, it said.Mr. Young had his breakthrough when he won the country-music reality TV competition “Nashville Star” in 2006. His second album, “The Man I Want to Be,” released in 2009, hit platinum in the United States. He has since been a fixture on the Billboard country charts.A representative for Mr. Young declined to comment.The Alcoholic Beverage Commission agents arrived at a bar called Tin Roof at about 8:30 p.m. to check the IDs of the patrons, including Mr. Young, the arrest affidavit said. After the check, Mr. Young began asking the agents questions, which they said they answered, and he began video recording them.The agents left and continued onto a bar next door, called DawgHouse Saloon. The arrest affidavit said that Mr. Young and his friends had followed them and began talking to the people there. When the agents finished their compliance checks, Mr. Young tried to block one of the agents from leaving and hit him on the shoulder, it said.The agent who was struck, Joseph Phillips, pushed Mr. Young to create distance, then other patrons got up to intervene, the affidavit said. Another agent tried speaking to Mr. Young, who did not comply with the orders. Then the agents detained him.The affidavit described Mr. Young as having had “slurred speech” and his eyes as “blood shot and watery.” It also said the people who were with Mr. Young were “making the incident hostile.”Mr. Young was later taken into custody and released on bonds of $250 for the disorderly conduct charge, $1,000 for the resisting arrest charge and $1,250 for the assault charge, according to reports by Nashville’s criminal court clerk. He is expected to appear in court on Feb. 16.Aimee Ortiz More

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      Red Paden, Juke Joint ‘King’ Who Kept the Blues Alive, Dies at 67

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      His unassuming Mississippi Delta nightspot is one of the last of its kind, giving blues musicians a welcoming venue and lately drawing visitors from around the world.Red Paden, who as the self-proclaimed “king of the juke joint runners” spent four decades as the owner of Red’s, an unassuming music spot in downtown Clarksdale, Miss., and one of the last places in the United States to offer authentic Delta blues in its natural setting, died on Dec. 30. He was 67.His son, Orlando, said the death, in a hospital in Jackson, Miss., was from complications of heart surgery.Juke joints, once commonplace across the Deep South, were the loam out of which blues music grew, a vast network of shacks, old shops and converted homes where traveling musicians would play a night for a share of the cover charge, then move on to the next gig.Red’s is the quintessential example: low-ceilinged and the size of a large garage, decorated with old music posters and lighted with neon signs and string bulbs (red, of course).We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      36 Hours in Joshua Tree, California: Things to Do and See

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      7 a.m.
      Hike to the site of a real-life Western drama
      California’s high-desert scenery often feels like the backdrop of an old western (in Pioneertown, northwest of the park, a set used for many films of the western genre still stands). For the nonfiction version of Wild West-like drama, enter the park via the west entrance and hike to the site of a showdown near the Wall Street Mill, once used to process gold mined in the area. In 1943, two neighbors entered into a fatal duel over a property line disagreement along what’s now the trail. On the path, a sign commemorating the shootout reads, “Here is where Worth Bagley bit the dust at the hand of W.F. Keys.” The sign is a replica of the original one that Keys, the mill’s owner, made and installed himself. At the end of the path, you’ll reach the ruins of the mill, flanked by rusted-out antique cars. The relatively easy hourlong round-trip feels like traveling back in time. More

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      Shane MacGowan: Raising a Farewell Pint in Dublin Pubs

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      The Pogues singer, who died Thursday, took traditional Irish music in a new direction. Most people in Ireland loved him for it.Christmas came early this year in Dublin, but too late for a beloved adopted son.On the last evening in November, a wet Thursday, cars at the rush hour stop lights blared “Fairytale of New York” on a thousand radios. From the sidewalk, you could hear drivers and passengers singing along: “The boys from the N.Y.P.D. choir still singing ‘Galway Bay,’ and the bells were ringing out for Christmas Day.”The song’s renowned lyricist and co-writer, Shane MacGowan, the British-born frontman of the punk-folk band the Pogues, died earlier that day. Ireland — his greatest muse, and ancestral home — was coming to terms with a death that had, thanks to MacGowan’s well-known addictions to alcohol and drugs, long been foretold.MacGowan would have turned 66 if he had lived to his next birthday — on Christmas Day, the subject of “Fairytale of New York,” the Pogues’ greatest hit, in which an elderly Irish couple berate and console each other for lives gone to seed in a soured Big Apple.Photographs of MacGowan and the Pogues were shown on screens at the Wall of Fame in the Temple Bar area of Dublin on Friday.Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York TimesOn South William Street, in Dublin’s city center, a gaggle of young women, dressed for a night out, were singing “Fairytale” as they rushed through freezing rain to a nearby pub. Student nurses at St. Vincent’s Hospital, from which MacGowan was discharged last week after a long final illness, said they had heard news of his death at work that morning.“We all just started singing ‘Fairytale of New York’, and we got very emotional,” said Eve McCormack, 22.“He was fantastic,” said her friend Sophie McEvoy, 21. “We hoped he might make it, because Christmas is his birthday. But not this time, I suppose.”Leah Barry, 37, a social worker, was having a pre-dinner drink nearby at Grogan’s pub on Castle Street, one of the last holdouts of an older, more Bohemian Dublin. She grew emotional as she talked about her favorite Pogues songs — “A Pair of Brown Eyes,” about a broken veteran of a nameless war, and “Rainy Night in Soho,” a bruised and tender love song.“I was with a group of Irish students going off to America,” Barry recalled, “and we bought a compilation album of Irish songs at Dublin Airport on the way out. That’s how I fell in love with the Pogues. Whenever I hear those songs I think of five of us in the one bedroom in Montauk, having a mad summer.”Leah Barry said the Pogues’ music reminded her of traveling from Ireland to America, listening to their music on a summer abroad.Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York TimesAcross the river Liffey in the Cobblestone pub, a famous venue for Irish traditional musicians, an old-school session was in full swing in the front bar: guitars, tin whistle, fiddles, uilleann bagpipes and bodhrán, a traditional goatskin drum. In the early 1980s, the Pogues gate-crashed this genre with a London-Irish swagger, subverting its pieties with punk vigor and venom. To its old tropes and titles — “The Boys from the County Cork,” “The Boys from the County Mayo,” “The Boys from the County Armagh” — MacGowan added his own variations, like “The Boys from the County Hell,” with lyrics that showcased his scabrous humor and diaspora-wide vision.Born in the county of Kent, near London, to Irish parents, MacGowan first came to music through the city’s punk scene, then found his lifelong inspiration in the dark poetry of his ancestral homeland, and in particular the Irish diaspora in the United States (“Body of an American,” “Fairytale of New York”), Britain (“Rainy Night in Soho,” and many more), Australia (a cover of “The Band Played Waltzing Matilda”) and even Mexico (“A Pistol for Paddy Garcia”).Far from being offended by MacGowan’s irreverence, most people in Ireland loved him for it.A book of condolences for MacGowan at Mansion House, the mayor’s residence, in Dublin on Friday.Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York TimesOn guitar at the Cobblestone traditional session on Thursday night was Colm O’Brien, a Dublin-born musician now living in Boston. “My own personal opinion is that we are only going to realize his genius in the next decades,” O’Brien said. “He introduced people to Irish music who wouldn’t have heard it otherwise, even Irish people. People who were young and who were punk, and wouldn’t have listened.”Tomás Mulligan, the 33-year-old son of the Cobblestone’s owner, Tom Mulligan, said that MacGowan had directly inspired his own musical project, a punk-folk collective called Ispíní na hÉireann (“Sausages of Ireland”).“Every Irish trad musician went through a phase when they were young, when their parents forced them to play the old music and then they rebelled,” Mulligan said. “But then they came back to it. It was the Pogues who brought me back to it.”In the Cobblestone pub, a famous venue for Irish traditional musicians, an old-school session in full swing, featuring guitars, tin whistle, fiddles, uilleann bagpipes and bodhrán, a traditional goatskin drum.Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York TimesAs Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa wrote in “The Leopard,” “If we want things to stay as they are, everything will have to change.” John Francis Flynn, a rising star of the Irish folk scene, expressed a similar thought over a drink in the back of the Cobblestone.“Most good traditional artists have two things in common,” Flynn said: “a real respect for the source material, but also having an urge to do something new with it.” MacGowan had “opened a door into Irish music for people who might have thought it would be twee,” he added.“What trad songs do is, they are almost like a time machine,” Flynn said. “You can connect with people who are long gone, and with history.”MacGowan’s work “was romantic, but it was real and it was honest. It wasn’t simple,” he added. “And it was sometimes brutal.” More