Deaths (Obituaries)

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      Michael Henderson, Funk Bassist Turned Crooner, Dies at 71

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      He was a sideman with Stevie Wonder and Miles Davis before embarking on a successful second career as a singer of soulful, romantic ballads.Michael Henderson, a self-taught bassist who performed and recorded in the 1960s and ’70s with Stevie Wonder and Miles Davis, then remade himself as a soulful balladeer and songwriter, died on Tuesday at his home in Dallas, Ga., a suburb of Atlanta. He was 71.His son, Michael Jr., said the cause was cancer.Mr. Henderson began his career early. He was about 14 and on tour with the Detroit Emeralds, an R&B group, when he met Mr. Wonder at a theater in Chicago.“There was a piano upstairs where the dressing rooms were,” Mr. Henderson said in the liner notes to “Take Me I’m Yours: The Buddah Years Anthology” (2018), a two-CD collection of his records from the 1970s and ’80s released by Soul Music Records. “Stevie was playing something I’d heard before, so I got my bass and sat down next to him. He started playing, and I started playing right along with him.”Mr. Wonder soon hired him. For the next five years, Mr. Henderson toured with Mr. Wonder while also working as a session musician for Motown Records. He said he had learned all he could from the influential Motown bassist James Jamerson, who would sometimes come to clubs or recording sessions where Mr. Henderson was playing.“I stayed close to James’s sound but began adding in my little stuff every now and then,” he said in the “Anthology” liner notes. “I’d go up the neck and find higher notes.”Mr. Henderson’s skills had advanced enough to pique Miles Davis’s interest when he heard him play with Mr. Wonder’s band in 1970 at the Copacabana in Manhattan. Davis had already begun using electric instruments and rock rhythms on “Bitches Brew” and other albums; now he wanted to take his music in more of a funk direction and decided to hire Mr. Henderson, who was not a jazz musician, to replace Dave Holland, who was best known as an upright bassist but had begun playing the electric bass with Davis.When the show was over, Mr. Henderson recalled in a 2017 interview for the website Lee Bailey’s Eurweb, which covers urban entertainment, sports and politics, Davis came backstage and told Mr. Wonder that he was “taking” his bass player.Over the next few years, Mr. Henderson recorded a string of albums with Davis, including “A Tribute to Jack Johnson,” “Live-Evil” and “On the Corner.” In a 1997 review of CD reissues of five Davis albums from 1969 to 1973, the New York Times critic Ben Ratliff cited “Live-Evil” and “In Concert: Live at Philharmonic Hall” as evidence of Mr. Henderson’s noticeable impact on Mr. Davis’s band.“Mr. Henderson made Davis’s band sound less searching, more hypnotic,” Mr. Ratliff wrote. “Instead of improvising and interacting with the band, he took a simple bass vamp and percolated it endlessly.”Mr. Henderson with Davis at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1973. One critic said that Mr. Henderson, who did not have a jazz background, had “made Davis’s band sound less searching, more hypnotic.”David Warner Ellis/Redferns, via Getty ImagesMichael Earl Henderson was born on July 7, 1951, in Yazoo City, Miss., and moved to Detroit with his mother, Rose Williams, who sang in church, and his stepfather, Earl Henderson, when he was young. During his childhood, he played cello and then switched to bass. Precociously talented, he was performing with local bands before his 12th birthday.“Mom was always cool with the noise I was making in the basement and backyard, and later as I began playing in the local bar scene,” he said in the liner notes. When he was 10 or 11, he saved enough money to take a bus to see a bill of Motown artists at the Fox Theater.“I told myself, ‘One day, I’m going to be onstage with all those artists,’” he said.Mr. Henderson was a sideman until 1976 — the year his time with Davis ended — when the jazz drummer and bandleader Norman Connors invited him to write and record a song for his album “Saturday Night Special.” He sang that song, “Valentine Love,” with Jean Carne. Mr. Henderson wrote and sang on the title song of Mr. Connors’s next album, “You Are My Starship,” and sang a duet with Phyllis Hyman on his song “We Both Need Each Other.”After making a deal with Buddah Records in 1976, Mr. Henderson’s transformation into a sexy crooner and songwriter continued. The cover of his 1981 album, “Slingshot,” showed him on a beach wearing a tiny aqua swimsuit.When Mr. Henderson appeared at the Roxy Theater in West Hollywood in 1979, Connie Johnson, a pop critic for The Los Angeles Times, wrote that he “isn’t a platinum sex symbol in the manner of Teddy Pendergrass — yet,” adding, “Currently, he’s in the same league as Peabo Bryson and Lenny Williams.”Mr. Henderson found success on the Billboard R&B chart with singles like “Take Me I’m Yours,” which hit No. 3 in 1978; “Wide Receiver,” which peaked at No. 4 in 1980, and “Can’t We Fall in Love Again,” another duet with Ms. Hyman that rose to No. 9 in 1981.After seven albums for Buddah, the last of them in 1983, he recorded “Bedtime Stories” for EMI America in 1986. That was his last solo album, although he continued to perform.In addition to his mother and a son, Mr. Henderson is survived by his daughters, Chelsea and Michelle Henderson, and his companion, DaMia Satterfield. He was separated from his wife, Adelia Thompson.In 2002, Mr. Henderson returned to Miles Davis’s music. He and several other Davis alumni, including the saxophonist Sonny Fortune and the drummer Ndugu Chancler, formed the group Children on the Corner; a year later, they released the album “Rebirth,” which reinterpreted and recreated Davis’s electric music from the 1970s.“This ain’t no smooth jazz,” Mr. Henderson told All About Jazz in 2003. “Don’t come to hear us and get ready to eat your steak and sit there and have a conversation with your old lady. It ain’t happenin’. Because when we hit the stage, we mean business. We’re going for the throat.” More

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      Shonka Dukureh, Actress Who Sang ‘Hound Dog’ in ‘Elvis,’ Dies at 44

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      She made her Hollywood debut as Big Mama Thornton, giving a performance that one castmate called “a spiritual experience.”Shonka Dukureh, who made her Hollywood debut as the celebrated blues singer Big Mama Thornton in the new Baz Luhrmann film, “Elvis,” was found dead on Thursday in Nashville. She was 44.The Metropolitan Nashville Police Department confirmed the death but did not provide a cause, saying only that no foul play was evident. One of Ms. Dukureh’s two young children found her unresponsive in her bedroom on Thursday morning and ran to alert a neighbor, who called 911, the police said.“Elvis,” Mr. Luhrmann’s highly anticipated movie about the life of Elvis Presley, with Austin Butler in the title role and Tom Hanks as Presley’s manager, Tom Parker, opened in June. Big Mama Thornton, who recorded the original version of “Hound Dog” in 1952, a year before Presley had a hit with it, was Ms. Dukureh’s first major acting role. In Thornton, she found a role that melded her booming voice with her apparently emerging acting chops.Her rendition of “Hound Dog” especially captivated audiences. She had been planning to release a studio album, titled “The Lady Sings the Blues,” according to her website.Ms. Dukureh said she was from Nashville “by way of Charlotte, N.C.,” where she was born on Sept. 3, 1977. She originally planned to become a teacher and held a master’s degree in education from Trevecca Nazarene University in Nashville, according to her website (which says she also held a bachelor’s degree in theater from Fisk University, also in Nashville). She instead pursued the arts. Her powerful voice was heard on international tours with Jamie Lidell and the Royal Pharaohs, and was a featured vocalist on several albums.Her performance in “Elvis” rapidly earned her fans; among them her fellow cast members. Olivia DeJonge, who played Priscilla Presley in the film, told Entertainment Weekly that watching Ms. Dukureh “was a spiritual experience.”“To watch a star essentially be born, to have something in her sort of break free, was just — it was insane to watch,” Ms. DeJonge said.Information on survivors was not immediately available. More

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      in Television

      Taurean Blacque, Actor Best Known for ‘Hill Street Blues,’ Dies at 82

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      He received an Emmy nomination for his work as Detective Neal Washington, a character he strove to portray as something other than “that hip, jive Black man.”Taurean Blacque, the actor best known for his Emmy-nominated performance as a detective on the critically acclaimed NBC drama series “Hill Street Blues,” died on Thursday in Atlanta. He was 82.His family announced the death in a statement. It did not specify a cause, saying only that he died after a brief illness.Mr. Blacque, who began his career as a stage actor in New York, had several television appearances under his belt when, in 1981, he landed his breakthrough role: the street-smart Detective Neal Washington on “Hill Street Blues,” which drew praise for its realistic portrayal of the day-to-day reality of police work and was nominated for 98 Emmy Awards in its seven seasons, winning 26.The part of Washington, Mr. Blacque later recalled, was sketchily written, and it was his choice to play the character as quiet and reflective. “I think the original concept was that hip, jive Black man, you know,” he told TV Guide. “But I wanted to turn it around a little, give him some depth, not get into that stereotype.”Mr. Blacque was nominated for a 1982 Primetime Emmy for best supporting actor in a drama series, but he lost to his fellow cast member Michael Conrad. (All the nominees in the category that year — the others were Charles Haid, Michael Warren and Bruce Weitz — were members of the “Hill Street Blues” cast.)“Hill Street Blues” ended its run in 1987, and two years later Mr. Blacque starred with Vivica A. Fox and others on the NBC soap opera “Generations.” Probably the most racially diverse daytime drama of its era, “Generations” dealt with the relationship over the years between two Chicago families, one white and one Black. Mr. Blacque played the owner of a chain of ice cream parlors.He later moved to Atlanta, where he was active on the local theater scene, appearing in productions of August Wilson’s “Jitney,” James Baldwin’s “The Amen Corner” and other plays. He was also involved in the National Black Theatre Festival in Winston-Salem, N.C.Taurean Blacque was born Herbert Middleton Jr. on May 10, 1940, in Newark. His father was a dry cleaner, his mother a nurse.He graduated from Arts High School in Newark but did not decide to pursue an acting career until he was almost 30 and working as a mail carrier. He enrolled at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York in 1969 and, he told USA Today, “Once I found out that acting was my niche, I poured all my energies into it.”He said he chose the stage name Taurean Blacque (Taurus was his astrological sign) in part as a way to get casting directors’ attention. Eventually, after several years of paying dues, he did.Work in community theater in New York led to roles with the Negro Ensemble Company and eventually to Hollywood, where he landed guest roles on “Sanford and Son,” “Taxi,” “Charlie’s Angels,” “The Bob Newhart Show” and other TV series before being cast on “Hill Street Blues.”In addition to being an actor, Mr. Blacque, who had two biological sons and adopted 11 other children, was an adoption advocate. He was the spokesman for the Los Angeles County adoption service. In 1989, President George Bush appointed him the national spokesman for adoption.Mr. Blacque’s survivors include 12 children, 18 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.The Associated Press contributed reporting. More

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      William Hart, Driving Force Behind the Delfonics, Dies at 77

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      With hits like “La-La (Means I Love You)” and “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time),” his group pioneered the soulful Philadelphia sound.William Hart, who as the lead singer and chief lyricist of the soul trio the Delfonics helped pioneer the romantic lyrics, falsetto vocals and velvety string arrangements that defined the Philadelphia sound of the 1960s and ’70s, died on July 14 in Philadelphia. He was 77.His son Hadi said the death, at Temple University Hospital, was caused by complications during surgery.The Delfonics combined the harmonies of doo-wop, the sweep of orchestral pop and the crispness of funk to churn out a string of hits, 20 of which reached the Billboard Hot 100. (Two made the Top 10.)Almost all of them were written by Mr. Hart in conjunction with the producer Thom Bell, including “La-La (Means I Love You),” “I’m Sorry” and “Ready or Not Here I Come (Can’t Hide From Love),” all released in 1968, and, a year later, “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time),” which won a Grammy for best R&B vocal by a duo or group.Alongside Motown in Detroit and Stax in Memphis, the Philadelphia sound was a pillar of soul and R&B music in the 1960s and ’70s. More relaxed than Motown and less edgy than Stax, it drew on both the doo-wop wave of the late 1950s — especially groups like Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers and Little Anthony and the Imperials — and a slowed-down version of the funk perfected by James Brown.Mr. Hart looked to all those artists, along with songwriters like Burt Bacharach and Hal David, as inspiration. He preferred to write lyrics after the melodies were in place, working around the strictures they imposed to weave stories about heartbreak, jealousy and old-fashioned romance.“I could imagine at a very early age what a broken heart was all about,” he told The Guardian in 2007. “Being a young man, I had to put myself in that position. And I found I could just write about it. It’s like imagining what it’s like to jump off a cliff — you can write about it, but you don’t have to actually jump off that cliff.”In Philadelphia, the Delfonics became mainstays of the frequent “battles of the bands” held at the Uptown Theater, the white-hot center of the city’s soul scene, going toe to toe in satin lapels to see who could be the night’s smoothest crooners.Their reach went far beyond 1960s Philadelphia. Mr. Hart’s songs have a timeless, dreamy quality, at once emotion-laden and urbane. That’s one reason they have had second and third lives: Singers have remade them, rappers have sampled them, and filmmakers have featured them on soundtracks.The New Kids on the Block remade “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)” in 1989, taking it to No. 8 on the Billboard pop chart. Prince covered “La-La (Means I Love You)” in 1996, the same year the Fugees released a reinterpreted version of “Ready or Not Here I Come (Can’t Hide From Love),” titled simply “Ready or Not.”The next year the Delfonics and Mr. Hart experienced an even bigger resurgence when Quentin Tarantino featured “La-La (Means I Love You)” and “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)” on the soundtrack of his film “Jackie Brown” and as a plot point, using the songs’ smooth, nostalgic sound to draw together characters played by Pam Grier and Robert Forster.“I think the fact that our music is clean helps us make the crossover into the next generation,” Mr. Hart told The Philadelphia Tribune in 2008. “We sing songs that everyone of every age can enjoy. I write most of the songs, and that’s one thing I’ve always tried to do.”William Alexander Hart was born on Jan. 17, 1945, in Washington and moved with his family to Philadelphia when he was a few months old. His father, Wilson, worked in a factory, and his mother, Iretha (Battle) Hart, was a homemaker.His father gave him the nickname Poogie, which stuck with him long into adulthood.Along with his son, he is survived by his wife, Pamela; his brothers, Wilbert and Hurt; his sisters, Niecy and Peaches; his sons, William Jr., Yusuf and Champ; 11 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.William began writing songs when he was about 11 and immediately latched onto the themes of love lost and regained that would dominate his lyrics for decades.He joined his brother Wilbert and a friend from high school, Randy Cain, in a group they at first called the Orphonics, a variation on “aurophonic,” a term William saw on a stereo box. They tweaked the name to Delfonics at the suggestion of their manager, Stan Watson.Mr. Hart was still working a day job in a barbershop when a friend put him in touch with Mr. Bell, who was already well known around Philadelphia for the lush, sensual arrangements he had done for a local label.They became a hit-making duo, the Lennon and McCartney of West Philadelphia: Mr. Bell wrote the music and Mr. Hart supplied the lyrics, often almost simultaneously. Mr. Hart claimed they wrote “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)” in two hours.The original Delfonics split up in 1975, but Mr. Hart continued to perform under the name, with lineups that might or might not include members of the original group. Wilbert Hart went on to tour with his own Delfonics, even after his brother won an injunction against him in 2000.In 2002 Wilbert Hart and Mr. Cain successfully sued William Hart for back royalties. The courtroom clash didn’t prevent the three of them from occasionally reuniting, at least until Mr. Cain’s death in 2009.Mr. Hart continued to tour using the Delfonics name, his falsetto a bit weaker but his presence still commanding. He also released a number of side projects, including “Adrian Younge Presents the Delfonics” (2013), with Mr. Younge producing and Mr. Hart singing and sliding effortlessly back into the lyricist’s chair.“It’s like a blank canvas,” he said in a 2013 interview for the music magazine Wax Poetics. “I’m an artist; just give me the canvas, and I’ll paint the painting.” More

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      Jak Knight, Known for ‘Big Mouth’ Netflix Series, Dies at 28

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      Mr. Knight, who was a stand-up comedian, died on Thursday in Los Angeles, his family said.Jak Knight, a stand-up comedian, writer and actor known for his role on the animated Netflix series “Big Mouth,” died on Thursday in Los Angeles. He was 28.His family on Saturday confirmed his death in a statement that did not provide a cause of death.Mr. Knight had recently finished filming as an actor in the movie “First Time Female Director,” written and directed by Chelsea Peretti.Starting in March, Mr. Knight starred with Chris Redd, Sam Jay and Langston Kerman in the Peacock series “Bust Down,” which he also helped to create. He was also an executive producer on the HBO talk show “Pause with Sam Jay” and was nominated this year for a Writers Guild of America award for his work on the show.From 2017-21, he was a writer and producer for the hit animated sitcom “Big Mouth” and voiced the character Devon. Mr. Knight worked as a writer for the ABC comedy “Black-ish” from 2019-20. His 30-minute Netflix stand-up special aired in 2018 as part of “The Comedy Lineup” series.He was named a 2014 Comedy Central Comic to Watch, a 2015 New Face at the Montreal Just for Laughs Festival and an L.A. Comic to Watch by TimeOut in 2018.He opened for various stand-up comedians, including Dave Chappelle, Joel McHale, Eric Andre, Moshe Kasher and Hannibal Buress.Details about his surviving relatives were not immediately available.As news of his death spread, tributes to Mr. Knight appeared on social media.The comedian James Adomian said on Twitter that whenever he was performing with Mr. Knight, he knew it would be a “wildly funny night.”“He was winning big, all of it well deserved, so witty and memorable every moment on stage and off,” he wrote. More

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      David Dalton, Rock Writer Who Lived the Scene, Dies at 80

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      An early writer for Rolling Stone, he traveled in the same circles as the Beatles, Janis Joplin and other stars, witnessing and documenting a time of cultural transformation.David Dalton, who chronicled the rock scene as an early writer for Rolling Stone and brought firsthand knowledge to his biographies of rock stars from having lived the wild life alongside them, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 80.His son, Toby Dalton, said the cause was cancer.Beginning in the 1960s, Mr. Dalton showed a knack for being where cultural moments and evolutions were happening. Before he was 20 he was hanging out with Andy Warhol. In the mid-1960s he photographed the Yardbirds, the Dave Clark Five, Herman’s Hermits and other rock groups that were part of the British Invasion. He was backstage at the Rolling Stones’ infamous 1969 concert at Altamont Speedway in California. He was hired, along with Jonathan Cott, to write a book to accompany a boxed-set release of the Beatles’ 1970 album, “Let It Be.” He traveled with Janis Joplin and James Brown and talked about Charles Manson with Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys.As his career advanced, he gravitated toward writing biographies and helping celebrities write their autobiographies. His books included “Janis” (1972), about Joplin, revised and updated in 1984 as “Piece of My Heart”; “James Dean: The Mutant King” (1975); and “Who Is That Man? In Search of the Real Bob Dylan” (2012). Autobiographies that he helped their subjects write included Marianne Faithfull’s “Faithfull: An Autobiography” (1994), “Meat Loaf: To Hell and Back” (1999), Steven Tyler’s “Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?” (2011) and Paul Anka’s “My Way” (2013). He collaborated with Tony Scherman on “Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol” (2009).Lenny Kaye, the guitarist in the Patti Smith Group and a writer who collaborated with Mr. Dalton on the 1977 book “Rock 100,” said Mr. Dalton, early in his career, was among a group of writers who took a new approach to covering the music scene.From left, the actress Edie Sedgwick, the poet and photographer Gerard Malanga, Andy Warhol, Mr. Dalton, the artist Marisol and an unidentified man in 1965. Mr. Dalton was hanging out with Andy Warhol before he was 20.David McCabe“In those days of rock journalism, there was not a lot of separation between writers and artists,” he said in a phone interview. “The writers aspired to create the same kind of artistic illumination as those they wrote about.”“David got to be very friendly with many people,” Mr. Kaye added, “and I believe that helped enhance his writing style. He had a way of assuming the persona of the person he was writing about.”Mr. Dalton’s wife of 44, years, Coco Pekelis, a painter and performance artist, said Mr. Dalton fell into writing almost by accident. He had read that Jann Wenner was starting a new music magazine, Rolling Stone, in 1967 and began sending in some of the pictures of bands that he had been taking.“He was taking photographs of groups like the Shangri-Las, and Jann wanted captions,” Ms. Pekelis said by email. “So David started writing. And wrote and wrote and wrote. I asked him the other day when he knew he was a writer, and he said, when his captions got longer and longer.”Mr. Dalton assessed his voluminous output in an unpublished autobiographical sketch, explaining how his work had changed over the decades.“When I wrote rock journalism I was younger,” he noted. “I was involved in the scene as it was happening, evolving. I went anywhere at the drop of a hat. When I got into my 30s I began writing about the past and have lived there ever since.”Janis Joplin was among the many people whose biographies Mr. Dalton wrote. He also helped celebrities like Meat Loaf and Marianne Faithfull write their autobiographies.John David Dalton was born on Jan. 15, 1942, in wartime London. His father, John, was a doctor, and his mother, Kathleen Tremaine, was an actress. His sister, Sarah Legon, said that during German air raids, David and a cousin, who grew up to be the actress Joanna Pettet, would be put in baskets and sheltered under a staircase or taken into the Underground, the London subway system, for protection.David grew up in London and in British Columbia — his father was Canadian — and attended the King’s School in Canterbury, England. He then joined his parents in New York, where they had moved, and he and his sister became assistants to Warhol, Ms. Legon said, helping him edit an early film, “Sleep.” In 1966, Mr. Dalton helped Warhol design an issue of Aspen, the multimedia magazine that came in a box or folder with assorted trappings.“Coming from England at the beginning of the sixties,” Mr. Dalton wrote in “Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol,” “I encountered Pop Art with the same jolt of excitement and joy I’d experienced on first hearing the blues. I was fortunate enough to meet Andy Warhol at the beginning of his career, and through his X-ray specs I saw America’s brash, bizarre and manic underworld of ads, supermarket products, comics and kitsch brought to garish, teeming, jumping-out-of-its-skin life.”In the middle and late 1960s and the early ’70s, Mr. Dalton spent time on the East Coast, on the West Coast and in England, rubbing elbows with the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and more. In California, he spent time with Dennis Wilson, who, he said, once expressed admiration for Charles Manson.After Manson had been charged in some brutal 1969 murders, Mr. Dalton began looking into the case for Rolling Stone with another writer, David Felton.“Like most of my hippie peers,” he wrote in an unpublished essay, “I thought Manson was innocent and had been railroaded by the L.A.P.D. It was a scary awakening for me to find out that not every longhaired, dope-smoking freak was a peace-and-love hippie.”His thinking turned when someone in the district attorney’s office showed him photographs of victims of Manson’s followers and the messages written in blood at the crime scenes.“It must have been the most horrifying moment of my life,” Mr. Dalton is quoted as saying in “Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine” (2017), by Joe Hagan. “It was the end of the whole hippie culture.”For Rolling Stone, Mr. Dalton also wrote about Elvis Presley, Janis Joplin, Little Richard and others. By the mid-1970s he had moved on and was focusing on books, though still applying his full-immersion approach. For “El Sid: Saint Vicious,” his 1997 book about Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols, who died of an overdose in 1979, “I actually started to hear Sid’s voice talking to me,” he wrote. David Nicholson, reviewing the book in The Washington Post, found it compelling.“There is a certain hypnotic quality to the story that is akin to watching someone standing in the path of an onrushing train,” he wrote. “The writing throughout is graceful and intelligent, even when it is in your face.”Mr. Dalton once described his biography technique this way:“Essentially you distill your subject into a literary solution and get high on them, so to speak. Afterwards, one needs brain detergent and has to have one’s brain rewired.”Mr. Dalton lived in Andes, N.Y. His wife, son and sister are his only immediate survivors.Mr. Kaye said Mr. Dalton had been both present for a sea change and part of it.“It was a fascinating time,” he said, “and David was one of our most important cultural spokespersons.” More

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      L.Q. Jones, Who Played Heavies With a Light Touch, Dies at 94

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      His face was familiar, mostly in westerns, during a career that spanned five decades. He also directed the cult film “A Boy and His Dog.”L.Q. Jones, a hirsute, craggy-faced, swaggering Texan who guilelessly played the antihero in some 60 films and dozens of television series, died on Saturday at his home in the Hollywood Hills area of Los Angeles. He was 94.His death was confirmed by his grandson Erté deGarces.A former stand-up comic, Mr. Jones also tried his hand as a bean, corn and dairy rancher in Nicaragua and once described himself as “but several hours away from three degrees — one in law, one in business, one in journalism” at the University of Texas.But he was lured to the Warner Bros. studios when a college roommate, Fess Parker, the actor who later played both Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, persuaded him to audition for a minor role in the 1955 film “Battle Cry,” directed by Raoul Walsh and adapted from Leon Uris’s novel.Mr. Parker sent him a copy of the book and a map with directions to the Warner lot. Mr. Jones was cast in two days.Billed as Justus E. McQueen (his birth name), he made his first appearance onscreen as the movie’s narrator introduced a group of all-American Army recruits being shipped by train to boot camp. The camera then panned to a character named L.Q. Jones.“Then, abruptly, the narrator’s voice drops to the scornful tone of a 10th-grade math teacher doling out detention,” Justin Humphreys wrote in “Names You Never Remember, With Faces You Never Forget” (2006).“‘There’s one in every group,’ he tells us, as we see L.Q. mischievously giving one of the other soldiers-to-be a hotfoot,” Mr. Humphrey added. “There could have been no more perfect beginning to L.Q. Jones’s career in the movies. The word that best sums up his overriding screen persona is hellion.”The actor pirated the character’s name for his own subsequent screen credits. From then on, Justus McQueen was L.Q. Jones.Mr. Jones joined the director Sam Peckinpah’s stable of actors, appearing in “Ride the High Country” (1962), “Major Dundee” (1965) and “The Wild Bunch” (1969), in which he and his fellow character actor Strother Martin play rival bounty hunters and, as the studio described their manic competition for the highest body count, “bring their depraved characters to life with a childish energy.”Mr. Jones was also frequently seen in the stampede of westerns that arrived on TV in the 1950s and ’60s, including “Cheyenne,” “Gunsmoke,” “Wagon Train” and “Rawhide.” His films included the 1968 westerns “Hang ’em High,” in which he slipped a noose around Clint Eastwood’s neck, and “Stay Away, Joe,” with Elvis Presley. Among his other screen credits were Martin Scorsese’s “Casino” (1995) and Robert Altman’s “A Prairie Home Companion” (2006), his last film.Don Johnson and friend in “A Boy and His Dog” (1975), which Mr. Jones directed. “I hope he goes on directing,” one reviewer wrote. But he didn’t.LQ/JAFMr. Jones directed, produced and helped write “A Boy and His Dog” (1975), a dark post-apocalyptic comedy starring Don Johnson and Jason Robards, based on the book of the same name by Harlan Ellison.“‘A Boy and His Dog,’ a fantasy about the world after a future holocaust, is, more or less, a beginner’s movie. It has some good ideas and some terrible ones,” Richard Eder wrote in his New York Times review.“This is the second film directed by L.Q. Jones, better known as an actor,” Mr. Eder continued. “It is not really a success, but I hope he goes on directing.”He didn’t. “A Boy and His Dog” acquired a cult following, but Mr. Jones returned to what he did best. He preferred the independence of choosing the villainous roles that appealed to him, and that measured his success, to the prospect of directing someone else’s script and wrangling larger-than-life egos.“Different parts call for different heavies,” Mr. Jones told William R. Horner for his book “Bad at the Bijou” (1982).“I have a certain presence,” he explained. “I play against that presence a lot of times, and that’s of a heavy that is not crazy or deranged — although we play those, of course — but rather someone who is a heavy because he enjoys being a heavy.”“It’s really hard to say what they’re looking for when they pick me,” Mr. Jones said. “A lot of times your heavy is not that well presented in the script. Most times he’s too one-sided. So we look for things to bring to being a heavy: a certain softness; a vulnerability that makes him human; a quiet moment when he’s a screamer most of the time; a look; the way he dresses; the way he walks into a room.”Mr. Jones was born Justus Ellis McQueen Jr. on Aug. 19, 1927, in Beaumont, Texas. His father was a railroad worker; his mother, Jessie Paralee (Stephens) McQueen, died in a car accident when he was a child. He learned to ride a horse when he was 8.After graduating from high school, he served in the Navy, attended Lamar Junior College and Lon Morris College in Texas, and briefly attended the University of Texas at Austin. His marriage to Sue Lewis ended in divorce. In addition to his grandson, his survivors include his sons, Randy McQueen and Steve Marshall, and his daughter, Mindy McQueen.Mr. Jones seemed to measure success less by his bank account (he once described himself as “independently poor”) than by professional gratification. But he had a sense of humor about it.“I’m around somewhere, probably just counting my money,” the message on his telephone answering machine said. “When I get through, if I’m not too tired, I’ll return your call.” More

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      Monty Norman, Who Wrote 007’s Memorable Theme, Dies at 94

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      He composed the instantly recognizable melody for the first James Bond film, “Dr. No.” It has accompanied the agent on his adventures ever since.Monty Norman, who in the early 1960s reached into his back catalog, pulled out a song about a sneeze and transformed it into one of the most recognizable bits of music in movie history, the “James Bond Theme,” died on Monday in Slough, near London. He was 94.His death, in a hospital, was announced by his family on his website.Mr. Norman began his career as a singer, but by the late 1950s he was making a name for himself writing for the musical theater, contributing to “Expresso Bongo,” “Irma la Douce” and other stage shows. A 1961 show for which he wrote the music, “Belle, or the Ballad of Dr. Crippen,” had among its producers Albert Broccoli, who had a long list of film producing credits.As Mr. Norman told the story, Mr. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman had acquired the film rights to Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels at about the same time. Mr. Broccoli asked if he’d like to write the score for the first of the films, “Dr. No.” He wasn’t particularly familiar with the books, he said, and was lukewarm about the idea — until Mr. Saltzman threw in an incentive: a free trip to Jamaica, where the movie was being shot, for him and his family.“That was the clincher for me,” Mr. Norman told the BBC’s “The One Show” in 2012. “I don’t know whether the James Bond film is going to be a flop or anything, but at least we’d have a sun, sea and sand holiday.”He was struggling to come up with the theme, he said, until he remembered a song called “Bad Sign, Good Sign,” from an unproduced musical version of the V.S. Naipaul novel “A House for Mr. Biswas” on which he and a frequent collaborator, Julian More, had worked.“I went to my bottom drawer, found this number that I’d always liked, and played it to myself,” he said. The original (which opened with the line “I was born with this unlucky sneeze”) had an Asian inflection and relied heavily on a sitar, but Mr. Norman “split the notes,” as he put it, to provide a more staccato feel for what became the theme song’s famous guitar riff.“And the moment I did ‘dum diddy dum dum dum,’ I thought, ‘My God, that’s it,’” he said. “His sexiness, his mystery, his ruthlessness — it’s all there in a few notes.”“Dr. No” premiered on Oct. 5, 1962, in London. Another piece of music was vying for public attention then — that same day the Beatles released their first single, “Love Me Do” — but the Bond theme caught the public imagination too. Luke Jones, a music producer and host of the podcast “Where is MY Hit Single?,” said the theme, which regularly turned up in various ways in subsequent Bond movies, was just right for “Dr. No” and for the franchise.“The Bond theme encapsulates many key aspects of the 007 brand in a very short space of time,” Mr. Jones said by email. “That iconic guitar riff perfectly accompanies footage of Bond doing just about anything.”“It’s such a simple melody,” he added, “that children can and have been singing it to each other in the playground for decades. Then, finally, an outrageously jazzy swing-era brass section that offers all the glamour of a Las Vegas casino.”A version of the theme recorded by the John Barry Seven was released as a single and made the pop charts in England. But there was controversy ahead.Mr. Barry, then early in what would be a long career of creating music for the movies, had orchestrated Mr. Norman’s theme, but in later years he was sometimes credited with writing it, and he didn’t discourage that notion.Mr. Norman in 2001. “His sexiness, his mystery, his ruthlessness — it’s all there in a few notes,” Mr. Norman said of his 007 theme.Kirsty Wigglesworth/Press Association, via Associated PressMr. Norman sued The Sunday Times of London over a 1997 article that gave Mr. Barry credit and played down his own contributions. The article, he told a jury when the case went to trial in 2001, “rubbished my whole career.” The jury found in his favor and awarded him 30,000 pounds. Mr. Barry died in 2011.Monty Noserovitch was born on April 4, 1928, in London to Abraham and Ann (Berlyn) Noserovitch. His father was a cabinet maker, and his mother sewed girls’ dresses.When he was 16 his mother bought him a guitar, and he once studied the instrument with Bert Weedon, whose manual “Play in a Day” would influence a later generation of rock guitarists. According to a biography on Mr. Norman’s website, Mr. Weedon once gave him a backhanded compliment by telling him, “As a guitarist, you’ll make a great singer.”By the early 1950s, Mr. Norman was singing with the big bands of Stanley Black and others, as well as appearing on radio and onstage in variety shows. Later in the decade he started writing songs, and that led to his work in musical theater. He was one of the collaborators on “Expresso Bongo,” a satirical look at the music business, staged in 1958 in England with Paul Scofield leading the cast.He, Mr. More and David Heneker collaborated on an English-language version of a long-running French stage show, “Irma la Douce,” which made Broadway in 1960 under the direction of Peter Brook, who died this month. The show was nominated for seven Tony Awards, including best musical.Mr. Norman’s lone other Broadway venture was less successful. It was a musical parody he wrote with Mr. More called “The Moony Shapiro Songbook,” and the Broadway cast included Jeff Goldblum and Judy Kaye. It opened on May 3, 1981, and closed the same day.Mr. Norman’s marriage to the actress Diana Coupland ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, Rina (Caesari) Norman, whom he married in 2000; a daughter from his first marriage, Shoshana Kitchen; two stepdaughters, Clea Griffin and Livia Griffiths; and seven grandchildren. More