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      Robert Morse, Impish Tony-Winning Comedy Star, Is Dead at 90

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      He dazzled as a charming corporate schemer in “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.” His later triumphs included a memorable role on “Mad Men.”Robert Morse, whose impish, gaptoothed grin and expert comic timing made him a Tony-winning Broadway star as a charming corporate schemer in the 1961 musical “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” who later won another Tony for his eerily lifelike portrait of the writer Truman Capote in “Tru,” and who capped his long career with a triumphant return to the corporate world on the acclaimed television series “Mad Men,” has died. He was 90. His death was announced on Twitter by the writer and producer Larry Karaszewski, who worked with Mr. Morse on the television series “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story.” He did not say where or when Mr. Morse died.Small in stature but larger than life as a performer, Mr. Morse was still a relative newcomer to the stage when he took Broadway by storm in “How to Succeed.” Directed (and partly written) by Abe Burrows, with music and lyrics by Frank Loesser, and based on a book by Shepherd Mead, the show, a broad satire of the business world, was set in the headquarters of the World Wide Wicket Company, ruled by its peevish president, J.B. Biggley (Rudy Vallee). The plot revolved around the determined efforts of an ambitious young window washer named J. Pierrepont Finch, played with sly humor by Mr. Morse, to climb to the top of the corporate ladder. Among the show’s many high points was the washroom scene in which Mr. Morse delivered a heartfelt rendition of the song “I Believe in You” while gazing rapturously into a mirror.“How to Succeed” ran for more than 1,400 performances and won seven Tony Awards, including one for Mr. Morse as best actor in a musical, as well as the Pulitzer Prize for drama. The 1967 film adaptation, with Mr. Morse and Mr. Vallee repeating their roles, was a hit as well, and the show has been revived on Broadway twice. Mr. Morse always seemed more at home on the stage than on the screen. Five years before “How to Succeed” opened, he made an uncredited and virtually unseen Hollywood debut (his face was swathed in bandages) in the World War II drama “The Proud and Profane.” With no other screen roles in the offing, he returned to New York, where he had earlier studied acting with Lee Strasberg, and where he auditioned for the director Tyrone Guthrie and was given his first Broadway role in “The Matchmaker,” Thornton Wilder’s comedy about a widowed merchant’s search for a new wife. Ruth Gordon played the title role, and Mr. Morse and Arthur Hill played clerks in the merchant’s shop. Mr. Morse would reprise his role in the 1958 film adaptation. From left, John Slattery, Mr. Morse and Nathan Lane in the 2016 Broadway revival of “The Front Page.” Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMr. Morse’s Broadway career continued with the comedy “Say, Darling” (1958), in which he played an eager young producer, and “Take Me Along” (1959), a musical based on Eugene O’Neill’s play “Ah, Wilderness!,” in which Mr. Morse was a doubt-ridden adolescent, Walter Pidgeon his sympathetic father and Jackie Gleason his hard-drinking uncle. Then came his star-making turn in “How to Succeed.”His success in that show led to movie offers, but not to movie stardom; he rarely had a screen vehicle that fit him comfortably. “The parts I could play,” he observed to The Sunday News of New York in 1965, “they give to Jack Lemmon.” When he co-starred with Robert Goulet in the 1964 sex farce “Honeymoon Hotel,” Bosley Crowther of The New York Times wrote, “It is hard to imagine good actors being given worse material with which to work.” He fared better, but only slightly, in “The Loved One” (1965), a freewheeling adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s scathing novel about America’s moneymaking funeral industry in which he was improbably cast as a British poet who finds work at an animal cemetery, and “A Guide for the Married Man” (1967), in which Mr. Morse gives a fellow husband (Walter Matthau) advice on how to cheat on his wife. Television proved more hospitable. In addition to guest appearances on various shows in the 1960s and ’70s, he co-starred with the actress E.J. Peaker in the 1968 series “That’s Life,” an unusual hybrid of sitcom and variety show that told the story of a young couple’s courtship and marriage through sketches, monologues, singing and dancing. Perhaps too ambitious for its own good — “We’re producing what amounts to a new musical each week,” Mr. Morse told an interviewer — it lasted only one season.Mr. Morse returned to Broadway in 1972 in “Sugar,” a musical based on the Billy Wilder film “Some Like It Hot” about two Chicago musicians — Tony Roberts in the part originally played by Tony Curtis and Mr. Morse, appropriately, in the Jack Lemmon role — who flee from local mobsters by dressing as women and joining an all-girl band en route to Miami. It brought Mr. Morse another Tony nomination and was a modest hit, running for more than a year.But his next show, the 1976 musical “So Long, 174th Street,” based on the play “Enter Laughing” — with Mr. Morse, still boyish-looking at just shy of 45, as an aspiring actor roughly half his age — received harsh reviews and closed in a matter of weeks. It was Mr. Morse’s last appearance on Broadway for more than a decade.He kept busy in the ensuing years, but choice roles were scarce, and he battled depression. He also had problems with drugs and alcohol, although he maintained that those problems did not interfere with his work; looking back in 1989, he told The Times, “It was the other 22 hours I had a problem with.”He starred in a number of out-of-town revivals, including a production of “How to Succeed” in Los Angeles. He was a familiar face on television in series like “Love, American Style” and “Murder, She Wrote” — and a familiar voice as well, on cartoon shows like “Pound Puppies.” But he longed to escape a casting pigeonhole that he knew he had helped create.“I’m the short, funny guy,” he said ruefully in a 1972 Times interview. “It’s very difficult to get out of that.” Eight years earlier he had told another interviewer: “I think of myself as an actor. I happen to have a comic flair, but that doesn’t mean I plan to spend my life as a comedian.”It took him a while to find the perfect dramatic showcase, but he found it in 1989 in “Tru,” Jay Presson Allen’s one-man show about Truman Capote. Almost unrecognizable in heavy makeup and utterly convincing in voice and mannerisms, he was Capote incarnate, alone in his apartment in 1975 and brooding over the friendships he had lost after the publication of excerpts from his gossipy novel in progress, “Answered Prayers.” Mr. Morse’s performance brought him his second Tony Award. A television adaptation of “Tru” for the PBS series “American Playhouse” in 1992 also won him an Emmy.Robert Alan Morse was born on May 18, 1931, in Newton, Mass. His father, Charles, managed a chain of movie theaters. His mother, May (Silver) Morse, was a pianist.In high school, Mr. Morse earned a reputation as the class clown; a sympathetic music teacher helped him transfer his energy from the classroom to the theater. He spent a summer with the Peterborough Players in New Hampshire, came to New York and, after trying and failing to get an acting job, joined the Navy in 1950. After his discharge four years later, he moved back to New York and enrolled at the American Theater Wing.Mr. Morse in an episode of “Mad Men.” “I said I’d be happy to be Bertram Cooper, chairman of the board, and sit behind a desk,” he said of being offered the role, which earned him five Emmy nominations. “It looked like the road company of ‘How to Succeed.’”Jaimie Trueblood/AMCMr. Morse’s first marriage, to Carole Ann D’Andrea, a dancer, ended in divorce. They had three daughters, Robin, Andrea and Hilary. He and his second wife, Elizabeth Roberts, an advertising executive, had a daughter, Allyn, and a son, Charles.Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Morse’s success in “Tru” guaranteed that he would no longer be thought of as, in his words, “an aging leprechaun.” A wider variety of roles followed, including, in 2016, a return to Broadway in a star-studded revival of “The Front Page.”“In the small but crucial role of a messenger from the governor’s office,” Ben Brantley wrote in The Times, “Mr. Morse, who made his Broadway debut more than 60 years ago, proves he can still steal a scene without breaking a sweat.”But for the last three decades of his life, he was mostly seen on television. He appeared in more than a dozen episodes of the 2000 CBS series “City of Angels” as the unpredictable chairman of an urban hospital. And in 2007 he came full circle when he was cast as the eccentric head of an advertising agency in the acclaimed AMC series “Mad Men,” set in the same era as “How to Succeed.” The role brought him five Emmy nominations. “I was quite elated when Matt called me and said, ‘We’d love you to do this show,’” Mr. Morse told The Times in 2014, referring to the show’s creator, Matthew Weiner. “I said I’d be happy to be Bertram Cooper, chairman of the board, and sit behind a desk. It looked like the road company of ‘How to Succeed.’”Although Bertram Cooper was a straight dramatic role, Mr. Morse got to return to his musical-comedy roots in his last episode, aired in the spring of 2014, when the character died — and then reappeared, in a fantasy song-and-dance sequence, to croon the old standard “The Best Things in Life Are Free.”“What a send-off!” Mr. Morse said. “The opportunity to shine in the spotlight that Matt Weiner gave me — it was an absolute love letter. Christmas and New Year’s, all rolled into one.”Peter Keepnews contributed reporting. More

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      Nicholas Angelich, Ocean-Straddling Pianist, Dies at 51

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      American-born and Paris-based since he was 13, he performed on both sides of the Atlantic, winning acclaim specializing in Germanic repertory.Nicholas Angelich, an American-born pianist best known for his soulful interpretations of the Germanic repertory, which he performed with elegant virtuosity and expressive intimacy, died on Monday in Paris, where he had lived since he was 13. He was 51.The cause was degenerative lung failure, according to his manager, Stefana Atlas.A soft-spoken man with a gentle demeanor, Mr. Angelich performed most frequently in Europe, but when he made appearances at American concert halls, they were almost invariably praised.Reviewing a recital at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2011, Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times wrote that Mr. Angelich’s performance of Bach, Chopin and Schumann “consistently challenged my thinking about this repertory.”“But his playing,” he added, “was so deliberate in its intentions, alternately refined and feisty, and so intriguing that I was affected and impressed.”Mr. Angelich had a particular affinity for Brahms, in particular the second piano concerto, which he performed with many orchestras and conductors on both continents. In 2016 he wrote an essay for Gramophone magazine about the piece and his relationship to it, at one point commenting: “I was more attracted to it because I had listened to it much more at home with my parents. I was very familiar with it and had several recordings I really loved.”Reviewing a performance of the concerto with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Jeremy Eichler wrote in The Boston Globe that Mr. Angelich had conjured “unusual veiled sonorities, drawing out inner lines that often go unnoticed, and dispatching rapid passagework with remarkable lightness and dynamic control.”“Pianissimos,” he added, “floated effortlessly into the hall.”Mr. Angelich also frequently performed Bach, Beethoven and Romantic composers like Schumann and Liszt, whose “Années de Pélerinage” was another of his signature pieces.But while dedicated to the core 19th-century repertory, Mr. Angelich believed musicians should be adventurous; he thought it essential that they explore varied repertory for creative growth. He performed 20th-century composers like Bartok, Messiaen, Stockhausen and Boulez and gave the premieres of music by Bruno Mantovani, Pierre Henry, Eric Tanguy and Baptiste Trotignon.Mr. Angelich receiving an honor at the Victoires de la musique classique awards ceremony in 2019 at the Seine Musicale Auditorium in Boulogne-Billancourt, outside Paris.Geoffroy Van Der Hasselt/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMr. Angelich’s own music making was notable both for its muscular power and for its delicacy. He disputed the idea that musicians tend to offer performances that are either cerebral or emotional.“There are people who say that it is one way or the other, it is either expressive or intellectual,” he said in an interview, “but I think that you need to have both. All great musicians offer that unique mix of spontaneity and thought.”Nicholas Angelich was born on Dec. 14, 1970, in Cincinnati, the only child of two professional musicians. His mother, Clara (Kadarjan) Angelich, who was Russian, attended the Academy of Music in Belgrade, where she met and married the Yugoslav violinist Borivoje Andjelitch. The couple emigrated to America in the 1960s.Clara taught piano, and her husband was a member of the violin section of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra for 46 years. He anglicized his name to Bora Angelich after arriving in America.Nicholas began studying piano with his mother at age 5 and made his debut at 7 performing Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 21. At 13, he and his mother moved to Paris so that he could study at the Conservatoire National Superieur de Musique, where he won multiple prizes for piano and chamber music. His teachers included Aldo Ciccolini, Yvonne Loriod and Michel Béroff.In 1994, Mr. Angelich won the Gina Bachauer International Piano Competition and made his New York recital debut in Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center the following year. In 2003, Leon Fleischer, one of his mentors, gave him the Young Talent Award at the Ruhr International Piano Festival in Germany. Mr. Angelich made his debut with the New York Philharmonic under Kurt Masur at Lincoln Center in May 2003, performing Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto.Mr. Angelich, a committed chamber musician, was a frequent guest at the Verbier and Lugano festivals in Switzerland. He frequently collaborated with the violinist Renaud Capuçon and the cellist Gautier Capuçon, with whom he recorded the Brahms piano trios, violin sonatas and piano quartets for the Virgin Classics label.Reviewing the trio’s performance at the Wigmore Hall in London, Martin Kettle wrote in The Guardian: “Though the French brothers provide the celebrity element, it is Angelich’s piano which is the constant in these varied programs. Angelich is a master Brahmsian.”Mr. Angelich made eight recordings for Warner Classics, including Bach’s “Goldberg Variations,” a disc of Prokofiev, Brahms Piano Concertos with Paavo Jarvi and the Frankfurt Radio Orchestra, and Beethoven’s fourth and fifth piano concertos on a historic Pleyel piano. His catalog also includes a recording of music by Baptiste Trotignon on the Naïve label.In the 2018-19 season, Mr. Angelich began his first season as soloist-in-residence with the Orchestre Métropolitain de Montreal, working with the conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, a frequent collaborator who described him on Tuesday in the Montreal Gazette as “a generous soul and a pianist like no other.” Mr. Angelich was scheduled to close the orchestra’s 2021-22 season with two concerts in June.Mr. Angelich, who died in a hospital, left no immediate survivors.In an interview in 2019 at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, Mr. Angelich explained that even when playing pieces he had performed for decades, he always studied the score again. “You will find a detail or several details which will make you understand something in a totally different way about the entire structure of the piece,” he said. “And this is something I find necessary and fascinating.” More

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      Radu Lupu, Pianist Who Awed Listeners, Is Dead at 76

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      Preferring the stage (and an office chair) to the recording studio, he enthralled audiences with ruminative performances that evoked the otherworldly.Radu Lupu, a pianist of rare refinement whose ruminative, enigmatic performances and recordings wove spells over his listeners, induced awe among his colleagues and confirmed him as one of the finest musicians ever to have graced his instrument, died on Sunday at his home in Lausanne, Switzerland. He was 76.His manager, Jenny Vogel, confirmed the death. She did not specify a cause but said that Mr. Lupu had struggled with a series of prolonged illnesses.The Romanian-born Mr. Lupu was no ordinary virtuoso. He was a conjurer of sounds, a spontaneous and sometimes eccentric player of patient lyricism and hypnotic tone, distinguished as much by his control over the ebbing of notes as by his fastidious initial touch.Uninterested in showmanship, with a wary stage presence and an allergy to public relations, Mr. Lupu shone in the music of the twilight, his rapt poetic sensibility working wonders in the shadowy ambiguities of Schubert and, above all, Brahms. The critic Fiona Maddocks once wrote that he appeared to take “aural dictation from the ether.”Quickly abandoning the dazzle of the Prokofiev Second Concerto with which he won the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition as a young musician in 1966, Mr. Lupu reportedly said that he would have liked to have made a career playing “nothing but slow movements.” He settled on a repertoire of the more reflective music of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann and Brahms, with Debussy, Franck, Janacek and Bartok among the few other composers he added in concert.“The decision has nothing to do with music I like, but rather music that likes me,” Mr. Lupu explained to The Chicago Tribune in a rare interview in 1994. “I love Chopin, but when I play it, it has always sounded like Brahms or something. I play it more for myself.”Mr. Lupu in concert at Carnegie Hall in 2008. His fellow pianist Daniel Barenboim noted Mr. Lupu’s “ability to improvise as if he was discovering what he is doing at the spur of the moment.” G. Paul Burnett/The New York TimesWhatever Mr. Lupu played, he evoked the mystical, the otherworldly. He sat on an office chair rather than a piano bench, and he leaned ever so slightly back; he seemed less to produce his sound than to elicit it, though thunder was always available for him to summon when necessary.Critics marveled at the intimacy this apparently diffident figure could create. Writing in The New York Times in 1974, Allen Hughes called it “alchemy” — “that mysterious something that goes beyond technique, erudition and general musicality to reach into the sensibilities of listeners.”Mr. Lupu’s performances did not always come off, but his was playing of such an exalted quality that it intoxicated fellow pianists: Daniel Barenboim noted Mr. Lupu’s “ability to improvise as if he was discovering what he is doing at the spur of the moment.” Mitsuko Uchida called him “the most talented guy I have ever met.”For the pianist Kirill Gerstein, hearing Mr. Lupu was an experience that approached transcendence. “The instrument, the craftsmanship, even the compositions themselves recede into the background,” Mr. Gerstein wrote in The New York Review of Books in 2015, “and there remains a lone figure communicating not just music, but something deeply humane.”Radu Lupu was born on Nov. 30, 1945, in Galati, a city on the Danube near Romania’s border with the Soviet Union. He was the only child of Meyer Lupu, a lawyer, and Ana (Gabor) Lupu, who taught French.Radu barely spoke a word until he was almost 3; as he tended to sing rather than speak to express himself, his parents gave him a piano when he was 5. He took lessons from the age of 6.“But I did not really play the piano as an end in itself,” Mr. Lupu told The Christian Science Monitor in 1970. “I made tunes on it, and from the very beginning I regarded myself as a composer. I was sure, and everybody else was sure, that one day I would become a famous composer.”He gave up composing only when he was 16, four years after his professional debut as a pianist in Brasov, Romania. He trained at the Bucharest Conservatory with Florica Musicescu, who had previously taught another cultivated Romanian, Dinu Lipatti, to whom Mr. Lupu was sometimes compared. Mr. Lupu attended the Moscow Conservatory for much of the 1960s; his professors there included Heinrich Neuhaus, tutor to two temperamentally different artists, Sviatoslav Richter and Emil Gilels.“I found even the most elementary rudiments of piano technique very difficult,” he confessed to The Monitor, “because this needed great self-discipline, and as for years I had imagined that I would one day become a composer, I had always felt that this sort of perfection wasn’t going to be needed.”Even so, Mr. Lupu placed fifth at the International Beethoven Piano Competition in Vienna in 1965 before sweeping to victory at the Cliburn finals in Fort Worth the next year. “I really do not like competition at all,” he told the press then; he nonetheless shared first prize at the George Enescu International Competition in Bucharest in 1967 and triumphed at the Leeds International Piano Competition in England in 1969.Fanny Waterman, the founder of the Leeds, recalled Mr. Lupu inviting the jury to tell him which of the Beethoven concertos to play; they declined, and he won with the first movement of the Third. He recorded that Beethoven with Lawrence Foster and the London Symphony Orchestra in 1970 — a prelude to his later complete survey of the five concertos with Zubin Mehta and the Israel Philharmonic.Despite such successes, he already struck listeners as anything but a standard-issue product of the competition circuit. “He is somewhat different from the regulation contest winner, in that he is not primarily a brilliant and impeccable technician,” Raymond Ericson wrote in The Times of Mr. Lupu’s Carnegie Hall debut in April 1967. Harold Schonberg, also in The Times, thought the Brahms First Concerto, with which Mr. Lupu returned to the hall in 1972, “willful, episodic and mannered,” but allowed that it at least had “the virtue of not being stamped from the same old cookie cutter.”Mr. Lupu, who retired in 2019, made few recordings for a pianist of his stature; he admitted to tensing up in the presence of studio and even radio microphones. A boxed set of his solo releases on Decca runs to a mere 10 discs, the last from the mid-1990s. As well as further concertos, including Mozart, Schumann and Grieg, Mr. Lupu recorded duets with the violinists Szymon Goldberg and Kyung Wha Chung, and two-piano or four-hand works with Mr. Barenboim and Murray Perahia.If Mr. Lupu’s solo records capture only a hint of the aura he exhibited in concert, his ethereality is made close to tangible on several of them, including one of Schubert’s Impromptus from 1982 that draws impossible tension from the natural flow of its singing lines; a pair of Schubert sonatas that won a Grammy Award in 1996; and a collection of late Brahms from the 1970s that is suffused with such understanding, such light and shade, that the result, as the critic Alex Ross put it, comes “as close to musical perfection as you could ask.”Mr. Lupu married the cellist Elizabeth Wilson, a fellow student in Moscow, in 1971; their marriage ended in divorce. He was married to Delia Bugarin, a violinist, for 32 years. She survives him, along with a son, Daniel, and two grandchildren.Mr. Lupu’s critics sometimes accused him of looking aloof onstage, such was his focus on the music at hand. But speaking to The Chicago Tribune in 1994, he denied that he was playing only for himself.“The audience element is the most important element in the concert,” he said. “But it is also true that if I can make music for myself, even while practicing, and be moved by it, then that will project to the audience. So it may seem I am playing for myself, but it’s not quite like that.“Why should I make a big show of the whole thing?” More

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      DJ Kay Slay, Fiery Radio Star and Rap Mixtape Innovator, Dies at 55

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      The onetime graffiti artist and New York D.J. for Hot 97 was known for breaking artists and stoking beefs that gave fuel to the careers of Nas, Jay-Z, 50 Cent and more.DJ Kay Slay, who served as a crucial bridge between hip-hop generations, developing from a teenage B-boy and graffiti writer into an innovative New York radio personality known for his pugnacious mixtapes that stoked rap beefs, broke artists and helped change the music business, died on Sunday in New York. He was 55.Slay had faced “a four-month battle with Covid-19,” his family said in a statement confirming his death.Few figures in hip-hop could trace their continued presence from the genre’s earliest days to the digital present like he could. In late-1970s New York, Slay was a young street artist known as Dez, plastering his spray-painted tag on building walls and subway cars, as chronicled in the cult documentaries “Wild Style” and “Style Wars.”Then he was the Drama King, a.k.a. Slap Your Favorite DJ, hosting the late-night “Drama Hour” on the influential radio station Hot 97 (WQHT 97.1 FM) for more than two decades before his illness took him off the air.“Cats know it’s no holds barred with me,” Slay told The New York Times in 2003, when the paper dubbed him “Hip-Hop’s One-Man Ministry of Insults.” In addition to providing a ring and roaring encouragement for battles between Jay-Z and Nas, 50 Cent and Ja Rule, Slay gave an early platform to local artists and crews like the Diplomats, G-Unit, Terror Squad and the rapper Papoose, both on his show and on the mixtapes that made his name as much as theirs.As mixtapes evolved from homemade D.J. blends on actual cassettes to a semiofficial promotional tool and underground economy of CDs sold on street corners, in flea markets, record stores, bodegas and barber shops, Slay advanced with the times, eventually releasing his own compilation albums on Columbia Records. Once illicit and unsanctioned, mixtapes now represent a vital piece of the music streaming economy, with artists and major labels releasing their own album-like official showcases that top the Billboard charts.“You were really the first to bring the personality to the mixtape,” Funkmaster Flex, a fellow Hot 97 D.J., once said to Slay during a radio interview. “That was very unusual. We were just used to the music and the exclusives.”Slay, who became immersed in drugs and spent time behind bars before making it in music, responded, “I had to find an angle and run with it.”He was born Keith Grayson in New York on Aug. 14, 1966, and raised in East Harlem. As a child, he was drawn to disco, dancing the Hustle; when early hip-hop D.J.s began turning breakbeats from those songs into proto-rap music, he traveled to the Bronx to observe and participate in the rising culture.“I had to see what was going on and bring it back to my borough,” he told Spin magazine in 2003. “So I used to hop on the 6 train and go up to the Bronx River Center [projects] to see Afrika Bambaataa and the Zulu Nation rock.”He soon took up the affiliated art forms of breakdancing and graffiti, even casually rapping with his friends. “Every element of the game, I participated in,” Slay told Flex. But street art became his chief passion, first under the tag Spade 429 and later Dez TFA, which he shortened to Dez.“I wanted a nice small name that I could get up everywhere and do it quick without getting grabbed,” he said at the time. “You’re telling the world something — like, I am somebody. I’m an artist.”Amid the city’s crackdown on graffiti, Dez took on the name Kay Slay (“After a while you get tired of writing the same name,” he said of his street-art days) and developed a fascination with turntables. “Boy, you better turntable those books,” he recalled his disappointed parents saying. But in need of money and with little interest in school, he soon turned to drugs and stickups.Kay Slay at MTV Studios in 2007. “The game was boring until I came around,” he said. Brian Ach/WireImageIn 1989, Slay was arrested and served a year in jail for drug possession with intent to sell. On getting out, he told Spin, “I started noticing Brucie B, Kid Capri, Ron G. They were doing mixtapes, doing parties and getting paid lovely.” He sold T-shirts, socks and jeans to buy D.J. equipment and worked at a Bronx facility that assisted people with H.I.V. and AIDS.“I can’t count the number of people I saw die,” he told The Times of that period. “Working there really made me begin to appreciate life.”In the mid-1990s, Slay found the professional music business still unwelcoming, and he began to call out, in colorful language on his releases, those label executives he thought of as useless. “I told myself I would be so big that one day the same people I was begging for records would be begging me to play their records,” he said.It was that irascible spirit that helped endear him to rappers who had their own scores to settle. In 2001, Slay had a breakthrough when he premiered “Ether,” the blistering Nas dis of Jay-Z that revitalized headline hip-hop beef following the murders of Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. His radio slots and mixtapes became a proving ground, and he later started a magazine called Straight Stuntin’.“He’s like the Jerry Springer of rap,” one D.J. told The Times. “All the fights happen on his show.”Slay’s gruff manner and mid-song shouts would go on to influence his contemporaries, like DJ Clue, a onetime rival, and those who followed, like DJ Whoo Kid and DJ Drama. Alberto Martinez, the Harlem drug dealer known as Alpo, who was killed last year while in witness protection, even hosted a Slay tape from prison.“The game was boring until I came around,” Slay said.He is survived by his mother, Sheila Grayson, along with his best friend and business manager Jarrod Whitaker.In Slay’s on-air conversation with Funkmaster Flex, the other D.J. marveled at the creativity of Slay’s boasts and threats — “If you stop the bank, then I’m gonna rob the bank!” — and asked his colleague if he ever regretted the shocking things he’d bellowed.“I said some foul things, man, on some mixtapes when I was not in full touch with myself,” Slay replied. “But I’m not angry at myself for doing it, because the boy that I was made the man I am today.” More

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      Kathryn Hays, Soap Star for Nearly 40 Years, Dies at 87

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      A string of TV credits, including a turn on “Star Trek,” led to an enduring role on “As the World Turns,” in which her character matured as Ms. Hays aged.Kathryn Hays, an actress who had a brief yet memorable turn in the “Star Trek” television series of the 1960s but who found enduring appeal as a stalwart soap opera star on “As the World Turns” for almost four decades, died on March 25 in Fairfield, Conn. She was 87.Her daughter, Sherri Mancusi, confirmed her death, in an assisted living facility.Ms. Hays was originally cast by the daytime drama writer and creator Irna Phillips for a six-month contract, but wound up as an integral part of “As the World Turns,” which ran on CBS from 1956 to 2010.By the end of Ms. Hays’s long run on the show, her character, Kim Hughes, had become the de facto matriarch of the drama’s fictional town, Oakdale. The character was known for her catchphrases, often calling people “kiddo” or “toots.”Ms. Hays balanced the demands of taping an episode a day with humor and close relationships on set, her daughter said, recalling that her co-stars gave her the nickname “One Take Kathy.”Ms. Hays was known to fans of the original “Star Trek” television series for the episode “The Empath” (1968), in which she played Gem, a mute alien with healing powers who rescues a grievously injured Captain Kirk (William Shatner). Her extensive screen credits included “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.,” “The Road West” and “Law and Order.”Ms. Hays often spoke about her love for the character Kim Hughes and the soap opera format in general.“I think if you look beyond soap operas, you’ll see that people like to have an ongoing story,” she told Entertainment Weekly on the occasion of the show’s finale. “They love to read sequels of books. They like to see sequels of movies.”Kim Hughes experienced standard soap opera fare on “As the World Turns,” from extramarital affairs to memory loss. But she also figured in more topical story lines. One episode, in the 1970s, touched on marital rape, an issue not often publicly discussed then.In a 2010 interview with the website “We Love Soaps,” Ms. Hays said that at the time, “I didn’t even realize that was controversial. But it was.”Ms. Hays at a 50th anniversary celebration of “As The World Turns” in 2006.Brian Ach/WireImageAs Ms. Hays aged, her character matured. Kim Hughes started out in 1972 as a stereotypical “home wrecker.” But after several marriages and countless twists and turns over the years, she and her husband, Bob Hughes, played by Don Hastings, exited the show’s 2010 finale happily married.The character, Ms. Hays said in the 2010 interview, “started one way and then turned into someone else.”“She turned into a deeper character, and that was wonderful,” she said of Kim. “She made the choice to be thoughtful of others. You saw her grow through those years.”But even the maturing of her character did not fully quell the occasional catfight that can energize a soap opera. “The thing that was great for me was knowing that if Kim got pushed too far, or too hard, she could turn around and deck you,” Ms. Hays said. “Verbally, not physically. The audience loved it.”Kay Piper was born on July 26, 1934, in Princeton, Ill., the only child of Roger and Daisy (Hays) Piper. They divorced shortly after her birth, and Kay was raised by her mother, who was a bookkeeper and a banker, and her stepfather, Arnold Gottlieb, a salesman.Ms. Hays in 1966 with her then husband, the actor Glenn Ford.Les Lee/Express/Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesKay graduated from Joliet Township High School and then went on to take classes at Northwestern University. After changing her name to Kathryn Hays in 1962, she modeled in New York and Chicago before finding work as an actress.She was married three times, to Sidney Steinberg, a salesman; the actor Glenn Ford, known for films like “The Blackboard Jungle” (1955) and a string of Westerns in the 1960s; and Wolfgang Lieschke, who worked in advertising.In addition to her daughter, she is survived by three grandchildren and one great-grandchild. More

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      Harrison Birtwistle, Fiercely Modernist Composer, Dies at 87

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      His labyrinthine, theatrical works placed him in the first rank of 20th-century English composers, though his music was often tagged as “difficult.”Harrison Birtwistle, whose intensely theatrical compositions and uncompromising modernism made him the most prominent British composer since Benjamin Britten, died on Monday at his home in Mere, England. He was 87.His death was announced by a spokesman for his music publisher, Boosey & Hawkes.Mr. Birtwistle’s granitic, earthy works revealed their secrets slowly, and their structures were labyrinthine. Dissonant, weighty and to some ears forbidding, they often dwelled on similar themes from piece to piece, interrogating kindred ideas from different angles, developing ideas touched on earlier.“I can only do one thing, and there is nothing else,” Mr. Birtwistle, who was active mainly in Europe, said in 1999.What Mr. Birtwistle did, however, he did in a unique style of indelible permanence. Reviewing “The Shadow of Night,” the critic Paul Griffiths wrote in The New York Times in 2002 that that orchestral work was “like all its predecessors: something strikingly new but heavy with echoes from the past and, indeed, the future.”“This is music made to speak now, authoritatively,” he added, “and (like little else in our time) made to last.”Myth provided much of Mr. Birtwistle’s subject material. In “Gawain,” which was given its premiere at the Royal Opera House in 1991, the legend was Arthurian. Greek sources wove a more constant thread, from instrumental works that borrowed ancient structures like the early “Tragoedia” (1965), to his most successful operas: “The Mask of Orpheus,” a massively complex expansion of the tale that won the prestigious Grawemeyer Prize in 1987, and “The Minotaur,” an unsparingly graphic work with baying crowds and a rape scene; it had its premiere at Covent Garden in 2008.“Birtwistle’s score is relentlessly modernistic, its astringency serving to underscore the opera’s violence and unremitting tension,” the critic George Loomis wrote in The International Herald Tribune.“One did not expect this crusty composer to turn mellow at 73, and he has not done so,” Mr. Loomis continued, adding that “this is not music from which one derives much sheer pleasure, but it is intently theatrical.”Mr. Birtwistle’s interests were always primarily in drama and form, whether writing for the opera house or the concert hall. His compositions tended to be deeply ritualistic, as blocks of material were etched and etched again in sounds dominated by woodwind, brass and percussion.Orchestral players were sometimes treated as if they were akin to characters in a theater. In such works as “Verses for Ensembles” (1969), “Secret Theatre” (1984) and “Cortege” (2007), instrumentalists played musical and dramatic roles, moving between ensembles and around the stage. The moving “Concerto for Violin and Orchestra” (2009-10) engaged the soloist Christian Tetzlaff in a series of duets with individual players, dissecting and reforming the genre even while extending it.Mr. Birtwistle was inescapably an English composer, taking inspiration from distant predecessors, such as the Renaissance musician John Dowland, and incorporating even old techniques like the medieval hocket. He had no time for the pastorals of more recent forerunners like Ralph Vaughan Williams, whose influence on his earliest works was quickly abandoned.Mr. Birtwistle delved instead into the more harrowing side of nature, as in his unearthly “The Moth Requiem” (2012) for female voices, and the volcanic “Earth Dances” (1986), a vast score that divided the orchestra into six bubbling, geological “strata” of instruments, each erupting over separate time scales. It was often compared to Stravinsky’s classic “Rite of Spring.”“You can find Birtwistle’s music ‘difficult’ or not, or like one piece more than another,” the composer Oliver Knussen said in “Wild Tracks,” a diary of conversations between Mr. Birtwistle and the journalist Fiona Maddocks. “But it seems to me that you can’t be indifferent to it. And that’s the mark of a great artist, I think.”Mr. Birtwhistle, right, with the Hungarian conductor Péter Eötvös in London in 1988. Some performances of his work drew heckling.Neil Libbert/Camera Press LondonHarrison Birtwistle was born on July 15, 1934, in the mill town of Accrington, England, north of Manchester. He was the only child of Fred and Madge (Harrison) Birtwistle, who together ran a bakery.Harry, as Mr. Birtwistle was universally known, trained not as a composer but as a clarinetist, taking up the instrument at age 7 and first playing in the local military band and in small theaters. At the Royal Manchester College of Music, which he entered in 1952, he played clarinet in small contemporary music ensembles, some of the work written by his fellow students his fellow students Peter Maxwell Davies and Alexander Goehr, who went onto significant careers of their own.The gritty urbanism and industrial brass of Mr. Birtwistle’s youth drew him to sounds he heard in avant-gardists like Stravinsky and Varèse, Messiaen and Pierre Boulez, who all became strong influences. (Mr. Boulez himself later conducted and recorded many of Birtwistle’s works.) But few of Mr. Birtwistle’s own early pieces survive, and his first published composition, “Refrains and Choruses,” was not given its premiere until 1959.After national service, for which he played in the band of the Royal Artillery from 1955 to 1957, Mr. Birtwistle took teaching jobs while continuing to compose. His breakthrough came in 1965, with the premiere of “Tragoedia” and the awarding of a Harkness Fellowship to study in the United States. As a visiting fellow at Princeton University he completed “Punch and Judy,” a murderous operatic take on puppet shows that premiered at the 1968 Aldeburgh Festival in England. Britten, who died in 1976, reportedly left halfway through.Following spells teaching at Swarthmore and the State University of New York at Buffalo — the latter at the invitation of the composer Morton Feldman — Mr. Birtwistle was appointed the music director of the National Theater in London from 1975 to 1983. His scores for “Hamlet,” “Volpone” and Peter Hall’s production of the “Oresteia,” among other plays, were lost.Mr. Birtwistle cemented his reputation in the 1980s with an extraordinary series of scores that included the orchestral “Secret Theatre” and “Earth Dances” as well as “The Mask of Orpheus,” a four-hour masterpiece with a libretto by Peter Zinovieff. It was so elaborate that it took its composer more than a decade to write.“For Mr. Birtwistle, there is no ‘main action,’” John Rockwell of The New York Times wrote after the premiere of “Orpheus” at the English National Opera in 1986. “He has deliberately thwarted the narrative flow, or even the epic progression, of normal opera in favor of a dizzying montage of flashbacks, repetitions, reconsiderations and parallel actions.”The music was “unrelentingly dense and driven” on a first hearing, Mr. Rockwell added. “But if one allows oneself to start accepting the opera’s gnomic conventions, its earnest search for the underlying truth behind our culture’s notions of music, poetry, sex, love and death take on an undeniable power.”Mr. Birtwistle’s work was always controversial. His “grim, raw, amorphous soundscapes make few concessions to narrow ears,” as the critic Alex Ross wrote in 1995. For the 1994 revival of “Gawain” at Covent Garden, two antimodernist composers coordinated a heckling campaign against what one called Mr. Birtwistle’s “sonic sewage.”The following year, “Panic,” a raucous work for saxophone, drum kit and orchestra, was featured in the Last Night of the Proms. Its appearance in that traditionally jingoistic ceremony caused some in the press and the public to sputter with rage.“I was treading on a sacred cow and the attendant manure,” Mr. Birtwistle later joked. He denied that his music was all that difficult, and refused the premise of questions about the accessibility of his compositions. “Panic,” he laughed, was “the nearest piece I’ve got to fun!”Mr. Birtwistle, who was knighted in 1988, married Sheila Duff in 1959. She died in 2012. He is survived by three sons, Adam, Silas and Toby, and six grandchildren.Asked by Ms. Maddocks in 2013 whether there was a continuity in his life from his childhood to his years as a composer, Mr. Birtwistle, whose gruff public persona hid a warm and witty personality, said that he had “achieved much more than I ever imagined.”“I’ve never felt I had ambitions for myself, only for my idea, and for it materializing into something worthwhile,” he added, laughing.“But I’m still here, still trying. And I’m still exactly the same.”Alex Traub contributed reporting. More

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      Paul Siebel, Singer Whose Career Was Notable but Brief, Dies at 84

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      He arrived on the Greenwich Village folk scene in the mid-1960s and drew comparisons to Dylan. But he left the music business not long after.Paul Siebel, a folk singer and songwriter who drew comparisons to Bob Dylan in the 1960s and ’70s but dropped out of the music business, hindered by stage fright and disappointed by the lack of attention his work received, died on April 5 in hospice care in Centreville, Md. He was 84.The cause was pulmonary fibrosis, his nephew, Robert Woods, said. Mr. Siebel had lived in nearby Wye Mills.In the mid-1960s, Mr. Siebel (pronounced SEE-bel) moved from the folk music scene in Buffalo to the more thriving one in Greenwich Village.“He knocked me out,” the folk singer and multi-instrumentalist David Bromberg, who backed Mr. Siebel in performances and remained his friend for decades, said by phone. “He was a great singer and songwriter. But he had the worst stage fright of anyone I ever met. If not for the stage fright, he would have continued.”Mr. Siebel, whose music was infused with a country sound, sang in a nasal voice and wrote evocative songs with strong narratives. In “Louise,” his best-known composition, he sang about the death of a truck-stop prostitute:Well, they all said Louise was not half badIt was written on the walls and window shadesAnd how she’d act the little girlA deceiver, don’t believe her, that’s her tradeLinda Ronstadt, in her book “Simple Dreams: A Musical Memoir” (2013), recalled seeing Mr. Siebel at the Cafe Au Go Go in Greenwich Village in 1969.“We saw the last part of his very impressive show made rich with his cowboy falsetto and a song about a poignant, sad girl of a certain reputation named Louise,” Ms. Ronstadt wrote.She recorded “Louise” and included it on her album “Silk Purse” (1970). It was subsequently covered by Bonnie Raitt, Leo Kottke and at least 20 other artists. Another of Mr. Siebel’s songs, “Spanish Johnny,” was recorded by Emmylou Harris and Waylon Jennings and by Mr. Bromberg.Mr. Siebel signed with Elektra Records after Mr. Bromberg set up a concert for him at the Folklore Center, in Greenwich Village, so that Peter Siegel, a producer for the label, could hear him.When Mr. Siebel’s first album, “Woodsmoke & Oranges,” was released in 1970, Gregory McDonald, a critic for The Boston Globe, wrote that it “justifies his currently being compared with Bob Dylan.” He called Mr. Siebel “the big new name in folk music.”But “Woodsmoke & Oranges” did not sell well and neither did his follow-up album, “Jack-Knife Gypsy,” released the next year.There would be only one more, a live album recorded with Mr. Bromberg and the singer-songwriter Gary White in 1978 and released in 1981.“He was very critical of himself,” Mr. Bromberg said. “After those two albums, he wrote another bunch of songs, but he destroyed them. He said they weren’t as good as the ones on the albums.”By the early 1980s, he had left the business altogether.“I started drinking, things started coming apart,” he told the magazine American Songwriter in 2011. “I guess I wasn’t getting the recognition I wanted, and without that, how can you write? And then after a while I just couldn’t go out and do those same songs again and again. I soured. It soured.”Mr. Siebel in the 1970s. “I guess I wasn’t getting the recognition I wanted,” he said of his decision to leave the music business, “and without that, how can you write?”Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesPaul Karl Siebel was born on Sept. 19, 1937, in Buffalo. His father, Karl, was a farmer and restaurateur. His mother, Dorothy (Hosmer) Siebel, was a homemaker and seamstress.Paul studied classical violin as a child and later became proficient at the guitar. After attending what is now the University at Buffalo, he served in the Army in Europe before beginning to perform on the folk circuit in Buffalo. When he moved to New York City, he supported himself by working in a baby carriage factory in Brooklyn.Robert Zachary Jr., his manager, told Dirty Linen, a folk and world music magazine, in 1996 that, before Mr. Siebel signed with Elektra, he didn’t have a telephone. “I used to have to send him telegrams, you know, to get him to come uptown and see us and talk to us or sign a contract,” he said.After Mr. Siebel walked away from the music business, he became a bread baker for a restaurant and a county park worker in Maryland.He leaves no immediate survivors.Asked in 1996 how he thought he would be remembered, Mr. Siebel said: “He was a guy who wrote a couple of pretty good songs. What ever happened to him?” More

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      Art Rupe, Who Brought Rhythm and Blues to the Mainstream, Dies at 104

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      As the founder of the independent label Specialty Records, he helped set the table for the rock ’n’ roll era by signing performers like Little Richard.Art Rupe, the founder of Specialty Records, an innovative independent label based in Los Angeles that brought rhythm and blues into the mainstream and helped set the table for the rock ’n’ roll era with singers like Little Richard and Lloyd Price, died on Friday at his home in Santa Barbara, Calif. He was 104.His death was announced by his daughter, Beverly Rupe Schwarz.Mr. Rupe created Specialty in 1946 with a niche audience in mind (hence the name). The major labels of the time, focused on mass-market pop hits, ignored the urbanized, blues-based music that appealed to Black audiences in the big cities. Mr. Rupe hoped to capitalize on this oversight by showcasing acts with “a big-band sound expressed in a churchy way,” as he put it to Arnold Shaw, the author of “Honkers and Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues” (1978).In the late 1940s and early ’50s, artists like Roy Milton, Percy Mayfield and Joe Liggins consistently put Specialty in the Top 10 of what were known as the “race record” charts until Billboard magazine began using the term “rhythm and blues” in 1949. In 1952, on a scouting trip to New Orleans, Mr. Rupe recorded Lloyd Price, then 19, singing his own composition, “Lawdy Miss Clawdy.” That record, which featured Fats Domino on piano, became the top-selling R&B record of the year and broke through to white listeners, too.Mr. Rupe hit one of rock ’n’ roll’s mother lodes when he signed Richard Penniman, known professionally as Little Richard, on the strength of a scratchy audition tape. SpecialtyThree years later, Mr. Rupe hit one of rock ’n’ roll’s mother lodes when he signed Richard Penniman, known professionally as Little Richard, on the strength of a scratchy audition tape. During a lunch break at a recording session in New Orleans, Little Richard sat down at the piano and shouted out a risqué song he used in his nightclub act: “Tutti Frutti.” With hastily rewritten lyrics, the song became one of rock’s early classics, and the first in a string of Little Richard hits that included “Long Tall Sally,” “Slippin’ and Slidin’,” “Rip It Up,” “Lucille,” “Keep a-Knockin’” and “Good Golly, Miss Molly.”“Art Rupe had a tremendous impact on rock ’n’ roll,” said John Broven, the author of “Record Makers and Breakers” (2009), a history of early rock ’n’ roll’s independent record producers. “‘Lawdy Miss Clawdy’ was really the first record to cross over and reach a teenage white audience, and then came Little Richard with ‘Tutti-Frutti’ and ‘Long Tall Sally.’ These were monumental records that almost created rock ’n’ roll in themselves.”Art Rupe was born Arthur Newton Goldberg on Sept. 5, 1917, in Greensburg, Pa., a suburb of Pittsburgh, and grew up in nearby McKeesport, where his father, David, was a salesman at a secondhand furniture store and his mother, Anna, was a music lover. After attending Virginia Polytechnic Institute and Miami University in Ohio, he moved to Los Angeles in 1939.He enrolled in business courses at U.C.L.A. with the idea of entering the film business; he also changed his last name to Rupe after being told by a relative that it had been the family’s original surname in Europe. After World War II broke out, he worked at a local shipyard on an engineering crew that tested Liberty ships.The movie business, he found, was tough to enter, and he shifted his attention to the recording industry. Responding to a newspaper ad, he invested $2,500 in a new label, Atlas Records, which lost most of his money and failed to produce hits by its two main artists, Nat King Cole and Frankie Laine.Roy Milton and His Solid Senders in a publicity photo. Mr. Milton, standing, a jump-blues singer, recorded numerous Top 10 R&B hits for Specialty.Courtesy of Colin EscottAfter selling his interest in Atlas for $600, Mr. Rupe created his own company, Juke Box Records, in 1944. “I called it Juke Box because the jukebox was the medium then for plugging records,” he told Arnold Shaw. “If you got a record into the boxes, it was tantamount to getting it on the top stations today.”Mr. Rupe was methodical. He bought $200 worth of race records and, stopwatch in hand, began analyzing musical structure, tempo and even titles to identify the common characteristics of the best-selling releases. Since the word “boogie” appeared in a disproportionate number of hit songs, Juke Box’s first record, an instrumental by the Sepia Tones, was given the title “Boogie No. 1.” It sold a more than respectable 70,000 copies, and Mr. Rupe was on his way.The jump-blues singer Roy Milton and his band, the Solid Senders, gave Juke Box its first big hit: “R.M. Blues,” released in 1945, which was said to have sold a million copies. Mr. Milton went on to record nearly 20 Top 10 R&B hits after following Mr. Rupe to Specialty, which he founded the next year after breaking with his Juke Box partners.In 1950 the pianist and bandleader Joe Liggins gave Specialty its first No. 1 hit, “Pink Champagne,” which became the top-selling R&B record of the year. Percy Mayfield, a singer and songwriter with a relaxed, swinging style who would later contribute “Hit the Road, Jack” and other songs to Ray Charles’s repertoire, topped the charts a year later with “Please Send Me Someone to Love.” Guitar Slim gave the label yet another No. 1 hit in 1954 with “The Things That I Used to Do,” one of the earliest records to put the electric guitar front and center.“Specialty was a little like the Blue Note label in jazz,” said the singer and music historian Billy Vera, who produced “The Specialty Story,” a boxed set of the label’s best sides released in 1994, and wrote “Rip It Up: The Specialty Records Story,” published in 2019. “Art was dollar conscious, but he did not let that stop him from going into the better studios and taking the time to rehearse. He took great pride and care to make quality records with quality musicians.”Specialty exerted a powerful influence on the British invasion bands of the 1960s, and even its second-tier acts had a ripple effect. Larry Williams, a New Orleans singer groomed by Specialty to fill the void when Little Richard left the music business in 1957, had solid hits with “Short Fat Fannie” and “Bony Moronie,” but even his lesser singles made an impression overseas. His single “She Said Yeah” was covered by the Rolling Stones and the Animals. The Beatles recorded three of his songs: “Bad Boy,” “Dizzy Miss Lizzy” and “Slow Down.” Don and Dewey, another Specialty act, never had a hit, but their sound greatly influenced the Righteous Brothers and Sam and Dave.Mr. Rupe, a longtime fan of gospel music, quickly made Specialty’s gospel division an industry leader, signing the Pilgrim Travelers, the Swan Silvertones, Alex Bradford, Brother Joe May and Sister Wynona Carr. Two of the label’s most famous gospel groups generated crossover stars for other labels: Sam Cooke became a pop star after leaving the Soul Stirrers, as did Lou Rawls, who recorded with the Chosen Gospel Singers.Mr. Cooke was the one that got away. In 1956, he recorded a pop tune, “Lovable,” produced by Specialty’s Bumps Blackwell with a lush background chorus and released with the singer’s name thinly disguised as Dale Cook. Mr. Rupe disliked the smooth pop treatment and let Mr. Blackwell and Mr. Cooke leave the label with the other recordings from that session in hand. One song, “You Send Me,” became a chart-topping hit and ignited Mr. Cooke’s remarkable career.“In all candor, I did not think ‘You Send Me’ was that great,” Mr. Rupe told an interviewer for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2011. “I never dreamed it would be a multimillion seller.”Mr. Rupe in 2019. He sold Specialty’s catalog in 1990 and created the Arthur N. Rupe Foundation in 1991.Rauh Jewish Archives, Heinz History CenterBy 1960, Mr. Rupe was growing disenchanted with the record business, particularly with the widespread system of payola, which required record companies to pay off disc jockeys and distributors to get their records heard.Increasingly, he let assistants like Harold Battiste, in New Orleans, and Sonny Bono, in Los Angeles, produce and market the label’s records. In 1990, he sold Specialty’s catalog to Fantasy RecordsWhile still at Specialty, Mr. Rupe invested successfully in oil and real estate and started his own oil company. In 1991 he created the Arthur N. Rupe Foundation, whose stated goals include “achieving positive social change by shining the light of truth on critical and controversial issues” and providing support for caregivers of people with dementia.In addition to his daughter — from the second of his three marriages, to Lee Apostoleris, which ended in divorce — Mr. Rupe is survived by a granddaughter; a step-grandson; and two step-great-granddaughters. His third wife, Dorothy Rupe, and three siblings died before him.In 2011, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame gave Mr. Rupe the Ahmet Ertegun Award for Lifetime Achievement, an honor given to record-company executives.“When I got into the business, few white people fooled around with this kind of music,” Mr. Rupe told Arnold Shaw. “I had no idea that it would ever appeal to so many white people.” More