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      Betty Davis, Raw Funk Innovator, Is Dead at 77

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      “Nasty Gal” and her two other 1970s albums influenced generations of R&B and hip-hop.Betty Davis, the singer and songwriter whose raunchy persona, fierce funk grooves and Afrofuturistic style in the early 1970s made her a forerunner of R&B and hip-hop to come, died on Wednesday in Homestead, Pa., the town outside Pittsburgh where she had lived. She was 77.Her reissue label, Light in the Attic, distributed a statement from her friend of 65 years, Connie Portis, announcing the death of a “pioneer rock star, singer, songwriter and fashion icon.” The cause was not specified. Ms. Davis, who first recorded as Betty Mabry, got her last name from her one-year marriage to the jazz bandleader Miles Davis. The music she made in the early 1970s didn’t bring her nationwide hits, but it directly presaged the uninhibited funk of musicians from Prince to Janet Jackson to Janelle Monáe.On the three albums she released from 1973 to 1975, Ms. Davis growled, moaned, teased and rasped through songs that were lascivious, bluesy and hardheaded. She posed in lingerie, in neo-Egyptian regalia and in space-warrior garb, with her hair in a towering Afro; she performed in silvery thigh-high boots, short shorts and a bustier. The poet Saul Williams described her as “the burning secret of Black womanhood and sensuality as expressed through song.”In a 2018 interview with The New York Times, Ms. Davis said, “I wrote about love, really, and all the levels of love,” proudly including carnality. “When I was writing about it, nobody was writing about it. But now everybody’s writing about it.”In the 2000s, Light in the Attic reissued Ms. Davis’s albums with her approval.“Nasty Gal” would be her last studio album released near the time it was recorded, and she never had a certified hit. As the 1980s began, she left the music business almost completely. Yet listeners and musicians have repeatedly rediscovered her, and Davis gained ever-increasing respect as her music was sampled — by Ice Cube, Method Man and Lenny Kravitz among others — and reissued. “This lady was hip before hip was hip,” Mr. Kravitz tweeted.She was born Betty Gray Mabry on July 26, 1944, in Durham, N.C., to Henry and Betty Mabry and grew up in rural North Carolina and in Homestead. Her father was a steelworker, her mother a nurse. In the 2017 documentary film “Betty: They Say I’m Different,” she recalled listening as a little girl to the blues and rock ’n’ roll — Big Mama Thornton, Howlin’ Wolf, Elmore James, Chuck Berry — and singing along with the record player. She was 12 when she wrote her first song, “Bake a Cake of Love,” and she sang in local talent shows.As a teenager, Ms. Mabry went o New York City to study at the Fashion Institute of Technology; she brought along a notebook full of songs. She worked as a model for the Wilhelmina agency, appearing in Glamour and Seventeen magazines and as a pinup in Jet magazine. She also worked as a club hostess, and she savored the city’s 1960s nightlife and met figures like Andy Warhol and Jimi Hendrix.Her first single, in 1964, was “The Cellar.” According to Danielle Maggio, an ethnomusicologist and adjunct professor at the University of Pittsburgh who wrote her dissertation on Ms. Davis, the song was named after a private club at Broadway and West 90th Street. Ms. Mabry became its M.C., disc jockey and hostess, and the club drew artists, musicians and athletes.In 1967, the Chambers Brothers recorded one of her songs, “Uptown.” The South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela, then her boyfriend, produced a 1968 single for her, “Live, Love, Learn.”Ms. Davis with her husband, Miles Davis, at their home in New York in 1969. During their yearlong marriage she introduced him to the music of Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone, catalyzing his move into rock and funk.Baron Wolman/Getty ImagesShe met Miles Davis at a jazz club and became his second wife in 1968. A photograph of her is the cover of Davis’s 1969 album, “Filles de Kilimanjaro,” which includes a tune titled “Mademoiselle Mabry.” Ms. Davis introduced her husband to the music of Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone, catalyzing his move into rock and funk.While Mr. Davis was working on a later album, he considered calling it “Witches Brew”; his wife suggested “Bitches Brew,” the title that stuck. She also convinced him to trade the dapper suits of his previous career for flashier contemporary fashion. “I filled the trash with his suits,” she recalled in the documentary.Mr. Davis encouraged her to perform. In 1969, he produced sessions for her, choosing musicians including Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter from Davis’s quintet and Mitch Mitchell and Billy Cox from Hendrix’s Band of Gypsys. His label, Columbia Records, rejected the results, which remained unreleased until 2016.The marriage was turbulent and sometimes violent before ending in 1969. “Miles was pure energy, sometimes light but also dark,” Ms. Davis recalled in the documentary. “Every day married to him was a day I earned the name Davis.”She kept the name as she returned to songwriting. Material she wrote for the Commodores brought her an offer to record for Motown, but she turned it down because she insisted on keeping her publishing rights.Ms. Davis subsequently moved to London — where a new boyfriend, Eric Clapton, offered to produce an album for her — and then to the Bay Area, where Michael Lang, who had promoted the 1969 Woodstock festival, signed her to his label, Just Sunshine. Greg Errico, the drummer from Sly and the Family Stone, produced her debut album, “Betty Davis”; it opened with “If I’m in Luck I Might Get Picked Up” and included “Anti Love Song,” which warned, “Just as hard as I’d fall for you, boy/Well you know you’d fall for me harder.”Ms. Davis wrote all the songs on her albums, and she produced the next two herself: “They Say I’m Different” and “Nasty Gal,” which brought her to a major label, Island Records. The music and arrangements were hers; she sang each part to her band members. Her songs were aggressive, jaggedly syncopated funk that was anything but shy. In “Nasty Gal,” she boasted, “You said I love you every way but your way/And my way was too dirty for you.”But while Davis conquered club audiences, she found little traction on radio, denying her any commercial success. In 1976, she recorded another album, which included the autobiographical “Stars Starve, You Know.” The song complains, “They said if I wanted to make some money/I’d have to clean up my act.”Island shelved the album, which went unreleased until 2009, and dropped Ms. Davis. “The doors in the industry kept closing,” she said in the film. “All these white men behind desks telling me to change. Change my look, change my sound. ‘Change your music, Betty.’”In 1979, she found independent financing to make another album, “Crashin’ With Passion,” recording it in Los Angeles with musicians including Mr. Hancock, Martha Reeves (of Martha and the Vandellas) and the Pointer Sisters; it, too, went unreleased. Ms. Davis felt that the music business was done with her. In 2018, she said: “When I was told that it was over, I just accepted it. And nobody else was knocking at my door.”The death of her father, in 1980, deepened her isolation and depression. On a yearlong visit to Japan in the early 1980s, she played some club dates with a Japanese band, her last live performances. She left no immediate survivors.But as the decades passed, she was far from forgotten. In the 2000s, Light in the Attic reissued her albums with her approval, along with the Columbia sessions produced by Mr. Davis and her unreleased 1976 album, “Is It Love or Desire.” Hip-hop samples made clear how hard-hitting her productions still sounded, and the 2017 documentary brought new affirmations that Ms. Davis had been ahead of her time.“Being different is everything,” she said in the film. “It is the way forward.” More

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      Hans Neuenfels, Opera Director with a Pointed View, Dies at 80

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      A leading proponent of “director’s theater,” his productions had a provocative stamp that often provoked outrage.Hans Neuenfels, a German director and writer whose provocative, iconoclastic productions made him one of the pioneers of modern operatic stagecraft and the frequent target of audience and critical outrage, died in Berlin on Sunday. He was 80.The cause was Covid-19, his son, the cinematographer Benedict Neuenfels, said.Mr. Neuenfels was among the founding fathers, and arguably the leading exponent, of what came to be known as Regietheater, or “director’s theater,” in which the director’s vision tends to dominate the work.He abandoned performance traditions to interpret operas in light of the present, and aimed to force audiences to engage with what they saw — which they often did with riotous booing. His style earned him the title of enfant terrible of the German opera world.He came to prominence with a production of Verdi’s “Aida” for the Frankfurt Opera in 1981 that portrayed the enslaved heroine as a modern domestic servant — mop, bucket and all.“Mr. Neuenfels’s notions can be inferred from the final duet,” John Rockwell of The New York Times wrote. The temple vault in which Aida usually died turned, in this “perverse but striking” production, into “the Egyptian wing of a museum that becomes a gas chamber.”From then on, critics habitually accused Mr. Neuenfels of violating the works he directed, rather than shedding light on them.The writer and composer James Helme Sutcliffe sputtered in Opera magazine that a “La Forza del Destino” by Verdi at the Deutsche Oper in 1982 was a “coldblooded murder,” an “atrocity” that represented little more than “a puppy rubbing its master’s nose in his own excrement.”Little escaped Mr. Neuenfels’s critical eye. A former altar boy, he made religion a frequent target. In his staging of “Il Trovatore” in Berlin in 1996 Christ descends from the cross, his crown of thorns entwined with twinkling lights, to dance with colorfully dressed nuns.The soprano Karita Mattila as Fiordiligi during a dress rehearsal of a Neuenfels production of Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte” at the Salzburg Festival in 2000.  Jacqueline Godany/AlamySexual imagery became graphic and inescapable, gratuitously so to some viewers. Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte” in Salzburg in 2000 found sadomasochism latent in the drama; the soprano Karita Mattila delivered her defiant aria, “Come scoglio,” holding leashes attached to men dressed in leather, chains and dog heads. His magic flute in Mozart’s opera of that name was a 3-foot phallus.But Mr. Neuenfels’s interest in opera was genuine, and he developed a deep knowledge of it. He all but abandoned the straight theater of his training and early work for the opera house and the music that transfixed him, writing librettos for operas by Adriana Hölszky and Moritz Eggert and arranging his own “Schumann, Schubert and the Snow,” a chamber opera for the Ruhr Triennale in 2005 that set a fictional meeting of the composers to their songs.“Each libretto mainly interested me in terms of information,” Mr. Neuenfels wrote in his 2009 book “How Much Musik do People Need?” “The main thing, I said to myself, is that it seduced the composer into music.”Hans Neuenfels was born on May 31, 1941, in Krefeld in northwest Germany, the only child of Arthur and Marie (Frenken) Neuenfels. He started writing as a child, and immediately had a capacity to shock.“At the age of 9 I wrote my first poems and stories, which I read to my parents,” he told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in 2013. “I remember my father running out of the room because he didn’t like my story.” He later published a novel and made several films.Mr. Neuenfels studied at the Folkwang Hochschule in Essen from 1960 to 1964, and at the Max Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna, where he met the actress Elizabeth Trissenaar. Frequent stage collaborators, they married in 1964, the year Mr. Neuenfels made his debut as a theater director in Vienna. He had built a significant reputation by the time they jointly began an association with the Schauspiel Frankfurt in 1972, and he continued to prefer working freelance; a spell in charge of the Volksbühne, a prominent theater in Berlin, from 1986 to 1990 was troubled by financial problems.Mr. Neuenfels knew little about opera before his debut directing one (“Il Trovatore” in Nuremberg in 1974), he wrote in a 2011 autobiography, “Das Bastardbuch.” But during his cigarette-and beer-fueled preparations, he wrote, Verdi’s music “enveloped me, penetrated me, wove itself into me so that I was convinced it would run through my veins.” He saw no similar passion in the stagings he began to watch; they made opera a “senseless and purposeless undertaking,” he surmised, aiming for no broader relevance.Mr. Neuenfels resolved to change that. Four productions followed for the Frankfurt Opera, a hotbed of radicalism in the 1970s and ’80s, including the infamous 1981 “Aida.” He also directed Schreker’s “Die Gezeichneten” and Busoni’s “Doktor Faust,” showing an early taste for otherwise ignored dramas.As sympathetic critics saw, there was a certain integrity to much of Mr. Neuenfels’s work, which became more apparent as younger generations of directors became more extreme still. Mr. Rockwell wrote in 2001 that a “Die Fledermaus” at the Salzburg Festival was “in poor taste” and a “seething nest of hypocrisy, cruelty, sexual perversion and incipient Nazism,” but granted that it was “at least seriously intended.”Perhaps no production made Mr. Neuenfels’s underlying sincerity plainer than his rat-infested “Lohengrin” for the Bayreuth Festival in 2010, which, like the Patrice Chéreau “Ring” decades before it, was booed vigorously at its premiere but eventually became a beloved classic. At its last appearance in 2015, the Times critic Zachary Woolfe called it a “model of operatic direction.”Even when Mr. Neuenfels did not deliberately court controversy, though, it tended to find him.His production of Mozart’s “Idomeneo” at the Deutsche Oper caused little stir at its premiere in 2003, despite his addition of an epilogue in which the title character pulled out the decapitated heads of Poseidon, Jesus, Buddha and Muhammad.In 2006, however, the Oper canceled a planned revival. The Berlin police said the performances might pose a security risk because months earlier, a Danish newspaper had run caricatures of Muhammad, leading to worldwide protests.The cancellation provoked weeks of debate and was condemned by both Muslim leaders and Angela Merkel, the German chancellor and an opera fan, who said that “self-censorship does not help us against people who want to practice violence in the name of Islam.”Mr. Neuenfels refused to cut the scene. The performance was reinstated and passed without incident.Mr. Neuenfels noted that the fiasco showed that opera had something to say. “It’s very good,” he told The Wall Street Journal, “that a government would be moved to comment on the situation, which says something about the role of opera and art in general.”Along with his son, Mr. Neuenfels is survived by his wife and two grandchildren.In his 2011 interview with Deutsche Welle, Mr. Neuenfels was asked whether he had to wrestle deeply with “Lohengrin,” a drama that often poses problems for directors.Responding that his Wagnerian work had at one point been “almost ecstatic,” he reflected that “directing really takes you to the absolute limit — it’s almost impossible in a sense. But once you’ve gotten there, it’s a really magnificent and unique experience. Every staging should take the director to the brink of insanity.”“And then,” he added, “comes the next one.” More

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      Irwin Young, Patron of Independent Filmmakers, Is Dead at 94

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      As the head of a prominent film processing laboratory, he helped directors like Spike Lee, Michael Moore and Frederick Wiseman early in their careers.Irwin Young, who through his Manhattan film processing laboratory gave support to the early careers of directors such as Spike Lee, Frederick Wiseman and Michael Moore, died on Jan. 20 in Manhattan. He was 94.His daughter Linda Young confirmed the death, at a rehabilitation facility.Over nearly a century, DuArt Film Laboratories processed and printed studio features, documentaries, newsreels, boxing films from Madison Square Garden, network news footage and commercials. But Mr. Young, who took over the company when his father died in 1960, was best known as an ally of independent filmmakers, some of whom could not always pay for his company’s services on a timely basis early in their careers.“He was the biggest mensch in the business,” the documentarian Aviva Kempner, who produced “Partisans of Vilna” (1986) and directed “The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg” (1998), said in a phone interview. “He really cared for the subject matter you were making a film about. If you needed a favor, he was there for you.”Mr. Young deferred $60,000 in costs incurred by Mr. Moore for three years as he made “Roger & Me,” his documentary about the social damage caused by General Motors’ layoffs of 30,000 workers in Flint, Mich. Warner Bros. later paid $3 million for the rights.When Mr. Lee was a graduate film student at New York University, his films were processed and printed at DuArt. So was his first feature, “She’s Gotta Have It” (1986).“I didn’t have the money, but Irwin let me develop the film, print the dailies, and he gave me some slack; he’d say, ‘When you get the money, pay me,’” Mr. Lee said in an interview. But Howard Funsch, DuArt’s treasurer, threatened to auction the negative if Mr. Lee didn’t pay. Mr. Lee said he found the money.He added: “I don’t think Irwin knew that Howard was putting the squeeze on me. And it doesn’t detract from how Irwin believed in and supported young filmmakers.”Mr. Young had a practical side as well. He made two investments in the 1970s that helped secure DuArt’s long-term future: He acquired the 12-story building in Midtown Manhattan where the laboratory had long been located, freeing it from the whims of a landlord; and he bought a two-thirds interest in a television station in Puerto Rico, which brought in a strong flow of revenue that helped improve DuArt’s bottom line.He also oversaw DuArt’s expansion into a process that benefited independent filmmakers: blowing up 16-millimeter negatives into 35-millimeter prints, which have a better chance at being commercially viable.And he added to DuArt’s photochemical film processing business by branching into film-to-video transfers and online video editing in 1970, and into digital work, including effects, titles and restorations, in 1994.But last August, Ms. Young, DuArt’s president and chief executive since 2017, announced that its business was being shuttered because it was no longer economically viable to stay independent. Its building was recently put up for sale.Mr. Young served with various organizations that dealt with independent filmmakers, including Film at Lincoln Center, where he was president, and Film Forum, where he was chairman.In 2000, he received the Gordon Sawyer Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his technological contributions to the film industry.Irwin Wallace Young was born on May 30, 1927, in the Bronx. His father had been a film editor before he and other partners acquired a film lab that was going out of business. His mother, Ann (Sperber) Young, was a homemaker.“I used to see film processed, amazing to a child,” Mr. Young told The New York Times in 1996.The family name had been changed from Youdavich by his uncle Joe, the lyricist of songs including “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter.”After serving in the Navy, Irwin entered Lehigh University. He graduated in 1950 with a bachelor’s degree in engineering and then joined DuArt, where his roles included working in black-and-white film quality control and being part of the team that processed Eastman color negatives for the first time at any film lab. After his father died, Mr. Young became DuArt’s president and chief executive.Mr. Young’s interest in independent film was ignited when his older brother, Robert, was a producer and writer and the cinematographer of “Nothing but a Man” (1964), a feature about a Black couple dealing with racism in Alabama. Irwin Young provided all of the film’s laboratory work.“I was attracted to independent filmmakers because of their spirit,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 2003. “I came from a very political family, so I responded to a lot of their messages. We needed each other.”Mr. Wiseman needed Mr. Young’s patience when his first documentary, “Titicut Follies” (1966) — about the way patients were treated at the State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Bridgewater, Mass. — was banned by a state court on the grounds that it violated the inmates’ privacy.“I didn’t pay him for six years because all my money went into the lawsuit,” Mr. Wiseman said in an interview. “And he was always friendly and helpful about distribution; he knew everybody.”Mr. Young’s support of filmmakers led him to become an accidental preservationist: He stored their negatives, at no charge, some for decades, largely on the top floor of the DuArt building on West 55th Street. He reasoned that if he held on to the negatives, he might generate more business from making prints.But, he told The Times in 2014: “I have trouble throwing away film. We never threw anything away. It’s because we were film people.”Film cans were stacked, floor to ceiling, often without any idea what was inside or who the director was. In 2013, three years after Mr. Young closed down his traditional film processing business, a project was started to create an index of the thousands of negatives there.Mr. Young began a collaboration with the organization IndieCollect, which sends orphaned film negatives to archives such as the Library of Congress and the Motion Picture Academy; restores them; and finds new audiences for the films.“We went through 5,000 films — about 50,000 cans,” said Sandra Schulberg, the president of IndieCollect. “Irwin was happy to come up as we were doing the inventorying. Each can was like opening a locked treasure.”She said that her group found homes for 3,500 of the negatives.Negatives of films by Mr. Lee, Mr. Wiseman, Gordon Parks, Woody Allen, Jonathan Demme, James Ivory, Ang Lee and Susan Seidelman were found, as were forgotten works like “Cane River,” a 1982 love story dealing with race issues made by Horace Jenkins, an Emmy Award-winning Black director, who died shortly after the film’s premiere in New Orleans.In addition to his daughter Linda, Mr. Young is survived by another daughter, Dr. Nancy Young; his brother; and four granddaughters. His wife, Diane (Nalven) Young, died in 2004.Mr. Moore knew little about filmmaking when he began making “Roger & Me” and was told by another director, Kevin Rafferty, that he should bring his undeveloped film to Mr. Young.“He said ‘Let me develop this for you,’ and he watched the first reels and said, ‘Listen, this is incredible, I’m going to help you, and you can pay me what you can,’” Mr. Moore said, recalling his first conversation with Mr. Young in 1987. “That was almost three years: from early 1987 to 1989, up until the last print was needed to go to the Telluride Film Festival.”He added, “Without his patronage, I’m convinced there wouldn’t have been a ‘Roger & Me.’” More

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      Syl Johnson, Soul Singer With a Cult Following, Dies at 85

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      He released dozens of records on an array of labels across five decades, and his work was heavily sampled by rappers. He enjoyed a career revival in his 70s.Syl Johnson, a Chicago soul singer and guitarist who built a cult following for his raw sound on 1960s songs like “Is It Because I’m Black” and, decades later, was heavily sampled by rappers, died on Sunday in Mableton, Ga., at the home of one of his daughters. He was 85.The cause was congestive heart failure, his daughter Syleecia Thompson said.Although never a chart-topping star, Mr. Johnson was beloved by record collectors and hip-hop producers for the driving power of his songs, and for a versatile vocal style that could match James Brown’s grunting gusto or Al Green’s lovelorn keening. He released dozens of singles and albums on an array of record labels across five decades, and he enjoyed a career revival in his 70s after an exhaustively researched boxed set, “Complete Mythology” (2010), introduced his work to a new generation.Mr. Johnson was also one of soul music’s most brazen and entertaining raconteurs, entrancing fans and journalists with his braggadocio and his tales of the music business’s underside. He proclaimed himself a “multifaceted genius” and compared himself favorably to giants of the genre like Mr. Brown, Mr. Green and Marvin Gaye.Mr. Johnson in an undated publicity photo. Although never a chart-topping star, he was beloved by record collectors and hip-hop producers for the driving power of his songs and his versatile vocal style.When Mr. Johnson’s performing career began slowing down in the 1980s, he opened a seafood restaurant in Chicago, invested in real estate and found a lucrative side business seeking out his royalties. Grooves and stray growls from tracks like “Different Strokes” (1967) and “Is It Because I’m Black” (1969) had become go-to samples in hip-hop, used hundreds of times by artists like Wu-Tang Clan, Whodini, Public Enemy, Kid Rock and N.W.A; even Michael Jackson used some of Mr. Johnson’s music.For help hunting down unauthorized samples, Mr. Johnson enlisted his children and their friends.“He would tell people in the neighborhood, ‘If you find any rapper who has sampled my music, I will pay you,’” Ms. Thompson told The New York Times in 2010. “And so all the kids, we would go buy cassettes and listen to see if we could hear his ‘wow!’ and his ‘aw!’”Mr. Johnson went after those royalties, sometimes through litigation. In recent years, his targets have included Jay-Z and Kanye West, who settled a case with Mr. Johnson in 2012.“I’m sitting in the house that Wu-Tang built with their money,” Mr. Johnson told The Times.Mr. Johnson was one of soul music’s most brazen and entertaining raconteurs, entrancing fans and journalists with his braggadocio and his tales of the music business’s underside.via The Numero GroupHe was born Sylvester Thompson on July 1, 1936, near Holly Springs, Miss., the sixth child of Samuel and Erlie Thompson, who farmed cotton and corn. Samuel Thompson sang at a local church and played the harmonica, and Sylvester and his older brothers Jimmy and Mack all took up the guitar. By 1950, the family had moved to Chicago.By the late 1950s, Sylvester was accompanying blues players like Junior Wells and Jimmy Reed, and in 1959 his first single, “Teardrops,” with echoes of the R&B crooner Jackie Wilson, was released under the name Syl Johnson on the Federal label. His stage name was chosen by Syd Nathan, the impresario behind King Records, of which Federal was a subsidiary.Mr. Johnson’s brothers also had extensive careers in music. Mack Thompson, a bassist and guitarist, died in 1991. Jimmy Johnson became a prominent blues guitarist in Chicago and died on Jan. 31 at age 93.Syl Johnson released singles on a variety of labels throughout the 1960s, with limited success, before signing with Twilight Records in 1967. Songs he recorded for the label like “Come On Sock It to Me,” “Dresses Too Short” and “Different Strokes,” with their gritty funk grooves and powerful vocals, raised his profile. “Different Strokes” — whose frequently sampled opening features Mr. Johnson’s deep grunts alongside giggles from the singer Minnie Riperton — reached No. 17 on Billboard’s R&B chart. (After learning that another label already owned that name, Twilight Records eventually rechristened itself Twinight.)“Is It Because I’m Black,” written as a response to the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., added a note of bitter social commentary. “Something is holding me back,” he sang. “Is it because I’m Black?”In 1971, Mr. Johnson signed to Hi Records in Memphis, Al Green’s home, where he worked with Willie Mitchell, the label’s house producer. Mr. Johnson’s time there — his output included a cover of Mr. Green’s “Take Me to the River” in 1975 — gave him perhaps his greatest exposure, though he later said he wished he had continued to record in Chicago.Mr. Johnson in performance at the Music Hall of Williamsburg in Brooklyn in 2009.Piotr Redlinski for The New York TimesHe continued recording into the 2000s, including an album with his brother Jimmy called “Two Johnsons Are Better Than One.” But he had mostly retired from music when he was approached in 2006 by the Numero Group, a Chicago label known for its extensive research, about a reissue project. Distrustful of record companies, he rebuffed the company for nearly four years.When he finally agreed, the label produced a six-LP, four-CD monolith with crisp historical photos and detailed liner notes. The boxed set cemented Mr. Johnson’s legacy and established Numero’s credentials as an authoritative outlet.“There is no Numero without Syl Johnson,” said Ken Shipley, one of the founders of the label, which has continued to represent Mr. Johnson as the owner of his music publishing rights and most of his recordings.In 2015, Mr. Johnson was the subject of a documentary, “Any Way the Wind Blows,” directed by Rob Hatch-Miller.In addition to his daughter Syleecia, Mr. Johnson’s survivors include three other daughters, Sylette DeBois, Syleena Johnson and Michelle Thompson; a son, Anthony Thompson; two sisters, Vivian and Marva Thompson; and a number of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.Mr. Johnson could be bitter in recounting his experiences with the music industry, but in later years he often expressed gratitude for being given another chance to make his mark.“Back in the day I didn’t get the proper chance, like a lot of people,” he told The Times after “Complete Mythology” came out.“But I didn’t drop out of my dreams,” he added, “and now these people went back and picked it up and said, ‘This is gold right here, man, you missed the gold.’ And I think that once you check it out, you’ll like it.” More

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      Norma Waterson, a Key Figure in Britain’s Folk Revival, Dies at 82

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      With her familial singing group, the Watersons, and later as a solo performer, she helped revitalize traditional music from the north of England.Norma Waterson, a vaunted fixture in British folk music for decades whose familial singing group, the Watersons, helped spur the genre’s revival in the 1960s, died on Jan. 30. She was 82.Her daughter, Eliza Carthy, also a highly regarded singer and musician, announced the death on Facebook but did not say where Ms. Waterson died. She said Ms. Waterson had been in ill health for some time and was recently hospitalized for pneumonia.Ms. Waterson had a dynastic influence in British folk, not only for her work with the Watersons but also through her collaborations with the singer she married in 1972, Martin Carthy, himself a pivotal figure in British acoustic music, as well as through her joint albums and concerts with Eliza, their daughter.She formed the Watersons in 1965 with her younger siblings Mike and Elaine (who performed as Lal), along with their second cousin John Harrison. They were driven by a mission to re-enliven overlooked folk music, particularly from the northern Yorkshire region surrounding their home in Hull, England.“Whereas people in other countries are proud of their traditions, somehow here in England we got left behind,” Ms. Waterson once told the British folk magazine Fatea. “I think that England has as good a tradition as anywhere else, and I think that we should keep it alive.”The Watersons did so without vocal fuss or musical adornment. They largely performed a cappella and always took care to keep their harmonies humble.“To bring the audience in to you, instead of projecting your particular personality out to the audience, that’s the point,” Ms. Waterson said in “Traveling for a Living,” a 1965 BBC documentary about her group.Despite her ardor for traditional sounds and styles, she reached well beyond them. Her debut solo album, released in 1996 and titled simply “Norma Waterson,” featured elaborate arrangements of songs by contemporary writers like Elvis Costello and Ben Harper. On her final album, “Anchor,” a joint recording with Ms. Carthy issued in 2018, she followed a cover of Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson’s “Lost in the Stars” with “Galaxy Song,” a whimsical hymn to human irrelevance co-written by Eric Idle of Monty Python.To all her performances Ms. Waterson brought unquestioned gravitas, signaled by her deep register and enhanced by a brandy-rich tone and a vibrato that roiled like a surging sea. In an email, Rob Young, the author of “Electric Eden” (2010), a history of British folk, likened her voice to “a hand-thrown clay pot, full of character and texture.”“It never sounded trained,” he added.Ms. Waterson performing in 1999. Her profile rose in the 1990s, when her debut solo album was nominated  for Britain’s prestigious Mercury Prize.David Redfern/Redferns, via Getty ImagesNorma Waterson was born into a working-class family in Hull, East Yorkshire, on Aug. 15, 1939. Her mother died when Norma was 8. Ten days later, her father died of a stroke. Norma and her siblings were immediately taken in by their maternal grandmother, Eliza, who had belonged to the Irish Travelers, an ethnic group sometimes referred to as Irish Gypsies.Their grandmother’s imaginatively superstitious nature encouraged the children to believe in the sort of supernatural phenomena that can haunt English folk songs. Seven generations of the family had gravitated toward music, and she sang to the children, often and eagerly. “It was in the genes,” Ms. Waterson told NPR in 2001.The first group that Ms. Waterson formed with her siblings and Mr. Harrison played skiffle music, a blend of American folk music, blues and jazz that became hugely popular in Britain in the 1950s. But they soon switched to the kinds of English folk songs they had cherished in their youth.In 1965, the Watersons signed with Topic Records, which included them in a compilation titled “New Voices: An Album of First Recordings” before issuing the group’s debut album, “Frost and Fire: A Calendar of Ritual and Magical Songs.”The album showcased Ms. Waterson on the song “Seven Virgins or the Leaves of Life,” which she delivered with an authority that seemed almost otherworldly. The British music magazine Melody Maker named “Frost and Fire” folk album of the year.In that same period, the group ran Folk Union One, a club in Hull that contributed to the folk revival by presenting important artists in the genre like Anne Briggs and Mr. Carthy. After releasing their third album, “A Yorkshire Garland,” in 1968, the Watersons split, and Ms. Waterson moved to the Caribbean island of Montserrat, where she worked as a radio disc jockey.By 1972, she had returned to England, and the Watersons reunited (without Mr. Harrison.). Soon after, she fell in love with Mr. Carthy, who had been issuing his own respected folk albums since 1965. He then joined the Watersons and began releasing albums with them when not playing with important electric folk bands of the time, including Steeleye Span and the Albion Country Band. All those efforts made Ms. Waterson and Mr. Carthy British folk’s ultimate power couple.Her profile rose further in the 1990s, when her first album, recorded when she was in her mid-50s, was nominated for Britain’s prestigious Mercury Prize, alongside albums by young rock acts at the time like Pulp (which won) and Oasis. She continued to release albums either on her own or with her husband and daughter, together billed as Waterson: Carthy. But she became significantly less active in the last decade, following an illness that at one point left her in a coma, after which she had to learn to walk and talk again.Her sister Elaine died in 1998 and her brother Mike in 2011, both of cancer. In addition to her daughter, she is survived by Mr. Carthy and their granddaughters.Later in life, Ms. Waterson was buoyed by her belief that folk music would last way beyond her, so long as it evolved with the times.“We thought that we’d all get old and gray and there’d be nobody left,” she told The Guardian in 2010. “Then this new generation of young musicians came up and we all said, ‘Thank God.’ If people say traditional music has got to be ‘like that’ or ‘like that,’ you’re going to freeze it. You can’t do that with tradition. You have to hope each generation brings their own thing to it, so it keeps going forever.” More

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      Kenneth H. Brown, Playwright Best Known for ‘The Brig,’ Dies at 85

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      He drew on his own experiences in the Marines to depict brutality within the corps, drawing acclaim Off Off Broadway.Kenneth H. Brown, a New York playwright whose acclaimed 1963 Off Off Broadway play “The Brig,” based on his experiences as a Marine, portrayed dehumanization inside a military prison during the Korean War, died on Feb. 5 at a hospice in Queens. He was 85. A friend, the performance artist and writer Penny Arcade, said the cause was cancer.After growing up in Brooklyn in the 1950s as something of a street tough, Mr. Brown, eager to serve his country, enlisted in the Marines at 18. But stationed in Japan, he found himself rattled by military life and was thrown into the brig for insubordination.There, by his account, he was humiliated and abused. Guards called him “maggot”; he was punched in the gut for even minor infractions. Mornings started with garbage-can lids being banged on bunk beds, and he and his fellow inmates were ordered to jog around their claustrophobic quarters for hours until they were breathless.“I was always in trouble in the Marines,” he said in an interview with the Lower East Side Biography Project. “I went to the brig twice. The first time I did 25 days.” Of his military service, he said, “By the time I got out, I was a complete pacifist.”Back in New York, Mr. Brown worked as a bartender and studied at Columbia University on the G.I. Bill. In his spare time he wrote “The Brig,” a hyper-realistic play depicting a grueling day in the life of 10 imprisoned Marines and the guards who brutalize them.Mr. Brown, left, with Judith Malina and Julian Beck, founders of the Manhattan avant-garde troupe the Living Theater, in 1964. The company had given “The Brig” its premiere.Mr. Brown didn’t have any theater connections. But through a friend his manuscript made its way to the Living Theater, the revered avant-garde repertory company founded in the 1940s by Julian Beck and Judith Malina. They were captivated by “The Brig” and decided to produce it.“I was a guy from the neighborhood,” Mr. Brown said. “I never met people like Julian and Judith.”“The Brig” made waves when it opened in 1963 at the Living Theater in Greenwich Village.“If what happens on the stage of the Living Theater is a true representation of conditions in the brig, the president or his secretary of defense ought to order an investigation,” Howard Taubman wrote in his review for The New York Times. “Mr. Brown’s obsessive script does not spare a detail of the devastating indictment.”The play won three Obie Awards and toured Europe. Jonas Mekas directed a film version.“The Brig” became one of the Living Theater’s great successes, but it also became inextricably linked to the company because of its anarchic last performance there. During the play’s run, the authorities shut down the playhouse for delinquent taxes, but the cast and an audience broke into the padlocked theater for one final show.“The play accomplished what I wanted it to accomplish,” Mr. Brown said. “It revealed the horror of this condition, and it revealed it very clearly not through commenting on it, but doing it. Actually performing the ritual of sadism that was the Marine Corps.”A scene from the film version of “The Brig,” directed by Jonas Mekas, in 1964Harvard Film ArchiveKenneth Howard Brown was born in Brooklyn on March, 9, 1936, to Kenneth and Helen (Bella) Brown. His mother was a bank officer, his father a police officer.Growing up in the Bay Ridge section, Ken was known to brawl with youths in the neighborhood. But he also wrote poems and short stories in his teens while attending the Jesuit-run Brooklyn Prep.After the success of “The Brig,” Mr. Brown enjoyed the life of a celebrated young playwright. “I was off and running, with grants and fellowships, teaching jobs and jaunts to faraway places,” he wrote in The New York Times Magazine in 1986. “Maybe I could make a go of it in the rarefied atmosphere of literature.”But “by the time the smoke cleared,” he continued, “I was broke.”He went back to tending bar. He worked at Bradley’s, a jazz club on University Place, and helped run Phebe’s, a Bowery haunt for the downtown theater crowd. In an essay published in the Times in 1972, he wryly addressed the realities of a writer’s life in the city:“That’s right, I’m the guy who wrote ‘The Brig.’ What am I doing here running this restaurant? Well, I’ve got to pay the rent, you know. No, I can’t get any fellowships and grants. I’ve had them all, and nobody will renew them until I make theater history again. Oh, yes, you have to do it again and again.”But Mr. Brown kept writing. In 1970, he published “The Narrows,” an autobiographical novel about high schoolers growing up in Bay Ridge in the 1950s. “Nightlight,” a drama set in a bleak city apartment, was staged in 1973. “Hitler’s Analyst,” a novel about a Park Avenue psychiatrist who treats a couple who believe they are Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun, was published in 2000.Mr. Brown grew old in Bay Ridge, living in a rent-controlled apartment passed down to him by his parents, and for years he headed into Manhattan to tend bar. He kept busy writing a sequel to “The Great Gatsby” titled “Carraway,” based on the character who narrates the Fitzgerald novel. (Information on survivors was not immediately available.)In 2007, long after the Living Theater’s playhouse was closed and years after the company began moving from place to place, it settled into a new home on the Lower East Side. To Mr. Brown’s surprise, he received a call from Ms. Judith Malina, then 80, who told him that “The Brig” would be the inaugural production.The play’s revival was widely publicized, and Mr. Brown savored the triumph. But as Americans were still reckoning with reports of torture at the U.S. military prison at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, the revival was starkly timely. The coincidence wasn’t lost on Mr. Brown.“‘The Brig’ has always been relevant,” he said in an interview in 2010. “I guess as long as there’s war and as long as there’s a military and especially as long as one questions the ethical right to wage war.”“It’s going to stay relevant,” he added, “until there’s peace throughout the world.” More

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      George Crumb, Eclectic Composer Who Searched for Sounds, Dies at 92

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      Mr. Crumb wrote startling works, sometimes with political themes, and challenged musicians to employ new techniques, vocalize and move about the stage.George Crumb, a composer who filled his works with a magpie array of instrumental and human sounds and drew on the traditions of Asia and his native Appalachia to create music of startling effect, died on Sunday at his home in Media, Pa. He was 92.His death was announced by Bridge Records, his record label.While rejecting the sometimes arid 12-tone technique of Modernists, Mr. Crumb beguiled audiences with his own musical language, composing colorful and concise works that range in mood from peaceful to nightmarish. Mr. Crumb looking over one of his compositions in 2019.  “I love sounds that seem to hang in the air, and you can’t tell exactly where they’re coming from,” he once said. Jessica Kourkounis for The New York TimesHe continued to compose late in life. His 90th birthday was celebrated by organizations including the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, which presented the premiere of a new piece for percussion quintet. “The apocalypse itself seemed to be evoked in the new Kronos-Kryptos piece, whose third movement has four bass drums going full tilt at the same time,” the critic David Patrick Stearns wrote in The Philadelphia Inquirer.“Black Angels” (1970), one of Mr. Crumb’s best-known works and a reaction to the Vietnam War, was an early example of his imaginative eclecticism. It is scored for an amplified string quartet and features techniques such as tapping the strings with thimbles. A mournful fragment from Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” string quartet is interrupted by fierce bow strokes and human shouts.The grimly claustrophobic music of the first movement, “Threnody I: Night of the Electric Insects,” was deemed sufficiently scary to be used on the soundtrack for the horror film “The Exorcist.”Mr. Crumb described the piece as “a kind of parable on our troubled contemporary world.”The members of the Stanley Quartet, which premiered the work in 1970, were baffled by some of the unusual requirements and not necessarily happy to play them. Nevertheless, they went along.In 2014 Mr. Crumb, who guided their first performance, said: “They hadn’t played much contemporary music, so they were willing to do anything I wanted. And I ended up conducting, can you imagine? I felt like a fool conducting a string quartet, but it helped them keep it all together.”The piece has since entered the repertory and been championed by prominent ensembles like the Kronos Quartet.Other pieces were equally theatrical and sometimes featured ritualistic elements. A recording of whale songs made by a marine scientist inspired his “Vox Balaenae (Voice of the Whale)” for electric flute, cello and amplified piano (1971). The performers wear black half-masks; Mr. Crumb also specified that (where possible) the performance take place under blue lighting. He used various extended techniques, like strumming the piano strings with a paper clip, to create eerie sonorities.Each movement of his orchestral piece “Echoes of Time and the River” (awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1968) features processionals in which small groups of musicians move around the stage in patterns and directions specified in the score — requirements Mr. Crumb later acknowledged were rather impractical.Practicality usually wasn’t one of his primary concerns, however. As in Charles Ives’s massive Symphony No. 4, multiple conductors preside over Mr. Crumb’s “Star-Child” (1977), a major work set to Latin texts for soprano, solo trombone, children’s choir and large orchestra. A recording of the work, one of his few forays into orchestral repertory, won a Grammy in 2001.Mr. Crumb’s fascination with Federico García Lorca led to other major works. Lorca’s poetry “somehow reconciled the joyous and the tragic,” the composer said, and he set Lorca’s verse to music in four books of madrigals for soprano and various instruments in the 1960s, and later in several song cycles including “Ancient Voices of Children” (1970).Given its premiere by the mezzo soprano Jan DeGaetani, Mr. Crumb’s frequent collaborator and muse, “Ancient Voices” features a range of haunting vocal effects, sinewy oboe lines and spare sounds coaxed from Japanese temple bells, Tibetan prayer stones, mandolin, harp and toy piano.He was less prolific in the 1980s and 1990s, when he suffered a creative block, but found renewed energy after 2000. He created a series of American Songbooks, collections of arrangements of hymns, popular tunes and African American spirituals. The gentle melody of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” for example, is punctuated by uneasy percussive interjections and an array of shimmering sonorities.Mr. Crumb’s repertory for piano includes four books called “Makrokosmos,” the title inspired by Bartok’s “Mikrokosmos,” an influential series of student works of varying difficulty. The pianist is instructed to sing, shout and moan at various points in the series by Mr. Crumb.He wrote many of his works in an elaborately creative and nontraditional format. The score of “Makrokosmos II” (1973), for example, is notated in the shape of a peace sign.Mr. Crumb eschewed computer notation and even drew his own staves. The flutist Tara Helen O’Connor described Crumb’s idiosyncratic scores as “his way of expressing how the music flows through space,” adding that it “also leaves some of the magic and creativity up to the performer.”Detractors sometimes called him New Age-y or beholden to sound effects.The New York Times critic John Rockwell found fault with Mr. Crumb for at times failing to put his borrowings from other composers into a natural-sounding context, or to integrate them into his own style, or for not expressing more clearly his higher meanings.“What makes all this so frustrating is the sheer beauty and originality of so much of Mr. Crumb’s music,” he wrote in a 1983 review. “Hearing it is like trying to bask outdoors on a partially cloudy day: the sun feels wonderful when it breaks through, but it is too often obscured.”One of Mr. Crumb’s works was inspired by a recording of whale songs. The performers wore black half-masks, and he specified that (where possible) the performance take place under blue lighting.Oscar White/Corbis/VCG via Getty ImagesGeorge Henry Crumb Jr. was born on Oct. 24, 1929, in Charleston, W.Va., to George Henry Crumb, a clarinetist, and Vivian (Reed) Crumb, a cellist. Both were professional musicians who played in a local orchestra; his father taught him the clarinet.Like Ives, Mr. Crumb, who began composing around age 10, was exposed to eclectic musical styles growing up, including gospel, country, folk and pop. He was also fascinated by the sounds of the forest near his home. “I love sounds that seem to hang in the air, and you can’t tell exactly where they’re coming from,” he told The London Telegraph in 2009.He received his bachelor’s degree in 1950 from the Mason College of Music in Charleston and a master’s degree two years later from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Mr. Crumb received his doctorate in composition in 1959 from the University of Michigan, where he studied with the composer Ross Lee Finney. Mr. Crumb’s student works reflected his burgeoning interests in combining unusual sounds: he meshed Appalachian folk songs and instruments like the harmonica and musical saw with Asian influences. Mahler, Bartok and Debussy — whose use of color and timbre fascinated Mr. Crumb — were other important compositional influences.Mr. Crumb, a prominent teacher whose students included Christopher Rouse, Osvaldo Golijov and Jennifer Higdon, all successful composers, taught early in his career at the University of Colorado and at the University of Pennsylvania from 1965 to 1995. His works have been performed alongside those of his son David Crumb, a composer who teaches at the University of Oregon.Besides his son David, Mr. Crumb is survived by his wife, Elizabeth May (Brown) Crumb, a violinist; another son, Peter; and a sister, Ruth Crumb. His daughter, the actress and singer Ann Crumb, died of cancer in 2019.When asked in 1988 if he liked his own music, Mr. Crumb responded: “I think most composers like their own music. But I’m aware at the same time that in my opinion I haven’t fully realized a piece. In other words, I haven’t yet written the kind of music I would like to write in my heart of hearts. I sense that maybe that’s the human condition; maybe one never does, in fact.”Alex Traub contributed reporting. More

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      Sam Lay, Drummer Who Backed Blues Greats and Bob Dylan, Dies at 86

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      His distinctive double-shuffle groove, which he likened to “three different drummers playing the same beat,” enlivened records by Howlin’ Wolf and many others.Sam Lay, a powerful and virtuosic drummer who played and recorded with Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters, was a founding member of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and backed Bob Dylan when he went electric at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, died on Jan. 29 at a nursing facility in Chicago. He was 86.His daughter, Debbie Lay, confirmed the death but said she did not know the cause.Mr. Lay’s exuberant, idiosyncratic drumming was known for its double-shuffle groove, which he adapted from the rhythms of the hand claps and tambourine beats he heard in the Pentecostal church he attended while growing up in Birmingham, Ala.“The only way I can describe it is, you’ve got three different drummers playing the same beat but they’re not hitting it at the same time,” Mr. Lay said in “Sam Lay in Bluesland,” a 2015 documentary directed by John Anderson that took its name from an album Mr. Lay released in 1968.The harmonica player Corky Siegel, a longtime collaborator, said the double-shuffle groove was part of Mr. Lay’s broader ability to do more than keep the beat.“He just made you fly,” Mr. Siegel said in a phone interview. “He wasn’t held back by the concept of groove and time.” He added: “People think he played loud. No, he played delicate, but he used the full dynamic range, and when you do that, and you get to a crescendo, it’s powerful, like a locomotive coming toward you. But with Sam, it was like five locomotives.”After arriving in Chicago in early 1960, Mr. Lay played in bands led by the harmonica player and singer Little Walter and the singer Howlin’ Wolf, with whom he recorded songs that became blues standards like “Killing Floor,” “The Red Rooster” and “I Ain’t Superstitious.”Once, after being fined by Howlin’ Wolf for wearing pants without a black stripe on them, Mr. Lay argued that no one could see his pants behind his drum kit. When their dispute persisted, Mr. Lay pulled a Smith & Wesson gun and held it to Howlin’ Wolf’s face.Mr. Lay left Howlin’ Wolf to join the Paul Butterfield Blues Band in 1963, lured by the prospect of making $20 a gig, nearly three times what he had been earning. Led by Mr. Butterfield on harmonica and vocals, the band — which also included the guitarists Elvin Bishop and Mike Bloomfield, the bassist Jerome Arnold and the keyboardist Mark Naftalin — was racially integrated, a rarity at the time, and bought the blues to a white audience during an intense period in the civil rights movement.Bob Dylan rehearsing for his performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival with, from left, Mike Bloomfield, Mr. Lay, Jerome Arnold and Al Kooper.David Gahr/Getty ImagesThe band played at the Newport Folk Festival on July 25, 1965. Hours after their set, Mr. Lay, Mr. Arnold and Mr. Bloomfield were part of Mr. Dylan’s backup band when he stunned the audience by performing an electric set, which began with a bracing version of his song “Maggie’s Farm.”Soon after that, Mr. Dylan asked Mr. Lay to back him on the title track of his album “Highway 61 Revisited.” In addition to playing drums, Mr. Lay played a toy whistle on the song’s memorable opening. (The organist Al Kooper has said he was the one who brought the whistle to the studio).“I blew it and it sounded like a siren,” Mr. Lay told The Chicago Sun-Times in 2004. “Bob said, ‘Do that again.’ So I did it again.”Later in 1965, the Butterfield band’s first album, called simply “The Paul Butterfield Blues Band,” was released. One track, “I Got My Mojo Working,” featured Mr. Lay on lead vocal.An illness caused Mr. Lay to leave the band in late 1965.Samuel Julian Lay was born on March 20, 1935, in Birmingham. His father, Foster, a Pullman train porter who played banjo in a country band, died when Sam was 17 months old. His mother, Elsie (Favors) Lay, cleaned Pullman cars.Growing up, he listened to country music; as a teenager, he took drumming lessons from W.C. Handy Jr., the son of the composer. He dropped out of high school (which ended his dream of trying to run faster than the Olympic champion Jesse Owens) and in 1954 moved to Cleveland, where he worked in a steel mill and started to discover his musical path.One day, he stopped into a wine bar after hearing the sound of a harmonica being played by Little Walter, who asked him to sit in when he learned that he played drums. In the late 1950s Mr. Lay joined the Thunderbirds, a blues and R&B group.When Little Walter was shot, Mr. Lay helped nurse him back to health. Once in Chicago, he joined Little Walter’s band. But he didn’t stay long; he was soon hired by Howlin’ Wolf.Mr. Lay was a slick dresser who wore elaborate capes and hats and carried a walking stick. He styled his hair for a while after Little Richard’s. And he brought his windup eight-millimeter camera to clubs in the 1960s. It didn’t have sound, but he captured images of Little Walter, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Albert King, Buddy Guy and others onstage.“As soon as Howlin’ Wolf knew that a camera was watching him, you’d think he was possessed in some kind of way,” Mr. Lay said in Mr. Anderson’s documentary.Footage he shot was used in Mr. Anderson’s film and in Martin Scorsese’s 2003 public television series, “The Blues.”In 1966, after he had begun to play with the harmonica player and singer James Cotton, Mr. Lay heard from Muddy Waters that an enemy of Mr. Cotton’s, who had shot him years before, had just been released from jail and was going after him. Mr. Lay rushed to his house, got his Colt .45, drove to the club and prepared to defend Mr. Cotton.But while Mr. Lay waited for the gunman (who never came), his gun went off, he told Phoenix New Times in 1999. He shot himself in the groin.“I’m still recuperating,” he said in the interview.Mr. Lay recording at Blue Heaven Studios in Salina, Kan., a former church, in 2000.Cliff Schiappa/Associated PressIn 1969, Mr. Lay was part of the all-star band, which also included Muddy Waters and Paul Butterfield, that recorded the album “Fathers and Sons.” It reached No. 70 on the Billboard chart.Over the next 50 years, he performed with Mr. Siegel’s ensembles the Siegel-Schwall Band, Chamber Blues and Chicago Blues Reunion, as well as leading his own blues band.But the blues did not pay all of Mr. Lay’s bills. For many years, he moonlighted as a security guard.Mr. Lay was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2015, as part of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, and into the Blues Hall of Fame three years later.In addition to his daughter, he is survived by four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. His wife, Elizabeth (Buirts) Lay, died in 2017. His son Bobby died inn 2019, and his son Michael died last month.Mr. Lay did not lack self-confidence.“I don’t know nobody in the world who can follow a band as good as I can, specifically if it comes to blues and that old-time rock ‘n’ roll,” he said in Mr. Anderson’s documentary.“The secret,” he added, “is paying attention to what everyone else is playing and keeping your eyes open, and your mind.” More