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      George Ferencz, Innovative Theater Director, Dies at 74

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      He directed works by Sam Shepard, Amiri Baraka and others at La MaMa and similar theaters known for experimentation.George Ferencz, a director who was a fixture at theaters known for experimental work like La MaMa E.T.C. in Manhattan, died on Sept. 14 in Brooklyn. He was 74.His family said the cause was cardiac arrest.Mr. Ferencz (pronounced FAIR-ents) directed pieces by unknowns as well as name writers like Sam Shepard, Amiri Baraka and Mac Wellman. One specialty was giving startling new interpretations to previously staged works, both classic and contemporary. Another was infusing productions with music in unusual ways; he collaborated a number of times with the jazz drummer Max Roach.Mr. Ferencz first drew attention in the New York theater world as a founder and co-artistic director of the Impossible Ragtime Theater, known as I.R.T., which presented a wide range of productions in small spaces beginning in the mid-1970s. His 1976 staging of “The Hairy Ape,” a 1922 Eugene O’Neill play, gave that work a visceral immediacy.“The main reason one attends off-off-Broadway shows is in the one chance in a thousand of finding a production as good as the Impossible Ragtime Theater’s version of Eugene O’Neill’s ‘The Hairy Ape,’” Glenne Currie of United Press International wrote.Mr. Ferencz scored another success soon after with a more obscure O’Neill play, “Dynamo.”“If lesser plays by great playwrights are to be seen,” Mel Gussow wrote in a review in The New York Times, “then Mr. Ferencz’s productions could serve as models.”Mr. Ferencz left the I.R.T. in 1977 but continued to direct Off Broadway and Off Off Broadway, including a mini-festival of Shepard plays at Columbia University in 1979, shortly after Mr. Shepard had won the Pulitzer Prize for “Buried Child.”Two years later Mr. Ferencz mounted a full production of one of those pieces under the title “Cowboy Mouth (in Concert).” Here he revisited “Cowboy Mouth,” which Mr. Shepard and Patti Smith had written and first performed in 1971. Mr. Ferencz’s production, with Brooks McKay and Annette Kurek in the roles originated by Mr. Shepard and Ms. Smith, imagined their back-and-forth exchanges as a rock concert.“The result,” Mr. Gussow wrote in The Times, “is a sizzling, surrealistic 70 minutes that in its own stark way comes closer to the anarchic spirit of Shepard than some elaborate productions of more complete plays.”Mr. Ferencz’s collaborations Mr. Baraka included directing his “Boy and Tarzan Appear in Clearing” at the Henry Street Settlement’s New Federal Theater in 1981.The next year Mr. Ferencz began a long association with Ellen Stewart and her influential experimental theater, La MaMa, in Lower Manhattan, directing a portion of “Money, a Jazz Opera,” composed by George Gruntz with a book by Mr. Baraka. He founded La MaMa’s Experiments reading series for experimental works in 1998 and ran it for 16 years.Mr. Ferencz in 1982 with Ellen Stewart, the founder of the experimental theater La MaMa in Lower Manhattan. They had a long artistic association. Courtesy of La MaMa ArchiveMr. Ferencz directed well beyond New York’s downtown scene, staging productions at Actors Theater of Louisville in Kentucky, the American Music Theater Festival in Philadelphia, San Diego Repertory Theater and numerous other venues.“I look at the theater as a hammer,” he told The Bangor Daily News in 1979, when he was guest director for a production of Donald Freed’s “Inquest” at the University of Maine, “aggressive and highly theatrical, something you can’t get by flicking on the television switch. It has got to have spectacle and shock value.”George Michael Ferencz was born on Feb. 3, 1947, in a Hungarian Catholic neighborhood of Cleveland. His father, George John Ferencz, owned an auto-parts store, and his mother, Anne (Haydu) Ferencz, was a homemaker and a former beauty queen.He studied journalism at the University of Detroit but transferred to Kent State University in Ohio, where he pursued theater, directing plays by Edward Albee, Arthur Kopit and others. He earned a bachelor’s degree in 1970 and settled in New York soon after.In 1969 he married Pam Mitchell, who became a founder of I.R.T. along with him, Ted Story and Cynthia Crane. The couple divorced in 1978, and in 1986 he married Sally Lesser, a noted costume designer he had worked with for years; they collaborated on some 65 productions.She survives him, as does their son, Jack.In addition to his La MaMa work, Mr. Ferencz was a favorite of Crystal Field, the co-founder and artistic director of Theater for the New City.“He had the political and historical understanding that is a necessity for socially relevant theater,” she said in a statement. “He was a Brechtian director whose mission was not only to engage you emotionally, but also to make you think and think hard about the world in which the story lives.”Among Mr. Ferencz’s frequent collaborators was Mr. Roach, whom he met at a party at Mr. Baraka’s house; they joined forces in 1984 for a staging of three Shepard plays performed in repertory, with Mr. Roach providing original music. Among their later efforts was a jazz-infused version of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” staged at San Diego Rep in 1987.“George loves jazz and directs like that,” Mr. Roach, who died in 2007, told The San Francisco Examiner in 1987. “He kind of lets things unfold the way folks like Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington would do. He knows where he wants to go, but he gives everybody a chance to make a contribution.” More

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      Carlisle Floyd, Whose Operas Spun Fables of the South, Dies at 95

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      His celebrated works drew from the musical traditions of revival meetings and country hoedowns, telling stories of intolerance.Carlisle Floyd, the composer-librettist whose operas explored the passions and prejudices of the South in lyrical tales that drew on rural fundamentalism, the Great Depression, the aftermath of the Civil War and other regional themes, died on Thursday in Tallahassee, Fla. He was 95. His death was announced by his publisher, Boosey & Hawkes.Among the leading 20th-century American opera composers, Mr. Floyd is often cited with Ned Rorem, Philip Glass, John Coolidge Adams, the Italian-American Gian Carlo Menotti, Samuel Barber and others whose works have joined the standard repertory, including George Gershwin, who called his “Porgy and Bess” a folk opera, and Leonard Bernstein, whose “Candide” was an operetta.The son of an itinerant South Carolina preacher, Mr. Floyd grew up with the music of the South: revival meeting hymns, square dance fiddlers, rollicking country hoedowns and folk songs. He wrote them into many of his operas, whose plots were largely derived from classics of literature, featuring social outcasts and narrow-minded neighbors who ostracized them.Mr. Floyd said his exposure to religious bigotry early in life had shaped his operatic themes. “The thing that horrified me already as a child about revival meetings,” he told The New York Times in 1998, “was mass coercion, people being forced to conform to something against their will without ever knowing what they were being asked to confess or receive.”His best-known opera was “Susannah,” based on the Apocrypha story of Susanna and the Elders. Taken from the Book of Daniel to the Tennessee hills and rendered in Smoky Mountain dialect, it portrays a young woman wrongly accused of promiscuity and a traveling preacher who incites a mob, then seduces her. The preacher is slain by her brother, and Susannah stands defiant, holding off the mob with a shotgun.With hymns, square dances and arias simulating folk songs, “Susannah” leapt to national renown at the New York City Opera under Erich Leinsdorf in 1956. It won the New York Music Critics’ Circle Award, was entered at the Brussels World’s Fair in 1958 as an outstanding example of American opera, and over the years became a favorite of regional companies, one of the most performed operas of the American musical stage.Other notable Floyd operas included “Of Mice and Men,” his adaptation of John Steinbeck’s story of two tragic migrant farm workers in the Dust Bowl; “Willie Stark,” his treatment of Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men,” about a ruthless politician modeled on Louisiana’s Huey P. Long; and “The Passion of Jonathan Wade,” about a Reconstruction-era love affair destroyed by intolerance and hate.American audiences flocked to regional performances of Mr. Floyd’s work, especially “Susannah” and “Of Mice and Men.” But New York critics were negative about his music, if not his storytelling. In 1999, four decades and some 800 regional performances after it opened, “Susannah” was finally performed at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Valhalla of grand opera in America.Renee Fleming as Susannah Polk and Samuel Ramey as Olin Blitch in the Met Opera’s 1999 production of “Susannah,” composer Carlisle Floyd’s best-known work.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Amiable, direct, wholly without guile, Carlisle Floyd’s American heroine and the work that bears her name arrived at the halls of grand opera on Wednesday night, looking like some lonely tourist lost in the vastness of Grand Central Terminal,” Bernard Holland wrote in The Times.He added: “The piece is perfect in size and difficulty for the regional opera house or the amateur production, but lesser singing, I suspect, reveals its thinness even more. Mr. Floyd has a nice way with hoedowns, countrified modal melody and drumroll crescendos, but there is amazingly little going on at the musical end of this opera.”Other critics disparaged his operas as narrowly drawn. But Mr. Floyd insisted that his stories reflected larger realities and that his characters — insular people fearful of outsiders and anyone different — were universal. And he scoffed at perceptions of his music as folk opera, implying that its tonal country sounds were naïve.“A lot of critics don’t like to acknowledge that there are no absolutes in taste, which is intensely personal and which governs a composer’s choice of idiom,” he told Opera News in 1999.Mr. Floyd’s “Of Mice and Men,” based on the John Steinbeck novel, at the New York City Opera in 2003. From left: Rod Nelman as George Milton, Anthony Dean Griffey as Lennie Small and Peter Strummer as Candy.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMr. Floyd never sought to join the New York-Northeast musical establishment. He devoted much of his life to teaching, starting at Florida State University in 1947, and over 30 years wrote most of his operas in Tallahassee. From 1976 to 1996, he was a professor at the University of Houston, where he wrote several of his last operas, including “Cold Sassy Tree,” based on a novel by Olive Ann Burns about the romance between an aging widower and a young northerner that scandalizes a small Georgia town.His last opera, “Prince of Players,” was premiered by the Houston Grand Opera in March 2016, months before his 90th birthday, and was performed by the Little Opera Theater of New York at Hunter College in February 2017.Adapted from a Jeffrey Hatcher play (and subsequent 2004 film) about Edward Kynaston, one of the last actors of Restoration England to play female roles, “Prince of Players” centers on Kynaston’s crisis in 1661, when Charles II declares that all female roles on London stages must be played by women.Reviewing the Houston production, Opera News said it revealed “Floyd’s deep understanding and sympathy for issues that pervade our culture today — the complexities and subtleties of gender identity, sexual preference and their social consequences — played out in a story from 17th-century England.”Anthony Tommasini, in a review of the New York production for The Times, said: “It’s miraculous that a composer whose reputation dates to his 1955 ‘Susannah,’ one of the most performed American operas, is still working with assurance and skill.”Carlisle Sessions Floyd was born in Latta, S.C., on June 11, 1926, one of two children of Carlisle and Ida (Fenegan) Floyd. He and his sister, Ermine, were schooled in a succession of South Carolina towns where their father was a Methodist preacher. Their mother nurtured Carlisle’s creative instincts, giving him piano lessons and encouraging him to write short stories.After graduating from high school in North, S.C., he entered Converse College in Spartanburg in 1943. He studied music and piano under the composer Ernst Bacon. In 1945, when Mr. Bacon became director of the music school at Syracuse University, Mr. Floyd followed him there and earned a bachelor’s degree in music in 1946.He began teaching at Florida State and was soon composing. In 1949, he earned a master’s degree at Syracuse. His first two operas sputtered, but “Susannah,” his third, thrived. It opened at Florida State in 1955, and its New York City Opera premiere was hailed a year later. Ronald Eyer, in Tempo, called it an “unadorned story of malice, hypocrisy and tragedy of almost scriptural simplicity.”In 1957, Mr. Floyd married Margery Kay Reeder. She died in 2010. No immediate family members survive.Mr. Floyd’s only non-American subject, an interpretation of Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights,” premiered at the Santa Fe Opera in 1958.After a long gestation, “Of Mice and Men” opened at the Seattle Opera in 1970. It was widely performed by regional repertory companies. But when it finally landed at the New York City Opera in 1983, Donal Henahan of The Times said it “failed ultimately because it is a feeble score too dependent on gray declamatory lines and melodramatic clichés of the sort that no longer turn up even in television serials.”Composer/librettist Carlisle Floyd, right, talks with conductor Patrick Summers about the music for Floyd’s upcoming opera “Cold Sassy Tree” during rehearsals Thursday, April 6, 2000, in Houston. “Cold Sassy Tree,” set to open Friday, April 14 in Houston, is Floyd’s latest and perhaps final opera.BRETT COOMER/Associated PressIn 1999, David Gockley, then general director of the Houston Grand Opera and a longtime admirer of Mr. Floyd’s work, told Opera News that New York reviewers were unfair to composers like Mr. Floyd.“Carlisle Floyd is America’s foremost opera composer,” Mr. Gockley was quoted as saying. “If you’re not part of the Northeastern establishment, specifically the New York scene, you have no status. Because Floyd always lived and taught in Florida or Houston, he has been regarded as a regional figure, when in fact he is a national one.”Mr. Floyd, who lived in Tallahassee, received the National Medal of Arts from President George W. Bush at the White House in 2004. In 2008 he was named, along with the conductor James Levine and the soprano Leontyne Price, as among the first honorees of the National Endowment for the Arts for lifetime achievement in opera.“Falling Up: The Days and Nights of Carlisle Floyd, the Authorized Biography” by Thomas Holliday, was published in 2013. More

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      George Frayne, a.k.a. Commander Cody, Alt-Country Pioneer, Dies at 77

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      With his band the Lost Planet Airmen, he infused older genres like Western swing and boogie-woogie with a freewheeling 1960s spirit and attracted a devoted following.George Frayne, who as the frontman for the band Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen melded Western swing, jump blues, rockabilly and boogie-woogie with a freewheeling 1960s ethos to pave the way for generations of roots-rock, Americana and alt-country musicians, died on Sunday at his home in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. He was 77.John Tichy, one of the band’s original members, who is now a professor of engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, said the cause was esophageal cancer.Though the band lasted only a decade and had just one Top 10 hit, Mr. Frayne’s charisma and raucous onstage presence — as well as the Airmen’s genre-busting sound — made them a cult favorite in 1970s music meccas like the San Francisco area and Austin, Texas.Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen was not the only rock band exploring country music in the early 1970s. The Eagles, New Riders of the Purple Sage, Poco and others mined a similar vein and were more commercially successful. But fans, and especially other musicians, took to the Airmen’s raw authenticity, their craftsmanship and their exuberant love for the music they were making — or, in many cases, remaking.“He said, ‘We’re gonna reach back and get this great old music and infuse it with a ’60s and ’70s spirit,’” Ray Benson, the frontman for Asleep at the Wheel, one of the many bands inspired by Mr. Frayne, said in a phone interview. “He saw the craft and beauty of things America had left behind.”Mr. Frayne and his band were more comfortable onstage than in the recording studio. They often performed 200 or more shows a year, and they were widely considered one of the best live bands in America; their album “Live From Deep in the Heart of Texas” (1974), recorded at Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin, was once ranked by Rolling Stone as one of the top 100 albums of all time.“He was a comic-book character come to life,” Mr. Benson said of Mr. Frayne. “He looked the part of the wild man, chomping on a cigar and banging on a piano. But he was also an artist, who happened to use the band as a way to express a much bigger picture.”Mr. Frayne in performance with a later version of the Lost Planet Airmen in 2016.John Atashian/Getty ImagesGeorge William Frayne IV was born on July 19, 1944, in Boise, Idaho, where his father, George III, was stationed as a pilot during World War II. Soon afterward the family moved to Brooklyn, where his father and his mother, Katherine (Jones) Frayne, were both artists. The family later moved to Bay Shore on Long Island, near Jones Beach, where George worked summers as a lifeguard.Mr. Frayne’s first marriage, to Sara Rice, ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, Sue Casanova, and his stepdaughter, Sophia Casanova.Having learned to play boogie-woogie piano while at the University of Michigan, Mr. Frayne used his musical talent to make beer money, joining a series of bands hired to play frat-house parties. He soon fell in with a group of musicians, including Dr. Tichy, who played guitar, and who introduced Mr. Frayne to classic country, especially the Western swing of Bob Wills and the Bakersfield sound of Buck Owens.Both Mr. Frayne and Dr. Tichy stayed at Michigan for graduate school and continued to play in clubs around Ann Arbor. Although they offered throwback country to students otherwise keen on protest songs, they were a hit. They just needed a name.Mr. Frayne was a big fan of old westerns, especially weird ones like the 1935 serial “The Phantom Empire,” in which Gene Autry discovers an underground civilization. Something about sci-fi and retro country clicked for him. He took the stage name Commander Cody, after Commando Cody, the hero of two 1950s serials, and named his band after the 1951 movie “Lost Planet Airmen.”He received his master’s degree in sculpture and painting in 1968 and that fall began teaching at Wisconsin State College-Oshkosh, today the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. But he was restless; he flew back to Ann Arbor on weekends for gigs, and when Bill Kirchen, the lead guitarist for the Lost Planet Airmen, moved to Berkeley and encouraged the rest to follow, Mr. Frayne quit academia and headed west.The San Francisco scene was still in the thrall of acid rock, but the East Bay was more eclectic. Soon the band was opening for acts like the Grateful Dead and later Led Zeppelin and Alice Cooper.The Lost Planet Airmen grew to eight core members, several of them sharing lead-singer duties; there would often be 20 or more others onstage, dancing, playing kazoo and even, at certain adults-only shows, stripping. Their music was bright and up-tempo, centered on Mr. Frayne, who sat — or just as often stood — at his piano, longhaired and shirtless, pounding beers and keys.A 1970 profile in Rolling Stone, a year before the band released its first album, called Commander Cody and His Lost Airmen “one of the very best unknown rock ‘n’ roll bands in America today.”At first the Lost Airmen’s rockin’ country didn’t really fit in anywhere — neither in the post-hippie Bay Area nor in Nashville, where they were booed off the stage at a 1973 concert, the crowd yelling “Get a haircut!”“We didn’t think of appealing to anybody,” Mr. Frayne told Rolling Stone. “We were just having a good time, picking and playing and making a few dollars on the side.”In 1971 the band released its first album, “Lost in the Ozone.” It spawned a surprise hit single, a cover of Charlie Ryan’s 1955 rockabilly song “Hot Rod Lincoln,” with Mr. Frayne speed-talking through the lyrics:They arrested me and they put me in jailAnd called my pappy to throw my bail.And he said, “Son, you’re gonna’ drive me to drinkin’If you don’t stop drivin’ that hot … rod … Lincoln!It was that song, and the band’s frequent trips to Austin, that allowed them room to find their place, nestling in among the seekers and weirdos piling into the city and building its music scene.“They were plowing new turf, even if they were doing it with heritage seeds,” the Austin journalist Joe Nick Patoski said in an interview.But the success of “Hot Rod Lincoln” haunted them, especially when they tried to reach too far beyond their fan base.“Their success got them pigeonholed as a novelty band, and so the suits at the record company were looking for the next ‘Hot Rod Lincoln,’” Mr. Patoski said.In 1974 they signed with Warner Bros. Records, but the relentless pressure to produce new music, and the band’s lackluster album sales, eventually broke them apart — a story documented in the 1976 book “Starmaking Machinery: The Odyssey of an Album,” by Geoffrey Stokes.“The only thing worse than selling out,” Mr. Frayne told Mr. Stokes, “is selling out and not getting bought.”After the band broke up in 1977, Mr. Frayne continued to perform with a variety of backup bands, always as Commander Cody. In 2009 he re-formed the Lost Planet Airmen, mostly with new members, and released an album, “Dopers, Drunks and Everyday Losers.”He also returned to art, making Pop Art portraits of musicians like Jerry Garcia and Sarah Vaughan — collected in a 2009 book, “Art, Music and Life” — and experimenting with video production.As a musician, he had one more minor hit, “Two Triple Cheese, Side Order of Fries,” in 1980. But it was the song’s video, directed by John Dea, that really stood out: A fast-paced, low-tech (by today’s standards) mash-up of 1950s lunch-counter culture and hot-rod mischief, it won an Emmy and is now part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art. More

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      Ruth Sullivan, Advocate for People With Autism, Dies at 97

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      After her son was found to be autistic, she started organizations to help children and adults. She also consulted on the making of the movie “Rain Man.”Ruth Sullivan, a public health nurse who became an influential advocate for autistic children and adults after one of her sons was diagnosed with the disorder in the early 1960s, died on Sept. 16 at an assisted-living facility in Huntington, W.Va. She was 97.Her daughter Lydia Sullivan said the cause was atrial fibrillation, an abnormal heart rhythm.For more than 40 years, Dr. Sullivan was a tireless champion for educational and other opportunities for people on the autism spectrum. She was a founder of the Autism Society, a national grass-roots organization, and secured state funding to open the West Virginia Autism Training Center at Marshall University.She started and ran the Autism Services Center, which provides residential, therapeutic and community services, and for several years offered information and referrals by telephone from her home in Huntington, where she and her husband, William, raised seven children.“Our dinners were often interrupted by hysterical parents calling,” Lydia Sullivan said in a phone interview, “and my mother would spend the evenings talking to desperate parents from around the world.”Dr. Sullivan was once that parent desperate for information about autism. When her son Joseph received his diagnosis in 1963, at the age of 3, autism was a mysterious disorder that most pediatricians knew little about. She took Joseph to a doctor in Lake Charles, La., where the family was living at the time, and he quickly recognized that Joseph was autistic.“I said, ‘What is that?’” she recalled when she was interviewed on a podcast in 2016 by Marc Ellison, the executive director of the Autism Training Center and one of her protégés. “He said he will always be odd. But he couldn’t offer anything else.”Nearly as disturbing to Dr. Sullivan was a prevailing psychological theory that cold and distant parents — most notably those who were referred to as “refrigerator mothers” — were responsible for causing their children’s autism.“I knew it wasn’t true,” she said on the podcast. “I didn’t love Joseph any less than the others. I treated him differently because he didn’t behave like the others.” She added: “I’m the oldest of seven. I have seven children. I was a nurse. I knew something about children.”Research led her to read the book “Infantile Autism: The Syndrome and Its Implications for a Neural Theory of Behavior” (1964), by Bernard Rimland, a psychologist with an autistic son. He rebutted the claim that neglectful parents caused autism in their children and argued that autism was a result of genetics and possibly environmental factors.Dr. Sullivan wrote to Dr. Rimland about starting a national network of parents that would receive the latest research about autism. In 1965, the two of them and a group of parents who had also written to Dr. Rimland met at a house in Teaneck, N.J., and founded the National Society for Autistic Children (now the Autism Society), a support group that would have numerous local chapters throughout the country. Dr. Sullivan was elected its president in 1969.Around that time she was also trying to overcome a local school board’s resistance to providing an education to autistic children like Joseph. She brought a prepared statement to a school board meeting, and local newspapers wrote about her campaign to educate Joseph.“For almost six weeks I was on the phone every day trying to persuade them to set up a special class,” Dr. Sullivan told The Sunday Gazette-Mail of Charleston, W.Va., in 1972. “The next week,” she added, “there was a class for Joseph and 12 other children. With the help of some dedicated teachers, they’ve been attending school ever since.”Dr. Sullivan lobbied for the passage in 1975 of what came to be called the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, which required public schools that received federal money to provide equal access to children with disabilities. When the law was amended 15 years later, she helped write the language to include autistic children.She also became a technical adviser to “Rain Man,” Barry Levinson’s 1988 film about an autistic man (Dustin Hoffman) and his brother (Tom Cruise). To prepare for the role, Mr. Hoffman studied two documentary films featuring Joseph as well as outtakes from one of them, “Portrait of an Autistic Young Man” (1986), which was shown on PBS stations.“That’s where I met Joe, in a sense,” Mr. Hoffman told The Associated Press in 1988 at a showing of “Rain Man” in Huntington that, at Dr. Sullivan’s request, was a fund-raiser for the Autism Services Center. “I buried myself there for the first two months.”Joseph’s favorite scene in the film was when Mr. Hoffman’s character, Raymond Babbit, quickly counted spilled toothpicks.Mr. Hoffman thanked Dr. Sullivan and Joseph from the awards ceremony stage when he accepted the Oscar for best actor. She believed that the film helped broaden the public’s understanding of autism.Dr. Sullivan in 2018. For more than 40 years, she fought for educational and other opportunities for people on the autism spectrum.Rick Lee/Huntington QuarterlyRuth Marie Christ was born on April 20, 1924, in Port Arthur, Texas, 90 miles east of Houston. Her father, Lawrence, worked in oil refineries, then turned to farming after he and his family moved to Mowata, La., when Ruth was very young. Her mother, Ada (Matt) Christ, worked in a department store.After graduating from the nursing program at Charity Hospital in New Orleans in 1943, Dr. Sullivan served in the Army Nurse Corps, treating soldiers during World War II at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio (now Joint Base San Antonio).After the war ended, she moved to Lake Charles for four years, then attended Teachers College at Columbia University on the G.I. Bill. After receiving bachelor’s and master’s degrees in public health, she worked as a nurse in Manhattan. She married William Sullivan, an English professor, in 1952 and accompanied him to teaching posts in Columbia, Mo., Lake Charles and Albany, working part time as a nurse until her fourth child was born, in 1958.Joseph, her fifth child, was born in 1960. He started speaking early but began to withdraw at 18 months. By his second birthday, Dr. Sullivan wrote in her journal — which was quoted by The Gazette-Mail in 1972 — “he could say only eight words. He would indicate what he wanted by grunts, guiding our hands to what he wanted.”In 1984, at 60, she earned a Ph.D. in special education, speech pathology and psychology from Ohio University, which gave her greater standing with the people she lobbied.Her relentless but gentle style of advocacy continued until her retirement in 2007.“Providing guidance to families nationally was obviously spectacular,” said Stephen Edelson, executive director of the Autism Research Institute. “But she was also one of the first people to talk about medical comorbidities associated with autism, like seizures, sleep problems and gastrointestinal problems. And she was one of the first to point to the importance of providing services to adults with autism.”Jimmie Beirne, chief executive of the Autism Services Center (the position Dr. Sullivan held from 1979 to 2007), was hired 33 years ago to work part time with Joseph on developing his social skills.“The philosophy that she worked so hard to instill in us was to have a parent’s perspective, to think as if this is our child receiving these services,” Dr. Beirne said by phone. “She’d say that the difference between good and excellent services is in the details, and, like a good coach, she had an eye for details.”Today, Joseph lives in a group home run by the Autism Services Center and works at the Autism Training Center.In addition to Joseph and her daughter Lydia, Dr. Sullivan is survived by her other sons, Larry, Richard and Christopher; her other daughters, Eva Sullivan and Julie Sullivan, who is writing a book about her mother; her sisters, Geraldine Landry, Frances Buckingham and Julie Miller; her brother, Charles; 12 grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.Dr. Sullivan’s influence was international. She received letters from parents around the world in search of solutions for their children, and she traveled widely to speak about autism.“She was invited to a conference on autism in Argentina in the 1990s,” her daughter Julie said by phone. “At the time, Argentina was in the grips of the ‘refrigerator mother’ thing, and she got together with parents and told them they needed to start their own group. So she’s the godmother of an autism parents’ group in Argentina.” More

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      Lonnie Smith, Soulful Jazz Organist, Is Dead at 79

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      Adept at blending the sophistication of jazz with the earthy appeal of rhythm and blues, he was later widely sampled by hip-hop artists.Lonnie Smith, a master of the Hammond B3 organ and a leading exponent of the infectiously rhythmic genre known as soul jazz, died on Tuesday at his home in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. He was 79.His manager and partner, Holly Case, said the cause was pulmonary fibrosis.Mr. Smith, who began billing himself as Dr. Lonnie Smith in the mid-1970s, could draw an audience’s attention with his appearance alone: He had a long white beard and always wore a colorful turban. (The turbans apparently had no specific religious significance, and he did not have an advanced degree in anything and never explained why he had adopted the honorific “Dr.”) His playing was every bit as striking.He began his career at a time when organists like Jimmy Smith and Jack McDuff were blending the sophistication of jazz with the earthy appeal of rhythm and blues. Mr. Smith was very much in that tradition, but his playing could also display an ethereal quality that was all his own. His music later reached new generations of fans when it was widely sampled by hip-hop artists.Reviewing a 2015 performance at the Jazz Standard in New York, Ben Ratliff of The New York Times praised Mr. Smith’s sense of dynamics. “When he is quiet, he is very quiet,” Mr. Ratliff wrote. “During a gospelish song with the singer Alicia Olatuja, he started a solo passage at a level that almost couldn’t be heard and stayed there for quite a while, unspooling jagged, alert phrases that you had to strain to listen to: an easy trick but a powerful one.”Lonnie Smith was born on July 3, 1942, in Lackawanna, N.Y., a suburb of Buffalo, and raised by his mother, Beulah Mae Early, and his stepfather, Charles Smith. As a teenager he sang in vocal groups and played trumpet and other instruments before a store owner’s generosity spurred his lifelong love affair with the organ.As he recalled in interviews, he spent a lot of time in a Buffalo music store, mostly just looking. One day he told the owner, Art Kubera (whom he would later call “my angel”), that he was sure he could make a living in music if he had an instrument. Mr. Kubera took him to the back of the store, showed him a Hammond B3 organ and told him that he could have it for nothing if he was able to get it out of the store. He did, he taught himself to play it, and his career began.Mr. Smith was soon working regularly at the Pine Grill in Buffalo. Mr. McDuff was an early influence, and when the guitarist George Benson left Mr. McDuff’s combo to form his own group, he hired Mr. Smith.The Benson quartet had an inauspicious beginning at a bar in the Bronx, where, Mr. Benson wrote in his autobiography, “Benson” (2014), “Lonnie and I played behind a revolving cast of go-go dancers.” After moving to a jazz club in Harlem, the Benson quartet began building a following.Mr. Smith’s first album as a leader was released by Columbia Records in 1967.Both Mr. Benson and Mr. Smith signed with Columbia Records. Mr. Smith’s first album as a leader, “Finger-Lickin’ Good,” which featured Mr. Benson on guitar, was released in 1967, but his tenure with Columbia was brief. The next year he moved to Blue Note, which had already used him on the alto saxophonist Lou Donaldson’s hit album “Alligator Boogaloo.”Blue Note, which had helped launch the organ-jazz boom by signing Jimmy Smith a decade earlier, was a natural home for Mr. Smith. But after releasing four well-received albums on the label, beginning with “Think!” (1968) and ending with “Drives” (1970), he moved on.He recorded for various labels throughout the 1970s, but by the end of the decade his brand of jazz was falling out of favor and he was growing tired of the music business. He stopped recording and maintained a low profile, performing only occasionally and sometimes under an assumed name.He ended his studio hiatus in 1993 with “Afro Blue,” a tribute to John Coltrane with John Abercrombie on guitar and Marvin Smith on drums, released on the MusicMasters label. (The same trio would later release two Jimi Hendrix tribute albums, “Foxy Lady” in 1994 and “Purple Haze”in 1995.) By that time Mr. Smith’s influence had grown in ways he had never anticipated: His 1970 cover of the Blood, Sweat & Tears hit “Spinning Wheel” had been sampled by A Tribe Called Quest, the first of many hip-hop acts that would find inspiration in his catalog.Mr. Smith began performing again, both with his own groups and with Mr. Donaldson, and eventually returned to Blue Note; his first album for the label in more than 40 years, “Evolution,” was released in 2016. His most recent album, “Breathe,” released this year, included a surprising guest appearance by the punk-rock pioneer Iggy Pop on two tracks, the vintage R&B ballad “Why Can’t We Live Together” and Donovan’s “Sunshine Superman.”In addition to Ms. Case, Mr. Smith is survived by four daughters, Lani Chambers, Chandra Thomas, Charisse Partridge and Vonnie Smith, and several grandchildren.In 2017 the National Endowment for the Arts named him a Jazz Master, the country’s highest official honor for a jazz musician.“A lot of musicians get into music because they want to be rich, famous or all of the above,” Mr. Smith said in a 2012 interview. “You are already rich once you sit down and learn to play. That’s richness in itself.”Alex Traub contributed reporting. More

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      Sue Thompson, Who Sang of ‘Norman’ and Sad Movies, Dies at 96

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      She started out a country singer, but she found fame and pop-chart success in the early 1960s with catchy novelty songs, as well as the occasional ballad.Sue Thompson, who after more than a decade of moderate success as a country singer found pop stardom in the early 1960s with hook-laden novelty hits like “Sad Movies (Make Me Cry)” and “Norman,” died on Thursday at the home of her daughter and caregiver, Julie Jennings, in Pahrump, Nev. She was 96.Her son, Greg Penny, said the cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease.With a clear, somewhat girlish voice that brought sass to humorous ditties but that could also be used to good effect on a ballad, Ms. Thompson was part of a wave of female vocalists, like Connie Francis and Brenda Lee, who had hits in the late 1950s and early ’60s.Her breakthrough came when she was paired with the songwriter John D. Loudermilk, who wrote her first big hit, “Sad Movies,” a done-me-wrong tune about a woman who goes to a movie alone when her boyfriend says he has to work late, only to see him walk in with her best friend on his arm.The song cracked the Top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the fall of 1961, and before long she was back in the Top 10 with another Loudermilk song, “Norman,” in which she turned that rather unglamorous male name into an earworm. (“Norman, Norman my love,” Ms. Thompson cooed in the chorus, surrounding the name with oohs and hmms.)Mr. Loudermilk also wrote an elopement novelty, “James (Hold the Ladder Steady),” which did moderately well for Ms. Thompson in 1962. That year she also showed what she could do with a ballad, having modest success with “Have a Good Time,” a song, by Boudleaux and Felice Bryant, Tony Bennett recorded a decade earlier.The British Invasion soon eclipsed this kind of light fare, but Ms. Thompson had one more pop success, in 1964, with Mr. Loudermilk’s “Paper Tiger.”In 1966 she traveled to Vietnam to entertain the troops. Because she was accompanied by only a trio, she could go to more remote bases than bigger U.S.O. acts, exposing her to greater danger.“Tonight we are at Can Tho, a huge American air base,” she wrote to her parents. “You can see the fighting (flashes from guns), hear the mortars, etc.”“We’re fairly secure most of the time,” she continued, “but must be aware that things can pop right in our midst.”The trip left her shaken.“A heartbreaking — and heartwarming — experience,” she wrote. “I will never be the same. I saw and learned unbelievable things.”Mr. Penny said that his mother was ill for weeks afterward, and that she long suspected that she had been exposed to Agent Orange. She underwent a sort of awakening, he said, becoming a vegetarian and developing an interest in spiritual traditions, Eastern as well as Western.Despite becoming ill after the first trip, she went on other tours to entertain troops, including one the next year on which Mr. Penny, just a boy, accompanied her. They traveled to Japan, Hong Kong, the Philippines and elsewhere. Vietnam had also been on the itinerary, but that part of the trip never happened.“I remember getting the communication while we were on the road in Okinawa,” Mr. Penny said in a phone interview. “They said it was just too dangerous.”When Ms. Thompson returned to performing stateside, she also returned to country music, releasing a number of records — including a string recorded with Don Gibson — and leaving behind the little-girl sound of her hits.“I don’t want to be ‘itty bitty’ anymore,” she told The Times of San Mateo, Calif., in 1974. “I want to project love and convey a more mature sound and a more meaningful message.” Country music, she said, was a better vehicle for that because “country fans pay more attention to what is being said in a song.”Ms. Thompson performing at a Country Music Association luncheon in New York in 1963.PoPsie Randolph/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesEva Sue McKee (she picked her stage name out of a phone book) was born on July 19, 1925, in Nevada, Mo. Her father, Vurl, was a laborer, and her mother, Pearl Ova (Fields) McKee, was a nurse. In 1937, during the Depression, her parents moved to California to escape the Dust Bowl, settling north of Sacramento. When she was in high school the family moved again, to San Jose.As a child Ms. Thompson was entranced by Gene Autry, and she grew up envisioning herself as a singing cowgirl. Her mother found her a secondhand guitar for her seventh birthday, and she performed at every opportunity as she went through high school.In 1944 she married Tom Gamboa, and while he fought in World War II, she had their daughter, Ms. Jennings. She also worked in a defense factory, Mr. Penny said.Her wartime marriage ended in divorce in 1947, but her singing career soon began in earnest. Ms. Thompson won a talent show at a San Jose theater, which led to appearances on local radio and television programs, including those of Dude Martin, a radio star in the Bay Area who had a Western swing band, Dude Martin’s Roundup Gang.In the early 1950s she became the lead vocalist on a TV show that Mr. Martin had introduced in the Los Angeles market, and she cut several records with his band, including, in 1952, one of the first versions of the ballad “You Belong to Me.” Later that year it became a hit for Jo Stafford, and in the 1960s it was covered by the Duprees.Ms. Thompson and Mr. Martin married in December 1952, but they divorced a year later, and Ms. Thompson soon married another Western swing star with his own local TV show, Hank Penny. That marriage ended in divorce in 1963, but the two continued to perform together occasionally for decades.The country records Ms. Thompson made on the Mercury label in the 1950s never gained much traction, but that changed when she signed with Hickory early in 1961. “Angel, Angel,” another ballad by the Bryants, garnered some attention — Billboard compared it to the Brenda Lee hit “I Want to Be Wanted” — and then came “Sad Movies.”That breakthrough hit was something of an accident. In a 2010 interview on the South Australian radio show “The Doo Wop Corner,” Ms. Thompson said she recorded it only after another singer had decided not to.“I inherited the song,” she said, “and I was really happy and excited when it turned out to be such a hit for me.”Even before her pop hits Ms. Thompson was a familiar sight on stages in Nashville and Nevada as well as on the country fair circuit, and the hits made her even more in demand in Las Vegas, Lake Tahoe, Reno, Nev., and elsewhere. Gravitating between country and pop came easily.“Most popular songs actually are country-and-western songs with a modern instrumental background,” she told The Reno Gazette-Journal in 1963.Ms. Thompson said her favorite among the songs she recorded was “You Belong to Me.” About a decade ago, when she was in her 80s, Greg Penny, a record producer who has worked with Elton John and other top stars, recorded her singing the song to a guitar accompaniment. Carmen Kaye, host of “The Doo Wop Corner,” gave the demo its radio premiere during the 2010 interview, Ms. Thompson still sounding sweet and clear.Her fourth husband, Ted Serna, whom she had known in high school and married in 1993, died in 2013. In addition to Ms. Jennings and Mr. Penny, she is survived by eight grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren.Ms. Jennings, in a phone interview, told about a time when her mother, on tour in Vietnam, asked to visit soldiers in the infirmary who couldn’t come to her stage show. One badly injured young man, when introduced to her, said, “I don’t give a darn who’s here; I just want my mama.” Ms. Thompson sat with him for a long while, asking all about his mother, helping him conjure good memories.“Three years later,” Ms. Jennings said, “my mother was working in Hawaii, and he brought his mother in there and introduced her to my mom.” More

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      Bob Moore, an Architect of the Nashville Sound, Dies at 88

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      He played bass on thousands of popular recordings, helping to create the uncluttered style that came to characterize the country music of the 1950s and ’60s.NASHVILLE — Bob Moore, an architect of the Nashville Sound of the 1950s and ’60s who played bass on thousands of popular recordings, including Elvis Presley’s “Return to Sender” and Patsy Cline’s “Crazy,” died on Sept. 22 at a hospital here. He was 88.His death was confirmed by his wife, Kittra Bernstein Moore, who did not cite a cause.As a mainstay of the loose aggregation of first-call Nashville session professionals known as the A-Team, Mr. Moore played on many of the landmark country hits of his day, among them Tammy Wynette’s “Stand By Your Man,” Loretta Lynn’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter” and George Jones’s “He Stopped Loving Her Today.”All were No. 1 country singles, and each typified the intuitive, uncluttered style of playing that came to characterize the less-is-more Nashville Sound.Mr. Moore, who mainly played the upright bass, also contributed the swaggering opening figure to Roger Miller’s “King of the Road” as well as the indomitable bass line on Jeannie C. Riley’s skewering of hypocrisy, “Harper Valley P.T.A.” Both records were No. 1 country singles and major crossover hits, with Ms. Riley’s reaching the top of the pop chart in 1968.Over 40 years Mr. Moore elevated the bass in country music from a subordinate timekeeper to an instrument capable of considerable tonal and emotional reach. By turns restrained and robust, his imaginative phrasing revealed a gift for seizing the dramatic moment within a recording or arrangement.“No matter how good a musician you are technically, what really matters boils down to your taste in playing,” he once said. “A lot of guys can play a hundred notes a second; some can play one note, and it makes a lot better record.”Mr. Moore’s forceful, empathetic playing extended well beyond the precincts of country music to encompass the likes of Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Boxer” and Brook Benton’s “Rainy Night in Georgia,” among other pop and soul hits, as well as several notable rockabilly records.As session leader at Monument Records, where he worked in the late 1950s, Mr. Moore created arrangements for recordings by Roy Orbison and others, including “Only the Lonely,” a Top 10 pop single for Mr. Orbison in 1960. The record stalled at No. 2 and might have gone on to occupy the top spot on the chart were it not for Brenda Lee’s “I’m Sorry.” Mr. Moore played bass on that one, too.He had a Top 10 pop record of his own: the Mariachi-flavored instrumental “Mexico” (1961), credited to Bob Moore and His Orchestra. (The song was composed by Boudleaux Bryant, who, with his wife, Felice, also wrote hits for Mr. Orbison and the Everly Brothers.)In 1960 Mr. Moore and some of his fellow A-Teamers received an invitation to appear at the Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island. After a series of violent incidents in Newport, some set off by an angry crowd of concertgoers who had been shut out of sold-out shows, the festival ended prematurely and Mr. Moore was unable to perform, so he and a group billed as the Nashville All-Stars, which included the vibraphonist Gary Burton, recorded an album of instrumentals called “After the Riot at Newport.”“Anyone who has heard me play bass knows my soul,” Mr. Moore said, looking back on his career in a 2002 interview with the website Art of Slap Bass. “I am studied, solid, thorough, steadfast, bold and dependable.”In 2007, Mr. Moore and his fellow A-Team members were inducted into the Musicians Hall of Fame in Nashville.His son R. Stevie Moore is also a musician, having played a pioneering role in the lo-fi, or do-it-yourself, movement popularized by indie-rock artists like Pavement and Beck.“Anyone who has heard me play bass knows my soul,” Mr. Moore once said. “I am studied, solid, thorough, steadfast, bold and dependable.”Bill ForsheeBobby Loyce Moore was born on Nov. 30, 1932, in Nashville and raised by his maternal grandmother, Minnie Anderson Johnson, a widow.When he was 9, Bobby set up a shoeshine station outside the Ryman Auditorium, then home to the Grand Ole Opry. One of his regular customers was Jack Drake, the bass player for Ernest Tubb and his Texas Troubadours; Mr. Drake became an early mentor.Bobby appeared in local bands before going on tour at age 15 as a guitarist and stand-up bassist for the minstrels Jamup and Honey. Along with the future A-Team guitarists Hank Garland and Grady Martin, he spent time in the bands of the Opry stars Paul Howard and Little Jimmy Dickens before working with the singers Red Foley and Marty Robbins.Mr. Moore’s big break came in the early 1950s, when the Nashville bandleader Owen Bradley offered him steady employment with his dance orchestra. Even more auspicious, Mr. Bradley promised Mr. Moore, then weary of touring, steady work on the recording sessions he would soon be supervising as the newly established head of the local office of Decca Records.Over the next three decades Mr. Moore would appear on hits by Decca luminaries like Kitty Wells and Conway Twitty as well as others, like Jim Reeves and Earl Scruggs, who recorded for other labels. He appeared on virtually all of Patsy Cline’s 1960s recordings for Decca, including her hit “Crazy” in 1961, and much of Presley’s RCA output of the early to mid-’60s, including “Return to Sender,” released in 1962.As a new generation of session musicians began supplanting the original A-Team in the early ’80s, Mr. Moore pursued other projects, including a stint with Jerry Lee Lewis’s band. A hand injury forced his premature retirement from performing later that decade.In addition to his wife and his son Stevie, Mr. Moore is survived by a daughter, Linda Faye Moore, who is also a performing musician; two other sons, Gary and Harry; and two granddaughters.In the early 1950s, when Mr. Bradley offered him a career as a studio musician, Mr. Moore discovered a life-changing musical fellowship as a member of the A-Team.“We were like brothers,” he said in his Art of Slap Bass interview. “We had great musical chemistry and communication.” He continued: “We loved creating our music together. We were able to assert our personalities and express our feelings through our music in such an effective way that the public came to recognize our individual styles.” More

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      Alemayehu Eshete, Singer Known as the ‘Abyssinian Elvis,’ Dies at 80

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      He became a swaggering star in the late 1960s, when Addis Ababa experienced a golden age of night life and music. Decades later, he was rediscovered.Alemayehu Eshete, a soulful Ethiopian pop singer widely known as the “Abyssinian Elvis” who became a star in the 1960s when a cultural revolution took hold of Addis Ababa, died on Sept. 2 at a hospital there. He was 80.Gilles Fruchaux, the president of Mr. Eshete’s reissue label, Buda Musique, confirmed the death.For years under Haile Selassie’s imperial rule, Ethiopia’s music industry was controlled by the state. Orchestras dutifully performed patriotic songs at government events, while defiant bands played Little Richard songs at night in clubs. It was forbidden to record and distribute music independently.“All the musicians used to work for the government,” Mr. Eshete said in a 2017 documentary about the era, “Ethiopiques: Revolt of the Soul.” “When they told you to perform, you had to perform. We were treated like average workers, not like real artists.”But in the late 1960s, as Selassie grew old and the grip of his rule loosened, Addis Ababa experienced a golden age of night life and music, and Mr. Eshete became a swaggering star of the so-called “swinging Addis” era.The sound that dominated this period was distinct: an infectious blend of Western-imported blues and R&B with traditional Ethiopian folk music. It was typified by hypnotic saxophone lines, funky electric guitar stabs and grooving piano riffs.As a teenager, Mr. Eshete was smitten with American rock ‘n’ roll, and his idol was Elvis Presley, so when he started singing in the clubs of Addis he imitated his hero. He sported a pompadour and wore big collared shirts as he gyrated onstage.“I dressed like an American, grew my hair, sang ‘Jailhouse Rock,’” he told The Guardian in 2008. “But the moment that I started singing Amharic songs, my popularity shot up.”He was soon enlisted in the fabled Police Orchestra, a state-run band composed of Ethiopia’s finest musicians, and he began playing with the ensemble at government functions in the city. After hours, he found refuge in the underground music scene.In 1969, the defiant act of Mr. Eshete and a young record shop owner named Amha Eshete (no relation) galvanized the scene.The acclaimed “Éthiopiques” album series, begun in 1997, ignited international interest in Ethiopian music. Two releases in the series are devoted to Mr. Eshete’s work.Buda MusiqueAmha Eshete decided to found a label, Amha Records, to commit to vinyl the Ethiopian pop music that bands were performing in clubs. Few musicians were willing to flout the law with him until Alemayehu Eshete stepped forward and offered to record the funky tune “Timarkialesh,” and Amha then had it manufactured as a 45 r.p.m. single in India.When copies of the record arrived, and Amha played it from a loudspeaker in his Harambee Music Shop, people started dancing outside and stopped traffic. The single became a hit, and when the government turned a blind eye toward this transgression, the city’s musical revolution exploded.Amha Records went on to release the work of giants of Ethiopian music like the vocalist Mahmoud Ahmed and the composer Mulatu Astatke. Mr. Eshete went on to found the Alem-Girma Band with the pianist and arranger Girma Beyene. He also became known for writing socially conscious songs, like “Temar Lije” (“Study, My Son”), which stressed the importance of education.But a Communist military junta, the Derg, took control of Ethiopia in the mid-1970s, and the swing in Addis came to an end.In what became known as the Ethiopian Red Terror, the Derg ousted Selassie, and thousands were massacred. A curfew extinguished night life in Addis and musicians left the country in droves, creating a lost generation of Ethiopian musical stars.Amha Eshete, who died in April, opened a nightclub and restaurant in Washington; Girma Beyene, who also landed there, became a gas station attendant. Alemayehu Eshete remained in Ethiopia to raise his family. He continued working as a musician under the Derg and returned to singing patriotic songs at state-sponsored events.“That time was hell,” he told The Guardian. “I was ordered to sing a song in Korean for Kim Il-sung, which I learned, though I had no idea what I was singing.”When the regime was overthrown nearly two decades later, much of the world didn’t know what had transpired musically in swinging Addis.But that changed in 1997 when a French musicologist, Francis Falceto, produced the first album in the acclaimed series “Éthiopiques,” which compiled the era’s lost treasures. Released on the Buda Musique label, the project, which now consists of 30 titles, ignited international interest in Ethiopian music. Two releases in the series are devoted to Mr. Eshete’s work.“Alemayehu is an icon of that era,” Mr. Falceto said in a phone interview. “He is a legend of the music of modern Ethiopia.”Alemayehu Eshete Andarge was born in June 1941 in Addis Ababa. His father, Eshete Andarge, was a taxi driver. His mother, Belaynesh Yusuf, was a homemaker.As a boy, Alemayehu liked watching Elvis Presley movies and singing Presley songs for his friends at school. Dreaming of stardom in Hollywood, he once ran away from home, hitching a ride to a port city in Eritrea, where he hoped to board a ship bound for America. His mission was foiled when someone got in touch with his family and he was sent home.Mr. Eshete is survived by his wife, Ayehu Kebede Desta; seven children; and six grandchildren.As Addis Ababa entered the new millennium, its musical past was revisited as part of a cultural revival. Young musicians played the old songs with reverence, and lost classics became radio hits again. Mr. Eshete began performing every Wednesday at a venue called the Jazzamba Lounge.In 2008, Mr. Eshete and three other notable Ethiopian musicians, Mahmoud Ahmed, Mulatu Astatke and the saxophonist Getatchew Mekurya, performed together at the Barbican in London and at the Glastonbury festival. In New York, backed by the New England-based Either/Orchestra, Mr. Eshete played at Lincoln Center’s Damrosch Park.“Mr. Eshete was at his charismatic best,” Nate Chinen wrote in a review of that show in The New York Times. “Each verse began with a single clarion note and then plunged into rapid-fire patter. He tried a few other approaches in his set, like an insinuative croon and a bark befitting his nickname, the Ethiopian James Brown.”A funeral ceremony attended by hundreds was held for Mr. Eshete at Meskel Square in Addis Ababa. An orchestra played before his coffin was driven away. Just months earlier, Mr. Eshete’s music had echoed across the square when he performed there with a band and sang his song, “Addis Ababa Bete” (“Addis Ababa, My Home”).Mr. Eshete had recorded that tune, a funky love letter to his city, in 1971 with his fellow musical outlaw, Amha. They sold it from Amha’s defiant little record shop, where it quickly became a hit and set swinging Addis on fire. More