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      David Crosby, Folk-Rock Voice of the 1960s, Dies at 81

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      He was an original member of the Byrds and a founder of Crosby, Stills & Nash. But he was almost as well known for his troubled personal life as for his music.David Crosby, the outspoken and often troubled singer, songwriter and guitarist who helped create two of the most influential and beloved American bands of the classic-rock era of the 1960s and ’70s, the Byrds and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, has died. He was 81.Patricia Dance, a sister of Mr. Crosby’s wife, Jan Dance, said in a text message on Thursday evening that Mr. Crosby died “last night.” She provided no other details.Mr. Crosby was inducted twice into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, as a founding member of the Byrds and as a founder of CSN&Y. He brought jazz influences to both groups, in the process broadening the possibilities of vocally driven folk-rock. And his reach extended to later generations: His alternate tunings became an inspiration for the innovative “freak folk” movement of the early 21st century while influencing scores of other musicians eager to give acoustic music a progressive spin.If Mr. Crosby’s music expanded boundaries, his persona fixed him in a specific era — and proudly so. In 1968, he wrote “Triad,” an ode to free love, recorded in distinct versions by the Byrds, Jefferson Airplane and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. His song “Almost Cut My Hair,” which he recorded with CSN&Y for their acclaimed 1970 album, “Déjà Vu,” was a virtual loyalty oath to the counterculture.Mr. Crosby’s image as the twinkle-eyed stoner and sardonic hedonist of the cosmic age was said to have been a model for the obstinate free spirit played by Dennis Hopper in the 1969 movie “Easy Rider.”His impish indulgences turned potentially lethal many times. He became nearly as well known for his drug offenses, weapons charges and prison stints as for his music. By the mid-1970s, he was addicted to both cocaine and heroin.“You don’t sit down and say, ‘Gee, I think I’ll become a junkie,’” Mr. Crosby told People magazine in 1990. “When I started out doing drugs, it was marijuana and psychedelics, and it was fun. It was the ’60s, and we thought we were expanding our consciousnesses.”But later, he continued, “drugs became more for blurring pain.” He added: “You don’t realize you’re getting as strung out as you are. And I had the money to get more and more addicted.”Mr. Crosby’s drug abuse may have exacerbated his medical problems, including a long battle with hepatitis C, which necessitated a liver transplant in 1994. He also suffered from type 2 diabetes and, in 2014, had to cancel a tour to endure a cardiac catheterization and angiogram.Despite his health issues, his voice remained robust enough in those years for him to tour. And in his best moments while performing with Stephen Stills and Graham Nash, he could recreate some of the most famous harmonies of the rock era. His voice remained strong as well when touring with his solo band in later years.A Prominent LineageDavid Van Cortlandt Crosby was born on Aug. 14, 1941, in Los Angeles into families with deep roots in American history dating back to Dutch rule in New York in the 17th century. His mother, who was born Aliph Van Cortlandt Whitehead, descended from the prominent Van Cortlandt family. His father, Floyd Crosby, an Academy Award-winning cinematographer whose credits included the classic western “High Noon,” was a member of the Van Rensselaer clan.David attended Crane Country Day School in Montecito, Calif., where he starred in the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta “H.M.S. Pinafore” and other musical productions, but he flunked out. He completed his high school studies by correspondence at the Cate School in nearby Carpinteria. He studied drama at Santa Barbara City College, but he dropped out before graduating to pursue a music career.He was 16 when he received his first guitar, from his older brother, Ethan, who had begun playing years earlier. David started out, like so many others in the early ’60s, performing folk music.“I would learn two chords and go back and forth between them,” Mr. Crosby told the British music magazine Mojo. “What took it to the next level was, my brother started listening to 1950s jazz: Chet Baker, Dave Brubeck, people like that. Listening to jazz really widens your world.”Mr. Crosby also absorbed the music of the Everly Brothers, which taught him how to layer harmonies into diaphanous patterns. He first performed with his brother, but he soon went solo and drifted through coffee houses around the country until landing in New York, in the epicenter of the 1960s folk movement, Greenwich Village. In 1963, he cut his first demos, produced by Jim Dickson, who would later manage the Byrds.Mr. Crosby, front row left, as a member of the folk group Les Baxter’s Balladeers in the early 1960s. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesMr. Crosby, who briefly played with the folk group Les Baxter’s Balladeers in Los Angeles, got to know Jim McGuinn (who later changed his name to Roger) and Gene Clark while they were performing as a duo at the Troubadour. He soon began adding his harmonies to theirs onstage, fitting in so smoothly that they became a trio, known as the Jet Set.Mr. Crosby brought in Mr. Dickson to become the group’s manager. Mr. Dickson encouraged them to advance the new sound they had already been exploring, which combined their earlier folk influences with the electrified sound of the British Invasion bands, particularly the Beatles. To that end the band added a drummer, the inexperienced but handsome Michael Clarke, and Mr. Crosby took up the electric guitar. Together, the revolutionary style they honed became known as folk-rock.That hybrid found its first recorded expression after Mr. Dickson acquired an acetate of a new Bob Dylan song, “Mr. Tambourine Man,” in August 1964. The band’s own demo of the piece, with the new recruit Chris Hillman on bass, helped land them a contract with Columbia Records that November. Two weeks later, the Jet Set changed its name to the Byrds.Writing Songs, and HitsColumbia, however, felt that the group hadn’t yet jelled musically, so only Mr. McGuinn was allowed to play an instrument on the single, which came out in April 1965, with studio musicians accompanying him. Mr. Crosby and Mr. Clark did provide impeccable harmonies on the song, which helped it reach No. 1 on the Billboard singles chart. The song was the title track of their debut album, released in June 1965, and the full band played on the rest of the tracks.The Byrds performed at Yankee Stadium in 1966 on an all-star bill that also included Stevie Wonder, the Beach Boys and others. From left: Mike Clarke (partly hidden), Chris Hillman, Mr. Crosby and Roger (then known as Jim) McGuinn.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesMr. Crosby didn’t contribute compositions to the Byrds’ first two albums. But on their third, “Fifth Dimension” (1966), he and Mr. Hillman helped fill a writing void left by the departure of the band’s most prolific songwriter, Mr. Clark. Mr. Crosby contributed to the composition of several songs on the album and wrote one himself, “What’s Happening?!?!” Its lyric introduced a Crosbyesque motif: posing questions that had no answer. More famously, Mr. Crosby wrote the band’s smash hit “Eight Miles High” with Mr. McGuinn and Mr. Clark.For the Byrds’ next album, “Younger Than Yesterday,” Mr. Crosby contributed “Everybody’s Been Burned,” which idealized the key strategy of his emerging style: to contrast a dreamy melody with dazed lyrics.A more daring number helped seal Mr. Crosby’s fate with the band. He had written “Triad” for the fifth Byrds album, and the band recorded it. But the other members were reluctant to release it, preferring instead “Goin’ Back,” written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King. Mr. Crosby vigorously argued against using outside writers for a band that already had three, and tension in the band grew. There was anger, too, over political speeches he had made between songs when the band played the Monterey Pop Festival the summer before. All of it led to his firing.Mr. McGuinn and Mr. Hillman delivered the crushing news. They “said I was impossible to work with, and I wasn’t very good anyway, and they’d do better without me,” Mr. Crosby told the British music magazine Uncut. “It hurt like hell. I didn’t try to reason with them. I just said, ‘It’s a shameful waste. … Goodbye.’”By this time Mr. Crosby had already started casually jamming with Mr. Stills, the guitarist and singer whose group Buffalo Springfield had recently disbanded. Mr. Crosby wrote his first song with Mr. Stills (along with Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane) while sailing on a 74-foot boat he had acquired a year earlier. The song, “Wooden Ships,” also recorded by the Airplane, tested out the vocal blend that would become Crosby, Stills & Nash’s signature.Mr. Crosby and Mr. Stills connected with Mr. Nash in July 1968 at a party at Joni Mitchell’s house in the Laurel Canyon section of Los Angeles. Mr. Nash was eager to leave his slick British pop act, the Hollies, to join the hot folk-rock scene. The three began meeting on their own to perfect their sound, and when Ahmet Ertegun, president of Atlantic Records, heard their elegant three-way vocal braiding, he signed them to his label.A Grammy, Then a DeathThe group’s debut album, titled simply “Crosby, Stills & Nash,” was released in May 1969 and shot into the Top 10. It earned them a Grammy as best new artist. Besides “Wooden Ships,” the album included two other songs by Mr. Crosby, the shimmering “Guinevere” and the elegiac “Long Time Gone,” which he wrote after the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in 1968.From left, Graham Nash, Stephen Stills and Mr. Crosby in a photo taken at the shoot for the cover of the album “Crosby, Stills & Nash,” their first as a group. Henry DiltzThat same year, his longtime girlfriend, Christine Hinton, was killed in a car accident while running a routine errand. Mr. Crosby later saw this as the tipping point that sent him into depression and serious drug use.“I was unable to handle it,” he told People magazine. “I was very much in love with her and she just never came back. That was when I got more into hard drugs.”His increasing recreational drug use made it harder for him to create music, he said, but he nevertheless managed to write two classic songs for the band’s follow-up album, “Déjà Vu,” released in 1970, which officially expanded the group’s lineup to include Neil Young: “Almost Cut My Hair” and the title track, a rhythmically daring number with complex harmonies.Fueled by drugs and egos, the group quickly began to fracture. Over the next year, all four members released solo albums. Mr. Crosby’s, “If I Could Only Remember My Name,” released in 1971, sold well, but it was the least well received in its day. Robert Christgau of The Village Voice called it a “disgraceful performance.” Mr. Crosby would not record another solo album for 18 years. But in later years it received a critical overhaul; in his 1994 book, “All Time Top 1,000 Albums,” Colin Larkin called it “miraculous.”Starting in 1972, Mr. Crosby released a series of successful albums with Mr. Nash, his closest ally in the band. All three of their first joint albums went gold, buoyed by Mr. Nash’s more commercial tunes.In 1973, Mr. Crosby reunited with the four other original Byrds for one album, but it was poorly received. For much of the ’70s, he also worked as a session singer, backing up star friends like Jackson Browne and James Taylor. In the ’80s and ’90s, he did similar work with Phil Collins.Mr. Crosby, Mr. Stills and Mr. Nash, and sometimes Mr. Young, reunited from time to time. But by the 1980s Mr. Crosby was increasingly running afoul of the law.Mr. Crosby was arrested by Dallas police in April 1982 and charged with drug and gun possession. He spent nine months in prison.Bureau of Prisons/Getty ImagesHe spent nine months in a Texas prison in 1982 on drug and weapons charges. In 1985, he was arrested on charges of drunken driving, hit and run, and possession of a concealed pistol and imprisoned for a year. By his account he quit hard drugs in 1986. But in March 2004, he was charged with criminal possession of a weapon in the third degree, as well as illegal possession of a hunting knife, ammunition and marijuana. He pleaded guilty and got off with a fine.Mr. Crosby detailed his travails in two harrowing autobiographies, “Long Time Gone” (1988) and “Since Then: How I Survived Everything and Lived to Tell About It” (2006), both written with Carl Gottlieb.Surging Late in LifeHe earned less fraught tabloid headlines in 2000, when he was revealed to be the biological father, via sperm donation, of the two children of the singer Melissa Etheridge and her partner at the time, Julie Cypher.Mr. Crosby had first become a father in 1962, with Celia Crawford Ferguson, but as young parents they put their son up for adoption. He had three other children: Erika, by his former girlfriend Jackie Gutherie; Donovan, by another partner, Debbie Donovan; and Django, with Ms. Dance, his wife of 35 years. His brother killed himself in the late 1990s. His survivors include his wife and four children.In 1997, Mr. Crosby reunited with the son he had put up for adoption, James Raymond, who had grown up to become an accomplished pianist. With the session guitarist Jeff Pevar, they formed a jazz-rock band, which they cheekily called CPR.Mr. Crosby in concert in Los Angeles in 2012. Two years later he released his first solo album in 21 years, ushering in one of the most prolific periods in his career.Mario Anzuoni/ReutersIn 2014, Mr. Crosby released his first solo album in 21 years, “Croz,” which debuted in the Billboard Top 40. It ushered in one of the most prolific periods in his career, in which he released five solo albums, most recently “For Free” in 2021.Mr. Crosby told The Orange County Register in 2019 that his late-in-life resurgence was sparked by his realization that “at this stage, you don’t know if you’ve got two weeks or 10 years,” adding, “Really what matters is what you do with whatever time you have.”Mr. Crosby announced in 2022 that although he planned to continue making records, he would no longer tour. “I’m too old to do it anymore,” he said. “I don’t have the stamina; I don’t have the strength.” (He recently said that he had reconsidered.)In 2019 he was the subject of an uncommonly frank documentary, “David Crosby: Remember My Name,” directed by A.J. Eaton and produced by Cameron Crowe. In the film, the famously cantankerous Mr. Crosby talks about how he had alienated nearly all of his old musical associates, even his longtime ally Mr. Nash. “All the guys I made music with won’t even talk to me,” he said. “I don’t know quite how to undo it.”Adapting a more appreciative tone, Mr. Crosby looked back at his life with wonder in his second memoir. “I was tremendously lucky, surviving injury, illness and stupidity,” he wrote. “As for the music, I was blessed early and often, from the Byrds to Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, singing with Graham, meeting my son and creating CPR” and experiencing “the wonderful, exploratory forward motion of new music.”Alex Traub contributed reporting. More

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      Herbert Deutsch, Co-Creator of the Moog Synthesizer, Dies at 90

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      An experimental composer, Mr. Deutsch collaborated with Robert Moog to create the first synthesizer to make a significant impact on popular music, launching a revolution in electronic music.Herbert Deutsch, who helped develop the Moog synthesizer, a groundbreaking instrument that opened up new frontiers in electronic music and brought a futuristic sheen to landmark recordings by countless artists, died on Dec. 9 at his home in Massapequa Park, N.Y., on Long Island. He was 90.The cause was heart failure, his wife, Nancy Deutsch, said.Mr. Deutsch, a Hofstra University music professor and experimental composer, joined forces with Robert Moog, an engineer and inventor, to introduce a modular voltage-controlled synthesizer in 1964.With its otherworldly sounds, which could call to mind both a Gothic cathedral’s pipe organ and an extraterrestrial mothership, the Moog (the name rhymes with “vogue”) was the first synthesizer to make a significant impact on popular music. Its debut marked the dawn of the synthesizer age.“There were plugged-in instruments before the Moog synthesizer, but none arrived on the scene with such awe-inspiring potential,” Ted Gioia, the music writer and author of the 2019 book “Music: A Subversive History,” wrote in an email. “The first recordings of Moog music from the 1960s felt like messages from the future, telling us that all the rules were going to change.”Many of those recordings turned out to define their eras. George Harrison purchased an oversized early Moog, which the Beatles used to color multiple tracks on their 1969 album, “Abbey Road,” including “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” and Harrison’s composition “Here Comes the Sun.”The Moog reached a broader market in 1971 with the introduction of the compact Minimoog Model D, the first widely used portable synthesizer.“Within months of the first commercial Moog synthesizers showing up in retail stores, commercial recordings started to sound different,” Mr. Gioia said. The futuristic synthesizer beeped and booped its way onto the pop charts in 1972 with “Popcorn” by Hot Butter, and went on to become a driving force behind landmark songs like Kraftwerk’s arty “Autobahn,” Donna Summer’s disco classic “I Feel Love” (1977), Parliament’s epic funk freak-out “Flashlight” (1977) and Herbie Hancock’s jazz-funk crossover hit “Rockit” (1983).The Minimoog Model D, introduced in 1971, was the first widely used portable synthesizer.Moog Music Inc.Even when it was not the featured instrument, the Moog provided moody textures to timeless songs like Bob Marley’s “Stir It Up” (1973) and Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” (1975). It also provided throbbing bass tracks to Michael Jackson’s mega-selling 1982 album, “Thriller.”While Mr. Moog handled the technical side of his namesake invention, during its creation Mr. Deutsch provided a practicing musician’s perspective, which was crucial in transforming it from an electronic gadget into a viable instrument.“Herb Deutsch was the catalyst for the invention of the synthesizer,” Michelle Moog-Koussa, Mr. Moog’s daughter and the executive director of the Bob Moog Foundation, said in a phone interview. “That is no overstatement.”“Herb would say, ‘This is what I need,’” she added, “and Dad would build the circuitry. It was a true partnership between a designer and a musician.”Despite his impact on music of all genres, Mr. Deutsch was the last person to trumpet his accomplishments.“I’m unwilling to go around shouting, ‘Look at me, I’m a part of the history of music,’” he said in a video interview with the Moog Music company in February. “But I do understand that Bob and I are an important part of music history, because that idea has been used in every direction that music can go into.”Herbert Arnold Deutsch was born on Feb. 9, 1932, in Hempstead, N.Y., the youngest of three children of Barnet and Miriam (Myersburg) Deutsch. His father was a clerical worker for the Veterans Health Administration, his mother a bookkeeper. With money tight, his parents also ran a small chicken farm on their property.In a detached garage next to the farm’s largest coop Mr. Deutsch, at age 3, had his first musical epiphany.“For some reason, I had picked up a long straight stick and, holding it in my right hand, was tapping it down on the dirt floor,” he recalled in a 2018 interview with Parma Recordings, a music production company. “At some point in this meaningless action I heard a note whenever I tapped the floor.”“It was a C,” he continued. “Then I tapped the floor an inch or so to the right and heard a D.”Soon he began to “tap out some melodies of music that I recognized as well as music that was new to me,” he said. “Suddenly, I stopped in terror. Of course I could not hear those actual pitches, or was the dirt floor truly magical?”The German rock band Kraftwerk was among the earliest exponents of the Moog synthesizer.Gie Knaeps/Getty ImagesHe started piano lessons a year later, and at 11, inspired by the likes of Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie, turned his sights to the trumpet. He played in bands throughout high school and during his years at the Manhattan School of Music, where he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees.One of his best-known compositions was the haunting, multi-media track “A Christmas Carol, 1963,” an aural collage interspersed with recorded news snippets and medieval chants composed to honor the four Black girls murdered in the infamous Ku Klux Klan bombing of a church in Birmingham, Ala., that year.His performance of another modernist composition at the New York studio of the sculptor Jason Seley in January 1964 earned a positive review in The New Yorker. More significant, however, was the fact that Mr. Moog was in the audience.Mr. Moog, whom Mr. Deutsch had met at a music trade show, was working on his Ph.D. in engineering physics at Cornell University while running the small R.A. Moog Company, based in Trumansburg N.Y., which manufactured his versions of the theremin, the electronic instrument whose eerie space-age sound was a staple of 1950s science-fiction movie soundtracks.After the performance, the men and their wives went to dinner, where Mr. Deutsch and Mr. Moog discussed new possibilities for electronic music. Mr. Deutsch ended up commissioning a new electronic instrument, to be designed by Mr. Moog in collaboration with Mr. Deutsch.With Mr. Deutsch advising, Mr. Moog designed an instrument consisting of modules linked by patch cords that allowed musicians to create their own vast array of previously unheard sounds from scratch, whether to simulate acoustic instruments or to create their own distinctly electronic sonic palette.That same year, Mr. Deutsch wrote “Jazz Images, a Worksong and Blues,” the first composition for the Moog. Soon he was giving pioneering performances at Town Hall and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.In 1968, Wendy Carlos released “Switched-On Bach,” a watershed moment for the Moog, launching Baroque musical into the Apollo age and the Moog into the bedrooms and dorm rooms of baby boomers. Ms. Carlos also used the Moog to conjure the foreboding sound of a dystopian future on the soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film, “A Clockwork Orange.”After his work with Mr. Moog, Mr. Deutsch turned his attention back to teaching at Hofstra. In 1976, he published his first of three books, “Synthesis: An Introduction to the History, Theory & Practice of Electronic Music.”But in the late 1970s, he joined the Moog Company as marketing director and consulted on new synthesizer designs.By that point, sales of the American-made Moogs had begun to slide as cheaper Japanese synthesizers from companies like Roland and Yamaha came to dominate the market.In addition to his wife, Mr. Deutsch is survived by two children, Lisbeth Mitchell and Edmund Deutsch, from his marriage to Margaret Deutsch, who died in 1996; three stepchildren, Cheryl Sterling, Adam Blau and Daniel Rogge; nine grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.The Moog synthesizer enjoyed a renaissance beginning in the 1990s, thanks to bands like the Beastie Boys, Wilco and Portishead. But by then, Mr. Deutsch had moved on from his days helping design synthesizers. He was, after all, a musician at heart, not an inventor.“A year ago I texted him to discuss something, and he said, ‘I can’t talk tonight because I have band practice,’” Ms. Moog-Koussa said. “He was 89 years old.” More

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      Jim Stewart, Unlikely Entrepreneur of Soul Music, Dies at 92

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      His background was in country music. But Stax, the label he founded with his sister, achieved a level of success with Black artists that rivaled Motown’s.Jim Stewart, who with his sister founded Stax Records, home to R&B luminaries like Otis Redding and Sam & Dave — and, after Motown, the best-selling soul music label of the 1960s and ’70s — died on Monday in Memphis. He was 92.His death, at a hospital after a brief illness, was confirmed by Tim Sampson, communications director for the Stax Museum of American Soul Music in Memphis.A former banker, Mr. Stewart first ventured into the music business in 1957, when he and his sister Estelle Axton established Satellite Records in a relative’s garage. Intending to release recordings of country and rockabilly music, Mr. Stewart and his sister, who died in 2004, never suspected that three years later their label would be producing some of the most enduring Black popular music of the era.“I had scarcely seen a Black person till I was grown,” Mr. Stewart, who grew up listening to the Grand Ole Opry on a farm in rural West Tennessee, was quoted as saying in Peter Guralnick’s “Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom” (1986).“When I started, I didn’t know there was such a thing as Atlantic Records; I didn’t know there was a Chess Records or Imperial,” he continued, referring to record companies that promoted Black vernacular music. “I had no dream of anything like that.”His remote upbringing notwithstanding, Stax placed more than 100 singles on the pop chart during Mr. Stewart’s tenure at the label, among them Eddie Floyd’s “Knock on Wood” and Isaac Hayes’s theme from the movie “Shaft.” The influence of its catalog on generations of performers has proved wide and deep, extending to Bruce Springsteen and the Rolling Stones as well as to the many hip-hop and R&B artists who have sampled Stax recordings.In a 2013 interview with The Associated Press, Mr. Stewart attributed his decision to start recording Black music to a single epiphany: hearing Ray Charles sing “What’d I Say.”“I was converted immediately,” he said. “I had never heard anything like that before. It allowed me to expand from country to R&B, into jazz, into gospel, wrapped all in one. That’s what Stax is.”Mr. Stewart was the audio engineer, and often the credited producer, on many records made at Stax, including Mr. Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness” and Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour.”The label began to make its mark in 1960, shortly after Mr. Stewart and his sister moved their operations to the former Capitol Theater at 926 McLemore Avenue in South Memphis. One day the popular singer and local disc jockey Rufus Thomas walked into the record shop that Mr. Stewart and Ms. Axton operated at the front of the building and announced that he wanted to record a duet with his daughter Carla.The record in question, “’Cause I Love You,” was only a regional hit, but “Gee Whiz (Look at His Eyes),” a dreamy ballad released the same year, reached both the R&B and pop Top 10 for Ms. Thomas in 1961. The same was true of 1961’s “Last Night,” a slinky saxophone-driven instrumental by the Mar-Keys, the R&B combo that evolved into Booker T. & the M.G.’s, Stax’s storied house band.Mr. Stewart and Ms. Axton in an undated photo. Mr. Stewart’s decision to start a record company would not have been possible had Ms. Axton not taken out a second mortgage on her home to buy him recording equipment.Charlie Gillett Collection/RedfernsThe success of “Gee Whiz” and “Last Night” changed the artistic and commercial direction of Satellite Records. It also acquired a new name, combining the first two letters of the owners’ last names to form the portmanteau Stax, after Mr. Stewart and Ms. Axton learned that another label owned the rights to Satellite.In 1962, “Green Onions,” by Booker T. & the M.G.’s, further cemented the label’s credibility on the emergent soul music scene, climbing to the pop Top 10 (and No. 1 on the R&B chart). A gutbucket instrumental, “Green Onions” served as a prototype for the groove-steeped, blues- and gospel-bred music that became synonymous with Stax — a sound as lean and funky as Motown’s was lush and refined.Just as inspiring as the music made at Stax was the social climate Mr. Stewart cultivated there. Known for its laid-back and inclusive vibe, the label was guided by a spirit of good will — almost all the recording artists were Black, the house musicians both Black and white — that bore witness to possibilities for racial harmony at a time when segregation prohibited Black and white people from sharing public spaces.“There was so much talent here, under circumstances that were almost considered impossible in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1960, with the racial situation here,” Mr. Stewart told The Associated Press in 2013, reflecting on the spirit of camaraderie that he helped foster at Stax. “It was a sanctuary for all of us.”James Frank Stewart was born in Middleton, Tenn., on July 29, 1930, one of three children of Dexter and Olivia (Cole) Stewart. His parents were farmers, and his father supplemented the family income with work as a bricklayer.Young Jim grew up playing gospel music at home on the fiddle with his father, uncle and two sisters. After graduating from high school, he moved to Memphis, where he worked at a local bank for several years before being drafted into the Army.In 1953, after completing two years of service, he returned to Memphis and resumed working as a bank clerk while playing fiddle in local country dance bands. He earned a degree in business from the University of Memphis.Mr. Stewart’s decision to launch Satellite Records in 1957 would not have been possible had his sister not taken out a second mortgage on her home to buy him recording equipment.A distribution deal with Atlantic Records further opened doors for Mr. Stewart’s fledgling label, especially after the success of “Gee Whiz” and “Last Night.” A few years later, Mr. Stewart hired the songwriting and production team of Isaac Hayes and David Porter, enabling Stax to expand its capacity to develop artists and repertoire and, ultimately, its roster.The arrival of Al Bell as national sales director in 1965 further strengthened the label’s capacity, lending it the promotional muscle needed to market its artists beyond Memphis and the South. But tragedy eclipsed this flush of prosperity when Mr. Redding and four members of his band, the Bar-Kays, died in a plane crash in 1967.Mr. Stewart in 1969 with Al Bell, left, who joined Stax as national sales director in 1965, and Isaac Hayes, who was a songwriter and producer at Stax in partnership with David Porter and also had hit records as a performer. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesAround the same time, Stax dissolved its distribution deal with Atlantic, a settlement that, because of a contractual loophole, cost the label the rights to virtually its entire catalog.The assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis in April 1968 cast even more of a pall over conditions at Stax, threatening the racial amity that had prevailed up to that point. Later that year Mr. Stewart, Ms. Axton and Mr. Bell, by then also an owner, sold Stax to Gulf & Western in exchange for stock in the company.Ms. Axton sold her stock in the label to Mr. Bell in 1970, and Mr. Stewart eventually followed suit.In 1975, following a revival of good fortune under Mr. Bell’s leadership, including the signing of the Staple Singers and others, creditors forced Stax into bankruptcy, leaving behind a legacy of some 800 singles and 300 albums.Stax’s foreclosure was a hardship for Mr. Stewart, who had invested much of his personal wealth trying to satisfy the creditors. He resurfaced in the early 1980s, occasionally supervising projects for former Stax artists, but soon retired from the business except for occasional appearances at the Stax Museum and Stax Music Academy. The label has since changed hands a few times.In 2002, after decades out of the public eye, Mr. Stewart was elected to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in the nonperformer category for his contributions to the creation and evolution of Southern soul music.Album covers on display at the Stax Museum of American Soul Music in Memphis.Adrian Sainz/Associated PressHe is survived by his son, Jeff; two daughters, Lori Stewart and Shannon Stewart; and two grandchildren. Evelyn (White) Stewart, his wife of more than 50 years, died in 2020. Another sister, Mary Louise McAlpin, died in 2017.“Mr. Stewart was the unpretentious soft-spoken diminutive white guy with a Brylcreem-lathered hair part and fat-rim glasses that I met in 1962,” Deanie Parker, Stax’s longtime publicist, told The Memphis Commercial Appeal after Mr. Stewart’s death.“He gave us opportunities denied to most Blacks in America and we gifted him with an indelible Memphis Sound that, together, we created at Stax Records.” More

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      At 91, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott Still Wants to Tell You a Story

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      TOMALES, Calif. — At a friend’s rustic home in a tiny village about an hour north of San Francisco, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott was trying to decide what to eat for breakfast. But he couldn’t resist telling a story.“Some of the best oatmeal I ever had was in the L.A. County Jail,” the singer said from beneath an old felt cowboy hat, a blue bandanna tied around his neck. In 1955, while living in Topanga Canyon, he was pulled over on the Pacific Coast Highway because the taillight on his Ford Model A was broken. “They told me I could pay a $25 fine or spend six days in the clink.”He was interested in religion at the time, and thought he’d finally have the chance to read the Bible, but his cellmates were too noisy. “I was extremely bored, and the police needed the space for more bona fide criminals, so they kicked me out on the second day,” he said. “They even gave me bus fare to get home.”In his decades as a wayfaring folk singer, Elliott, who turned 91 in August, has amassed volumes of such tales, stories that blur the line between reality and fantasy, and translate as a particular, increasingly endangered strain of American folklore. He’s released nearly two dozen albums since 1956, alone and with the banjo player Derroll Adams (who died in 2000), but wasn’t recognized with a Grammy until 1995.He’s known as an interpreter rather than a writer, singing beloved versions of “If I Were a Carpenter” by Tim Hardin, “San Francisco Bay Blues” by Jesse Fuller and the traditional “South Coast.” Though he hasn’t put out an album since “A Stranger Here” in 2009, he continues to perform live. His gigs this fall included a show at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville on Sept. 24; a short run of concerts in Georgia, Tennessee and North Carolina start this week, followed by a tribute to John Prine and stops in California.It’s a welcome return to the road. Elliott played 44 concerts in 2019 before the pandemic forced a 15-month pause, the longest he’s ever gone without stepping onstage. In August, he rescheduled two shows after contracting the coronavirus, though he described his case as “mild” after taking the antiviral drug Paxlovid.Born Elliot Charles Adnopoz to middle class, Lithuanian Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn, he became so enamored with our nation’s iconography — the rodeo, merchant vessels, boxcar-hopping folkies, Peterbilt trucks — that he transformed himself into a peripatetic cowboy, a maritime enthusiast and a troubadour chasing the wind.Today, he’s one of the last of the ’50s era folk music revivalists and beatniks who eschewed their parents’ conventions. He studied with Woody Guthrie, inspired Bob Dylan and hung out with Jack Kerouac. He was recorded by Alan Lomax, and has performed with Phil Ochs, Nico and Prine. He has covered, befriended and worked alongside American folk icons for so long that he’s become one.“He wears the cloak and scepter of the American minstrel; he’s that guy,” said Bob Weir, a founding member of the Grateful Dead and Elliott’s longtime friend. The pair met in the ’60s when Elliott was opening for Lightnin’ Hopkins at a club in Berkley, and Weir, who was 16 at the time, crashed into the dressing room through a skylight to avoid being carded. “He dropped me into a conversation that we’ve been having for incarnations; he pretty much had me nailed to the wall,” he said. “I became acutely aware of who he was and why they call him Ramblin’ Jack.”After decades of touring, the nonagenarian is resilient. He moves with swagger in his carefully chosen outfits.Aubrey Trinnaman for The New York TimesAs the legend goes, Elliott’s nickname originated with the folk singer Odetta’s mother. “I knocked, and the door opened a crack, and I heard her say, ‘Odetta, Ramblin’ Jack is here,’” Elliott said. “I adopted it right away.”Since then, Elliott has spent much of his life traveling between the East and West Coasts, with a little Texas in between. He finally settled in a modest rental in rural West Marin, an arresting stretch along coastal Highway 1. In these parts, Elliott’s become a sort of mythological figure, recognized because of his career but also, more generally, for his vibe, a kind soul in Western wear who cares just as much about the local postman as he does about his days on the Rolling Thunder Review.“He doesn’t distinguish between the Joan Baezes and the Bob Dylans, and the person who’s driving the bus or the truck,” his daughter Aiyana Elliott said in an interview in nearby Marshall, Calif. “He loves working people, but also all people who he comes in contact with.”In 2000, Aiyana made a documentary about her father, “The Ballad of Ramblin’ Jack,” that explored the real-life costs of building a mythic artistic persona and finds Aiyana grappling with Elliott’s unrelenting restlessness. In a moment of frustration, she begs for alone time with him, which he never grants. That plotline, she revealed, was more loaded than it seemed. “If there was anything keeping me from my father,” she explained, “it was that he had abominably bad taste in women for decades.”At the behest of his daughter, Elliott has been recording his tales for posterity at the home of his friend Peter Coyote, the actor, author and ’60s era counter cultural activist. “They trusted I could keep him on track,” Coyote said in an interview at his home. “He comes over here with a really good sound man, and people like Bobby Weir, Peter Rowan and all these other musicians he’s known drop in.”He lives quite modestly, a lot of people don’t realize just how modestly,” Elliott’s daughter Aiyana said. “But I don’t know that I’ve ever seen someone so rich in friends.”Aubrey Trinnaman for The New York TimesWeir emphasized the importance of capturing Elliott’s history: “I’m a big proponent of making some space for him in the Smithsonian,” he said, “because an enormous part of America’s musical heritage lives in that body.”Known for his storytelling and larger-than-life stage presence, Elliott’s greatest superpower may be his way with the guitar. “The way he attacks it, I only hear that in him,” Weir said. Elliott’s mighty flatpicking is also what made Frank Hamilton take notice amid the American folk music revival, when the two musicians were drawn to Washington Square Park. The former Weavers member and a founder of the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago, called Elliott a “folk guitarist par excellence” and a “very good raconteur.” “He and I, and a lot of other young men at the time, were imbued with a romanticism of the open road,” he said in a phone interview.Though Elliott has written few songs, a road trip with Hamilton spurred his most famous original, “912 Greens,” inspired by the house of a folk singer they crashed with in New Orleans. “That’s a talkin’ song,” Elliott said, meaning that he’s telling a story over acoustic guitar. “Guy Clark told me he stole the guitar part I’m playing for one of his songs, and I was honored.” Another conversational composition, “Cup of Coffee” was covered by Johnny Cash on his 1966 album of novelty songs “Everybody Loves a Nut.”Recalling his earliest encounter with Dylan, Elliott described him as “a nifty little kid with peach fuzz, he couldn’t shave yet.” (The future Nobel Prize winner was then a teenager visiting Guthrie at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in New Jersey.) Elliott wrote “Bleeker Street Blues” for Dylan in 1997, after the singer-songwriter was hospitalized with severe chest pains from histoplasmosis, a fungal infection. “Later on, we’ll join Woody and Jerry and Townes/But right now we all need you, so stick around,” Elliott speak-sings over acoustic guitar.From left: Richie Havens, Joan Baez, Elliott and Dylan onstage in 1975. Elliott performed as part of Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue that year.Bettmann, via Getty ImagesThe pair grew close when they were neighbors in the Hotel Earle in Greenwich Village, where they bonded over a shared love of Guthrie, and other music of the burgeoning folk revival. Since then, fans have accused Dylan of aping Elliott’s style in his early days, particularly his nasally delivery, but that doesn’t bother the elder. “I helped him get into the musician’s union,” he said. Today, the pair aren’t in regular contact, but when they do cross paths, it’s with a great deal of warmth. “Love you Jack,” Elliot recalled Dylan saying after a gig in Oakland in 2014. “I thought, ‘Wow, you’ve never told me that before,’” Elliott said.Unlike Dylan, and many of his other peers, Elliott hasn’t seen much commercial success — partly because he deals in niche genres, but also because “he’s not been great at managing his career, per se,” according to Aiyana. Because he hasn’t written many songs, he receives far fewer royalties on album sales and streams. The bulk of his income comes from touring, which has its own risks. More than anything, Elliott has sought freedom, and human connection. “He lives quite modestly, a lot of people don’t realize just how modestly,” Aiyana said. “But I don’t know that I’ve ever seen someone so rich in friends.”After decades of touring, the nonagenarian is resilient. He’s recovered from triple bypass surgery and two “little strokes” that left him unable to play the guitar for about a week. His hearing is assisted by small aids, but his mobility and stamina befit a much younger man. He moves with swagger in his carefully chosen outfits.After a breakfast of oatmeal with berries and chopped pecans, and a plethora of stories about schooner ships, James Dean, big rigs, Leon Russell and other subjects between, Elliott loaded into his Volvo station wagon to wind through the cypress-lined roads overlooking the inlet Tomales Bay. He passed through his friend Nancy’s lavender field, and by the dunes at Dillon Beach where he and his friend Venta hike. In a vulnerable moment, he recalled his wife, Jan, the last of five, who died from alcoholism in 2001. “I was very devastated when she left us,” he said.In 1995, the pair were living in a motor home in Point Reyes while she worked for Ridgetop Music, owned by Jesse Colin Young of the Youngbloods. One day, they decided to head north to sight see. “I was driving and admiring the bay on the left, and she was in the passenger seat and saw a sign on the right,” he said. “We pulled in and rented the house on the spot.” He’s lived in it ever since.“An enormous part of America’s musical heritage lives in that body,” Bob Weir said of Elliott.Aubrey Trinnaman for The New York TimesDuring the hourlong drive, Elliott’s profile set against the bucolic pastures rolling by and magnificent views of the ocean, he recalled other friends and acquaintances he’s known over the years, some who’ve moved away or died. Pointing to a run-down farmhouse, he wondered what happened to its owner: “I haven’t seen him in years, and I hope he’s OK.” Though Elliott lives in one of the most beautiful places in America, it’s clear that, for him, the landscapes are an added benefit. It’s the people here that truly nourish him.Later, at Nick’s Cove, a local restaurant with a pier that stretches over the bay, Elliott chatted with a woman who had bellied up to the bar to watch a baseball game. “She runs a big dairy,” he explained as he headed toward a table facing the night’s performer. “Hey, I know that guy!” He lit up at the sight of Danny Montana, a fellow cowboy folk singer dressed in a hat and boots. On this September night, he covered many of Elliott’s friends, like John Prine, Jerry Jeff Walker and Guy Clark, and Elliott hummed along in between bites of a hamburger. When he finished his set, Elliott invited Montana to sit at our table, and then complimented his “rig” as he packed up his gear to leave.In just a few weeks, Elliott’s own show would be hitting the road once again. He was particularly excited about his travel companion, a former Navy pilot who also loves horses. “He just got a brand-new, red, Ford F-350 diesel pickup truck, and he’s going to be my driver,” he said with a grin. “He’s a good driver and a great guy.” More

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      Jim Post, Known for a Memorably ‘Groovy’ Hit Song, Dies at 82

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      He and his wife, Cathy Conn, had a Top 10 single with “Reach Out of the Darkness” as Friend & Lover in 1968. It’s still played today, but it was their only hit.Jim Post, best known as half of the duo Friend & Lover, whose only hit was a memorable one — “Reach Out of the Darkness,” which proclaimed with flower-power earnestness, “I think it’s so groovy now that people are finally gettin’ together” — died on Sept. 14 in Dubuque, Iowa. He was 82.His former wife Janet Smith Post, with whom he wrote two children’s books, said his death, in hospice care, was caused by congestive heart failure.“Reach Out of the Darkness,” which rose to No. 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 in June 1968, featured Mr. Post and his wife at the time, Cathy Conn, singing lyrics that say, in part:Don’t be afraid of loveDon’t be afraid, don’t be afraidDon’t be afraid to loveListen to meEverybody needs a little love.Although the lyrics say “Reach out in the darkness,” an executive of Verve Forecast Records, the label that released the record, gave it the title “Reach Out of the Darkness.” That title suggested something different to Mr. Post, who wrote the song.“Reach out in the places where you’re not enlightened,” he explained to The South Bend Tribune in 2009. He then recited the chorus: “Reach out in the darkness, reach out in the darkness, reach out in the darkness and you may find a friend.”The song fared better than the duo’s album of the same name, and after a few more singles that were not successful, Friend & Lover disbanded and Mr. Post and Ms. Conn divorced. Ms. Conn died in 2018.Mr. Post injected extra elements into “Reach Out” for a 2009 recording, giving it a radically new arrangement and merging it with “Get Together,” the late-1960s Youngbloods hit that urged listeners, “Everybody get together / Try to love one another right now.” He called the medley “Reach Out Together.” He said at the time that “Reach Out,” mashed up with a song from the same era with a similar sensibility, was as relevant as it had been in 1968.“What is the theme of our country now?” he asked. He answered his own question: “Coming together.”“Reach Out of the Darkness” received new life in 2013 when it was heard over the closing credits of a sixth-season episode of “Mad Men” while Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination was being reported on television. Writing on the arts and culture website Across the Margin, L.P. Hanners said that the upbeat 45-year-old song “was perfectly paired with the duality featured in the final scene of ‘Man With a Plan.’”The song was also heard on the soundtrack of the 2015-16 TV series “Aquarius,” which starred David Duchovny as a homicide detective on the trail of Charles Manson in Los Angeles in the late 1960s.Jimmie David Post was born on Oct. 28, 1939, in Houston and grew up on a farm about 20 miles outside the city. His father was a longshoreman, his mother a homemaker.A singer from an early age, Jim won a school talent contest in first grade, which led to a performance on a local radio show. Later, he told The Chicago Sun-Times in 1972, he was a “successful evangelistic singer” who had performed in more than 500 churches around the United States by the time he was 22.In the early 1960s, Mr. Post became part of a three-man folk group, the Rum Runners, which in 1963 released a version of the traditional song “You Gotta Quit Kickin’ My Dog Around” as a single on Mercury Records. When they played at a club in Kansas City, Mo., a year later, Dick Brown of The Kansas City Star wrote, “To a major extent, the vocals depend on the remarkable tenor voice of Jim Post.”While on tour in Canada with the Rum Runners, Mr. Post met Ms. Conn, a dancer, and left the group to be with her. They soon began performing as Friend & Lover and made their name at the Earl of Old Town, a folk club in Chicago where singers like Steve Goodman and John Prine also performed.Although Friend & Lover was a folk act, their records used studio musicians and achieved more of a pop sound — and, at least at first, pop success.After the breakup of both Friend & Lover and his marriage to Ms. Conn, Mr. Post became a solo act and returned to folk music.“Jim was a wonderful character with a wide vocal range,” the folk singer Bonnie Koloc, who watched Mr. Post perform both with Ms. Conn and alone at the Earl of Old Town, said in an interview. “He was such an enthusiastic performer. We all loved him.”Mr. Post, who was married and divorced five times, is survived by a daughter and a grandson.He later changed directions, conceiving and touring with one-man musical shows. The first, in 1986, was “Galena Rose: How Whiskey Won the West,” about a 19th-century lead-mining rush in Galena, Ill., where he lived for many years.Then, in the mid-1990s, when he began to look like Mark Twain, Mr. Post created “Mark Twain and the Laughing River,” a show that married his songs to Twain’s words. The CD of the show earned him an American Library Association award for notable recordings.He followed that about a decade later with “Mark Twain’s Adventures Out West.”“Reach Out of the Darkness” remained a notable part of Mr. Post’s life 54 years after its release, through continued airplay and the royalties he received.“Two months ago, he got a check for $6,000,” his friend Bob Postel said in an interview.He added: “He was always proud that he wrote it and it surprised the hell out of him that it was a hit. That song paid for a lot of gas.” More

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      ‘Riotsville, USA’ Review: A Fake Town to Explore Ongoing Unrest

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      A documentary delves into the responses to the 1960s protests, revealing uncomfortable truths about that time and ours.The mid-1960s saw a conspicuous rise in civil unrest in the United States. The war in Vietnam, substandard living conditions for people of color, and a larger shift in consciousness all contributed to people wielding violence as a tool of protest. The new documentary “Riotsville, USA.,” shows the federal government’s response to this tactic as both sinister and, in some sense, laughable.The Riotsville of the title is the name of a fake town built as a training ground for law enforcement, in which riot story lines were enacted by soldiers and police forces. More than one of these towns were built by the U.S. government in collaboration with local police departments, with the events filmed for official review. The documentary’s director, Sierra Pettengill, uses a variety of archival footage here. There are government films of Riotsville exercises, clips from talk shows, and a mini-narrative of a public television station whose progressive politics led to its defunding by the Ford Foundation. And of course, searing images from riots in Los Angeles, Chicago, Newark, Memphis and Miami.A federal government advisory commission on civil disorder actually concluded that the rioters had something to riot about. They recommended sweeping policies to redress inequities. The activist H. Rap Brown, who was in jail when the report came out, said the people on the commission ought to be in a cell too, as “they’re saying what I’ve been saying.” The only recommendation lawmakers acted on, however, was to increase police budgets.The film’s tone, largely defined by narration written by the essayist Tobi Haslett and read by Charlene Modeste, is often one of weary exasperation. At times, though, Haslett’s words are charged with indignation, which arguably overwhelms the reportage, as in Haslett’s heated account of the media coverage of the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. To this complaint, one imagines Haslett might respond, “Too bad.” This is not an objective film. It is a polemic, a work of activism, a challenge to the viewer.Riotsville, USANot rated. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters. More