Florence Ballard born 30 June 1943

Florence Glenda Chapman (née Ballard; June 30, 1943 – February 22, 1976) was an American singer and a founding member of the Motown vocal female group the Supremes. She sang on 16 top 40 singles with the group, including ten number-one hits. After being removed from the Supremes in 1967, Ballard tried an unsuccessful solo career with ABC Records before she was dropped from the label at the end of the decade.

Florence and her mother

Florence Glenda Ballard was born in Rosetta, MS, June 30, 1943, the ninth of 15 siblings. The family moved to Detroit before she turned ten to take advantage of the city's booming job market. Ballard took music classes, sang in her school's choir, and built a reputation as a talented singer in her neighbourhood. At 14, she befriended the Primes (Paul Williams, Eddie Kendricks, and Kell Osborne) and performed a few gigs with the smooth, silky trio at Detroit venues. The Primes' manager, Milton Jenkins, encouraged Ballard to form a sister group to the Primes, so she chose Mary Wilson, Betty McGlown, and Diane Earle (Diana Ross). All sang lead, but McGlown left early and was replaced by Barbara Martin. Wilson had the lowest voice; Ballard, the most demonstrative; and Earle, the highest with a razor edge.

The Primettes

The Primettes played hops, talent shows, and house parties for fun and experience. They tried to get a deal with Berry Gordy's Motown before they graduated from high school, only to be told to try again after they finished; they cut a one-off record for the Lupine label, did backing sessions for Lupine-affiliated labels, and were present during occasional sessions for Gordy. Their single, "Tears of Sorrow" b/w "Pretty Baby," didn't leave make much of an impression but displayed compelling harmonies and fascinating leads. Around the time of its release, Ballard was sexually assaulted by future professional basketball star Reggie Harding. This greatly altered the singer's outlook and behaviour.

Gordy signed the Primettes the second time around in 1961. After a renaming to the Supremes (Gordy didn't like the Primettes), they cut their first single on Tamla; parental pressures forced Martin to quit shortly thereafter and "I Want a Guy" flopped. Soon, the producers zeroed in on Earle and rarely wrote anything for Wilson or Ballard. After a series of flops, number one smashes became automatic. The pace was frantic and Motown muddied the water by pushing Wilson and Ballard out of the limelight to spotlight Ross.

Ballard didn't take the snub well. The breaker came when she tired of the relentless pace and started missing gigs. By 1967, Cindy Birdsong (formerly with Patti LaBelle & the Bluebelles) had replaced her as a member of the Supremes. Lawsuits ensued. The money Ballard thought was sitting in a bank turned out to be a pittance. She married Thomas Chapman, a former Motown chauffeur, in 1968, and through various connections inked a deal with ABC-Paramount.

                             

George Kerr produced her first single, "It Doesn't Matter How I Say It" (1968), but radio play was almost nonexistent. She completed an album, “You Don't Have To”, that ABC left for dead. Despite gigs opening for Wilson Pickett, some television appearances, performing with Bill Cosby, and singing at President Nixon's inauguration party, Ballard experienced no commercial success. ABC released "Love Ain't Love" in the fall of 1968 but let it languish. The label had soured on Ballard, some say because of Chapman's constant demands, and didn't extend her contract. She never got another record deal.

Within a few years, Ballard's personal and financial conditions went from bad to abject. She moved into public housing, and Chapman (with whom she had three children) left the family. After receiving an insurance settlement in 1975, she cleaned up her situation and made another go at recapturing stardom. An appearance at Detroit's Ford Auditorium gave her a needed boost. She reconciled with Chapman, purchased a new house, and did television. But the melancholy years, fuelled by chemicals and alcohol, weakened her system and on February 21, 1976, Ballard entered Mt. Carmel Mercy Hospital, complaining of numbness in her extremities. She died at 10:05 ET the next morning from cardiac arrest caused by a coronary thrombosis (a blood clot in one of her coronary arteries), at the age of 32. Ballard is buried in Detroit Memorial Park Cemetery in Warren, Michigan.

Ballard's death was considered by one critic as "one of rock's greatest tragedies". Ballard was posthumously inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Supremes in 1988.

Edited from AllMusic & Wikipedia)

 

Bobby Gordon born 29 June 1941

Bobby Gordon (June 29, 1941- December 31, 2013) was an American clarinetist.

Robert Cameron Gordon was born in Manhasset, New York, in 1941. Happily for him, his father worked for RCA and sold Tommy Dorsey records for them also running a nightclub in Hartford, the Paddock, where 1940s celebrities like Joe Marsala went. 

Bobby was raised near Long Island where he was a student of Joe Marsala ("He also taught me how to practice to achieve a beautiful tone by starting on low E and playing long notes"). Marsala told him, "Try to play like Bobby Hackett (his phrasing, his feel for chord changes) but with my tone". In 1957, Bobby won a scholarship to the Lenox School of Jazz in Tanglewood, Massachusetts, and continued his studies at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. It was in 1960, with his family, that he moved to Chicago. He started playing Plugged Nickel there with banjo player Eddy Davis. From 1961, he recorded with Little Brother Montgomery. 

Between 1960 and 1963, he recorded three albums for the Dot label, during which time he played folk music and traditional jazz. He also played intermittently with Muggsy Spanier, notably in Toronto. One opportunity that didn’t materialize was his replacing Buster Bailey in the Louis Armstrong All Stars in 1968. Bobby remembers being measured for the band uniform and learning the repertoire. But Louis suffered a heart attack, “and I never got to play with him.” 

Bobby then conducted orchestras at the Jazz Ltd club, as well as at the London House in Chicago (in trio with Marty Grosz). He moved to Ryan's in New York with Max Kaminsky and recorded with Zutty Singleton and Danny Barker. In 1973 he was hired by Jim Cullum Jr. In 1977, he lived in New York and performed at Condon's for three years (with Bobby Hackett, Wild Bill Davison). For eight years he worked for Leon Redbone. It was then that he settled in San Diego where he met his English-born wife, Sue. 

                    Here’s “Blue Clarinet” from above Album.

                              

Around 1988, he also started playing with the Orphean Newsboys of Peter Ecklund and Marty Grosz. He recorded for cornetist Chris Tyle alongside fellow Pee Wee Russell disciple Frank Powers (1988). Bobby has led a quartet at Milligan’s Bar and Grill in La Jolla, CA since 1992. In 1993 Bobby Gordon conducted an orchestra that included Joe Marsala's widow, on the album Music From the Mauve Decades, where you’ll find the best of Bobby Gordon's sound quality is preserved. 

In May of 1995 and 1996 Bobby made appearances in Japan with Marty Grosz and the Orphan Newsboys, and at Lincoln Center in New York in July of 1996. In 2000 he accompanied Rebecca Kilgore. 

He produced the album Pee Wee's Song: The Music of Pee Wee Russell in April 2007 and also Bobby Gordon Plays Joe Marsala- Lower Regiter, this time with notably Ingham, Randy Reinhart , James Chirillo and Vince Giordano. Around 2010, he performed in Barcelona with the young Andrea Motis. As a singer, he is reminiscent of Little Brother Montgomery. Bobby Gordon has particularly worked on the low register and the delicacy that has made him considered "one of the great poets of jazz". 

Gordon had been in poor health in his later years but occasionally performed at jazz parties and festivals. He died  of cardiopulmonary arrest on December 31, 2013 at a skilled nursing facility in San Diego. The Pacific Beach resident was 72. 

(Edited from Wikipedia, JazzHot, Jazz Lives & the San Diego Union Tribune)

Pete Candoli born 28 June 1923

Pete Candoli (born Walter Joseph Candoli; June 28, 1923 – January 11, 2008) was an American jazz trumpeter and the brother of trumpeter Conte Candoli. He played with the big bands of Woody Herman and Stan Kenton and worked in the studios of the recording and television industries.

Pete & Conte

Candoli was born and brought up in Mishawaka, Indiana, with his younger brother Secondo, known to the jazz world as Conte Candoli, also a renowned trumpeter and soloist. Their father, a factory worker of Italian descent, played cornet in a local marching band and was keen for his sons to take up music as a way to a better life. 

Growing up in a household littered with instruments, it was little wonder that both boys showed promise, with Pete proficient on bass and French horn by the age of 12, before he changed to the trumpet, on which he was self-taught. So remarkable was his progress that he was soon playing local Polish weddings and dance jobs, qualifying for his musician's union card while still in his early teens. 

His first real break came when he joined the popular Sonny Dunham orchestra in 1941 for two years, before moving on to play lead trumpet with the Will Bradley, Ray McKinley and Tommy Dorsey orchestras. These were among the best bands of their day, but Candoli's greatest triumphs came when he joined the explosive Woody Herman big band in summer 1944, his 16-year old brother briefly alongside in the trumpet section until their mother hauled him back home to finish his education. 

The Herman orchestra (aka the First Herd) was then at the height of its fame, packed with star jazz soloists and great section players, Candoli paramount among them. His power and bandstand flamboyance earned him the title of "Superman with a horn" - so much so that he began to appear on stage in a Superman costume (which his first wife had made for him), leaping out from the wings to electrifying effect. 

This led to Candoli's routine as the superhero, described by Herman as: "One of our most successful gimmicks, which he initiated on his own. We were playing the last chorus of Apple Honey when he jumped out on stage in time to play his walloping passages. It brought the house down and remained part of our act." At the Paramount theatre in New York, Candoli refined his gimmick by sliding down a wire from a high balcony, arriving with split-second timing to play his high notes. 

                             

He won many awards, notably his selection as one of Esquire magazine's new stars of 1946. He can be heard screeching boppishly on many of the Herman Herd's greatest recordings, and played first trumpet when Igor Stravinsky premiered his Ebony Concerto, written specially for Herman. After the clarinettist disbanded the Herd temporarily, Candoli moved on again to play lead for a couple of years with the Tex Beneke and Jerry Gray bands. 

In the 1950’s he played  with Stan Kenton's New Concepts orchestra, where he teamed up with brother Conte once more, Candoli made for Los Angeles, where he stayed for the rest of his life. He entered fully into studio life, taking part in more than 5,000 recording sessions; and his lead talents were in constant demand for jazz dates, movie soundtracks (notably the Frank Sinatra vehicle, The Man with the Golden Arm), and television series, such as the Peter Gunn show. 

Pete conducting Orchestra for Judy Garland

He also found time to perform with Les Brown's Band of Renown and formed several combos with his brother, continuing intermittently until Conte's death in 2001. At other times, he was a member of the studio orchestra, again with his brother, for the Johnny Carson television show, and backed such singers as Peggy Lee and Ella Fitzgerald. He also managed to imitate Louis Armstrong, vocally and instrumentally; this act was launched during a tour of Japan with Benny Carter. 

The Candoli brothers were especially close (Pete once said they'd never exchanged a harsh word in their lives), and Pete suffered a devastating blow when Conte succumbed to cancer in December 2001. Pete didn't play much after that but still showed up at various jazz events. But he too had cancer, and it claimed his life on January 11, 2008, at age of 84. 

Candoli's three marriages, all to fellow performers, ended in divorce. He was married first to the actor Vicky Lane; then briefly to actor Betty Hutton in the 1960s; and finally to actor and singer Edie Adams, with whom he had appeared in nightclubs. As well as leading her orchestra and playing trumpet with them, Candoli also sang and danced on stage. 

(Edited from The Guardian, AllAboutJazz & Wikipedia)

Here’s Pete Candoli with Rosemary Clooney and Jeri Southern on piano on Clooney’s show in 1956.

Harry "The Hipster" Gibson born 27 June 1915

Harry "The Hipster" Gibson (June 27, 1915 – May 3, 1991), born Harry Raab, was an American jazz pianist, singer, and songwriter. 

Gibson was Jewish. He came from a musical family that operated a player piano repair shop. He began playing piano in the 1920s as a child, in the Bronx and Harlem. His first professional piano gig was at age 13 with his uncle's orchestra. He began playing boogie woogie and talking in a jive style. He was invited into black speakeasies in Harlem to play piano while still a teenager. 

In the 1930s, after Prohibition ended, Gibson played regularly in Harlem nightclubs. He punctuated his piano stylings with a running line of jive patter, which can be traced directly to recordings of the late-1930s jazz personality Tempo King, particularly "I'll Sing You a Thousand Love Songs" with its enthusiastic exclamations. After King's death in 1939, Gibson made King's vocal mannerisms his own. 

Gibson was fond of playing Fats Waller tunes, and when Waller heard Gibson in a club in Harlem in 1939, he hired him to be his relief pianist at club dates. Between 1939 and 1945, Gibson played at Manhattan jazz clubs on 52nd Street ("Swing Street"), most notably the Three Deuces, run by Irving Alexander, and Leon and Eddie's run by Leon Enkin and Eddie Davis. During one audition for a nightclub engagement, where he played piano for a girl singer, he gave his true name of Harry Raab. The club owner insisted on a "showbiz" name, shouting, "I'm calling you two The Gibsons!" Harry adopted Gibson as his professional name. 

In the 1940s, Gibson was known for writing unusual songs considered ahead of their time. He was also known for his unique, wild singing style, his energetic and unorthodox piano styles, and his intricate mixture of hardcore, gutbucket boogie rhythms with ragtime, stride and jazz piano styles. He took the boogie woogie beat of his predecessors, but he made it frantic, similar to the rock and roll music of the 1950s. Examples of his wild style are found in "Riot in Boogie" and "Barrelhouse Boogie". An example of his strange singing style is "The Baby and the Pup." Other songs that he recorded were "Handsome Harry, the Hipster," "I Stay Brown All Year 'Round," 4-F Ferdinand the Frantic Freak," "Get Your Juices at the Deuces" and "Stop That Dancin' Up There." 

                              

In his autobiography, he claimed he coined the term hipster between 1939 and 1945 when he was performing on Swing Street, and he started using "Harry the Hipster" as his stage name. Gibson's wild-man theatrics belied the fact that he was also a highly trained classical musician. While working on "Swing Street" at night, he was a fellow at the Juilliard Graduate School during the day. Gibson was invited to perform at Carnegie Hall, for a jazz concert held on December 2, 1944. Gibson performed a serious rendition of Bix Beiderbecke's piano piece "In a Mist." A recording contract with Musicraft Records followed, resulting in the hit album "Boogie Woogie in Blue." 

He recorded "Who Put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy's Ovaltine?", released in January 1946. Radio stations across America refused to play it, and he was blacklisted in the music industry. Although his mainstream movie appearance in Junior Prom was released that year, it could not overcome the notoriety of the "Benzedrine" record. His own drug use led to his decline, and with the rising popularity of young rock-and-roll musicians among teenagers in the 1950s, older musicians were not in demand. 

In the 1960s, when Gibson saw the success of the Beatles, he switched to rock and roll. By the 1970s, he was playing hard rock, blues, bop, novelty songs and a few songs that mixed ragtime with rock and roll. His hipster act became a hippie act. His old records were revived on the Dr. Demento radio show, particularly "Benzedrine", which was included on the 1975 compilation album Dr. Demento's Delights. 

His comeback resulted in three more albums: Harry the Hipster Digs Christmas, Everybody's Crazy but Me, (its title taken from the lyrics of "Stop That Dancin' Up There") (Progressive, 1986), and Who Put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy's Ovaltine (Delmark, 1989). The latter two feature jazz, blues, ragtime, and rock and roll songs about reefer, nude bathing, hippie communes, strip clubs, male chauvinists, "rocking the 88s", and Shirley MacLaine. 

Gibson may have been the only jazz pianist of the 1930s and 1940s to go on to play in rock bands in the 1970s and 1980s. The only constants were his tendency to play hard-rocking boogie woogie and his tongue-in-cheek references to drug use. Suffering from congestive heart failure, Harry had long ago decided that he would end life on his own terms if he ever became chronically ill. Harry Gibson took his own life by putting a handgun to his head on May 3, 1991. He was 75.   (Edited from Wikipedia)

Bill Russo born 25 June 1928

Bill Russo (June 25, 1928 – January 11, 2003) was an American composer, arranger, and musician from Chicago, Illinois, United States. He composed more than 200 pieces for jazz orchestra, and there were more than 30 recordings of his work. His five-decade career included collaborations with his idol Duke Ellington, Leonard Bernstein, Seiji Ozawa, Stan Kenton, Cannonball Adderley, Yehudi Menuhin, Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Carter, Maynard Ferguson, Billie Holiday, Cleo Laine, and Annie Ross.

William Joseph Russo was born in Chicago. He was drawn towards writing music at an early age, after hearing Woody Herman's band. At the age of 17 he had two scores accepted by Lionel Hampton. He was originally destined for a legal career. He enrolled at the University of Illinois, but found himself spending more time with the college jazz orchestra than on his studies. 

A student of jazz pianist Lennie Tristano, Russo wrote orchestral scores for the Stan Kenton Orchestra in the 1950s, including 23 Degrees N 82 Degrees W, Frank Speaking, and Portrait of a Count. He composed Halls of Brass for the brass section, without woodwinds or percussion. The section recording this piece included Buddy Childers, Maynard Ferguson and Milt Bernhart. In 1954, Russo left the Kenton Orchestra and continued private composition and conducting studies, then moved to New York City in 1958, where he led the 22-piece Bill Russo Orchestra. 

In 1962, Russo moved to England and worked for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). While working in London he founded the London Jazz Orchestra. He was a contributor to the third stream movement which sought to combine jazz and classical music. In 1965 he returned to his native Chicago and founded the music department at Columbia College Chicago. He was the director for the Center for New Music and the college's first full-time faculty member. He was the Director of Orchestral Studies at Scuola Europea d'Orchestra Jazz in Palermo, Italy. 

             Here’s “An Esthete On Clark Street” from above EP

                              

Besides writing for jazz ensembles, Russo composed classical music, including symphonies and choral works, and works for the theater, often mixing elements of the genres. His 1959 Symphony No. 2 in C "TITANS" received a Koussevitsky award, and marked his entrance into the classical-music world. It was performed by the New York Philharmonic that year with Leonard Bernstein conducting and trumpeter Maynard Ferguson appearing as soloist. 

Srayhorn, Ellington & Russo

The 1973 album that included Russo's Three Pieces for Blues Band and Symphony Orchestra became a big seller for Deutsche Grammophon, with its cross-genre performance by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, with Seiji Ozawa conducting and the Siegel-Schwall Band. Ozawa had premiered "Three Pieces for Blues Band and Symphony Orchestra" with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Siegel-Schwall Band in 1968. The success prompted the label to release Russo's Street Music, A Blues Concerto in 1979, featuring Corky Siegel on harmonica and piano.

Russo's theater works included a rock cantata, The Civil War (1968), based on poems by Paul Horgan. A politically charged multimedia piece for soloist, chorus, dancers, and rock band, The Civil War paralleled the American Civil War and the martyrdom of President Lincoln with the turbulent civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s and the murders of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. Russo followed The Civil War with other rock-based multimedia music-theater works, including Liberation, Joan of Arc, Aesop's Fables, The Bacchae, and Song of Songs. These were performed by the Chicago Free Theater, which Russo founded and directed. The Free Theater spawned companies in Baltimore and San Francisco. 

In 1969, Russo and director Paul Sills, founding director of the Second City, and community activist Rev. Jim Shiflett testablished the Body Politic Theatre. Russo's other works for the theater include the operas John Hooton (1962), The Island (1963), Land of Milk and Honey (1964), Antigone (1967), The Shepherds' Christmas, The Pay-Off (1983–84), The Sacrifice, and Dubrovsky (1988), and a musical fairy tale for children, The Golden Bird, for singers, narrator, dancers, and symphony orchestra. Russo also composed art songs set to poetry by Edna St. Vincent Millay, W. H. Auden, and Gertrude Stein, as well as scores for dance and film. 

As part of his work with Columbia College, he started the Chicago Jazz Ensemble (CJE), which was dedicated to preserving and expanding jazz. A few years later this ensemble disbanded but was reborn in 1991. Russo's successor as artistic director was trumpeter Jon Faddis. Russo appeared with the band at the Jazz Showcase nightclub during the week before his death. After struggling with cancer, he retired as chair of the Columbia College Music Department in 2002.

He was still conducting the orchestra only a few days before his death on January 11, 2003. 

(Edited from Wikipedia & The Telegraph)

Tommy Scott born 24 June 1917

Ramblin' Tommy Scott (June 24, 1917 – September 30, 2013), aka "Doc" Tommy Scott, was an American country and rockabilly musician. He recorded consistently from the 1930s-2000s and released a number of solo sides in the 1950s and 1960s which branched into rockabilly. 

Thomas Scott was born outside of Toccoa, Georgia, United States, and began playing the guitar at age ten. After high school he joined Doc Chamberlain's medicine show, and got his first job in radio on WTFL in Athens, Georgia in 1933. He also sold Vim Herb on the radio. After Chamberlain retired and gave Scott the patent medicines, he landed a regular job fronting the Uncle Pete and Minervy show on Raleigh, North Carolina's WPTF, and soon after this he was offered a job with Charlie Monroe becoming the first Kentucky Partner as a feature act - Rambling Scotty. 

He performed on the WWVA Jamboree in Wheeling, West Virginia with Monroe and was also a frequent soloist there, and did skits involving blackface and ventriloquism with "Luck McLuke" (a talking mannequin) which was said to be his favourite comedy routine throughout his career up to that point. Monroe and Scott started the Man-O-Ree medicine company selling Scott's patent laxative over the radio. The group moved to WHAS in Louisville, Kentucky, where he did the early morning show. His medicine and musical partnership came to an end with Monroe and he soon launched a tent show with Curly Seckler. 

He married his wife Frankie in 1940; the couple had a daughter, Sandra; both women became part of his stage show, his films and TV shows. In the 1940s he did radio transcriptions which were broadcast nationwide. By 1942 he had his own stage show traveling coast to coast, 'Ramblin' Tommy Scott's Hollywood Hillbilly Jamboree'. He began the Herb-O-Lac Medicine Company and later Katona Medicine Company selling laxatives and liniments. He soon joined the Grand Ole Opry and later went to Hollywood to begin a career in film and TV. Beginning with Carolina Cotton in 1949, Scott's road show operated six days per week from January through early December, featured Scott with some guest stars from film and TV. 

                              

He returned to television in the 1950's with Tommy Scott's "Smokey Mountain Jamboree" in syndication around the country. Early television appearances also include Johnny Carson.  From 1949-1980 his touring stage show provided a vehicle for former western film stars to reach their public.

 Among those western stars were Carolina Cotton, Ray Whitley, Johnny Mack Brown, Sunset Carson, Monte Hale, Fuzzy St. John and Tim McCoy. Many others tried to sign on and some came for a day or two. Other stars included Uncle Dave Macon, Curley Williams, Billy Grammar, Junior Samples, Clyde Moody, "In the Heat of the Night" star Randall Franks among others. 

In the 1970s, Scott returned to his earliest roots and rebranded himself as "Doc" Scott, impressario of his own latter-day, nostalgia-themed medicine show. Until the mid-1990s when his wife was stricken with Alzheimer's, "'Doc' Scott's Last Real Old Time Medicine Show" visited nearly 300 towns each year across the United States and Canada. To date, the show, founded by "Doc" V. O. Chamberlain in 1890, has performed over 29,000 times in towns across America and Canada. It was at this time that Scott, wearing his trademark colourful clothes, red top hat and snake skinned shoes, endeared himself to millions of fans around the world. 

According to his autobiography, Snake Oil, Superstars and Me, published in 2007 and co-authored by Randall Franks and Shirley Noe Swiesz, that over almost 60 years, there can be few major country artists with whom he has not appeared and few major US or Canadian programmes on which he has not been featured. In subsequent decades he appeared on The Today Show, Late Night with David Letterman, and Oprah Winfrey. He was the subject of a PBS documentary Still Ramblin'. 

Scott's status as a treasure is evidenced by many accolades, including his nominations for the National Heritage Award, his 1976 placement in the Country Music Foundation's Walkway of Stars and the 1996 unveiling of his Georgia Music Hall of Fame exhibit, the museum's largest, in Macon.

With over 500 recordings to his credit, his chart success with included three titles "Rosebuds and You," "Dance With Her, Henry," and "Mule Train." He wrote around 300 of his recordings including "Rosebuds and You," recorded by numerous artists, and the bluegrass standard "Rainbow of My Dreams" popularized by Lester Flatt. He recorded for various labels, including 4-Star and King, and some early recordings were reissued in the 80s by the German Cattle label, who did a reasonable job of trying to improve the relatively poor recording quality of some of the original recordings. 

Frankie Scott died Saturday April 24th, 2004 of a stroke at the age of 84. Tommy Scott died on September 30th 2013 in Toccoa, Georgia following injuries sustained in an automobile accident on Aug.10. He was 96 years old. 

(Edited from Wikipedia, AllMusic, tommyscott.net & IMDb)