Al Jackson Jr.

popular name: Scrapper Blackwell

date_of_death: October 7, 1962

age: 59

cause_of_death: Murdered (solved but no arrest)

claim_to_fame: Music

best_know_for: Scrapper Blackwell, together with Leroy Carr are arguably the two most underrated blues musicians of the 1920s and 1930s. What is undeniable is the two together created some of the most recorded blues classics including How Long, How Long Blues, Mean Mistreater Mama and When the Sun Goes Down

popular name: Arnold Schoenberg

date_of_death: July 13, 1951

age: 76

cause_of_death: Myocardial infarction

claim_to_fame: Music

best_know_for: Arnold Schoenberg was an Austrian-American composer, music theorist, teacher, writer, and painter. He is widely considered one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. He was associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese School. Schoenberg's approach, both in terms of harmony and development, has shaped much of 20th-century musical thought. Many composers from at least three generations have consciously extended his thinking, whereas others have passionately reacted against it. Schoenberg was known early in his career for simultaneously extending the traditionally opposed German Romantic styles of Brahms and Wagner. Later, his name would come to personify innovations in atonality (although Schoenberg himself detested that term) that would become the most polemical feature of 20th-century classical music. In the 1920s, Schoenberg developed the twelve-tone technique, an influential compositional method of manipulating an ordered series of all twelve notes in the chromatic scale. He also coined the term developing variation and was the first modern composer to embrace ways of developing motifs without resorting to the dominance of a centralized melodic idea. Schoenberg's archival legacy is held at the Arnold Schönberg Center in Vienna.

popular name: Dean Manuel

date_of_death: July 31, 1964

age: 30

cause_of_death: Plane crash

claim_to_fame: Music

best_know_for: "Dockie" Dean Manuel played piano for several noteworthy bands of the mid-twentieth century both on the West Coast and in Nashville, Tennessee. While attempting to re-establish himself in the West Coast country music scene after returning from the armed services, Dean received a phone call from Jim Reeves in Nashville, who was reorganizing the Blue Boys, named for Jim’s big hit of 1958, “Blue Boy.” Manuel and his family moved to Nashville. Manuel became part of the Jim Reeves Blue Boys band in 1959. He he was joined by drummer Mel Rogers and bass player James Kirkland to be in the band. Manuel, Rogers, and Kirkland, along with Leo Jackson (who was returning from the military), formed the nucleus of Jim Reeves and the Blue Boys. Sadly in 1965 Manuel died in a plane crash with Jim Reeves after leaving Independence County, where he had been helping Reeves with a land purchase.