Elvin Shepherd

popular name: Karen Carpenter

date_of_death: February 4, 1983

age: 32

cause_of_death: Heart failure due to anorexia nervosa

claim_to_fame: Music

best_know_for: Karen Carpenter was an American singer and drummer, who formed half of the sibling duo the Carpenters alongside her older brother Richard. With a distinctive three-octave contralto range, she was praised by her peers for her vocal skills and was named Rolling Stone's Top 100 Vocalists. Carpenter's struggle with and eventual death of heart failure related to her years-long struggle with anorexia would later raise awareness of eating disorders and body dysmorphia and their possible causes. On February 1, 1983, Carpenter saw her brother for the last time and discussed new plans for the Carpenters and for resumed touring. Three days later, on February 4, Carpenter was scheduled to sign final papers making her divorce official. Shortly after waking up on that day, she collapsed at her parents' home in Downey. Paramedics found her heart beating once every 10 seconds (6 bpm). Carpenter was pronounced dead at Downey Community Hospital at 9:51 a.m. The vocalist and drummer behind three number-one singles, five number-two singles on the Billboard Hot 100, 15 number-one hits on the Adult Contemporary chart and 12 top-10 singles was only 32 years old.

popular name: Brent Mydland

date_of_death: July 26, 1990

age: 37

cause_of_death: Drug overdose - acute cocaine and morphine intoxication ("speedball")

claim_to_fame: Music

best_know_for: Brent Mydland was a talented keyboardist, vocalist, and songwriter best remembered as a member of The Grateful Dead from 1979 to 1990, a longer tenure than any other keyboardist (aka The Hot Seat) in the band. No previous keyboard player contributed any enduring original songs to the Dead’s repertoire. Brent immediately made his impact felt with the songs “Far From Me” and “Easy to Love You,” which appeared on the Grateful Dead’s 1980 album “Go to Heaven,” released almost exactly a year after he joined the band. On 1987’s “In the Dark,” Brent brought “Tons of Steel” to the table, and he co-wrote the house rocker that opened many an ‘80s show, “Hell in a Bucket,” with Bob Weir and frequent collaborator John Perry Barlow.

popular name: Earle Hagen

date_of_death: May 26, 2008

age: 88

cause_of_death: Natural causes

claim_to_fame: Music

best_know_for: Earle Hagen was a talented Hollywood composer and musician who wrote some of the most famous theme songs in television history. Hagen's memorably melodic riffs in a variety of musical genres graced the score of dozens of television shows from 1953 to 1986, including “Make Room for Daddy,” “The Mod Squad,” “Eight Is Enough” and “The Dukes of Hazzard. Of course most remember him as the creator of possibly the most idly hummed melody of all time - the folksy, countrified whistle that opened “The Andy Griffith Show,” accompanying Sheriff Andy Taylor (Mr. Griffith) and his young son, Opie (Ron Howard), down a dirt road toward a fishing hole. And not only did he score the opening theme song, he also did the whistling himself. He also wrote the swing-like anthem for “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” accompanying Mr. Van Dyke’s entry into his suburban home and his tumble over an ottoman. (In later seasons, Mr. Van Dyke would sidestep the ottoman to the same playful musical phrase.) He wrote the cool, cosmopolitan and suggestively exotic theme for the espionage drama “I Spy.” He wrote the cheerily mock-military anthem for the bumpkin-in-the-marines comedy “Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C,” starring Jim Nabors. And he wrote the perky pop theme for the Marlo Thomas vehicle “That Girl.”