Elvin Shepherd

popular name: Antonio Salieri

date_of_death: May 7, 1825

age: 74

cause_of_death: Effects of dementia caused by a head wound

claim_to_fame: Music

best_know_for: Antonio Salieri was an Italian classical composer, conductor, and teacher. Salieri was a pivotal figure in the development of late 18th-century opera. As a student of Florian Leopold Gassmann, and a protégé of Christoph Willibald Gluck, Salieri was a cosmopolitan composer who wrote operas in three languages. Salieri helped to develop and shape many of the features of operatic compositional vocabulary, and his music was a powerful influence on contemporary composers. Appointed the director of the Italian opera by the Habsburg court, a post he held from 1774 until 1792, Salieri dominated Italian-language opera in Vienna. During his career, he also spent time writing works for opera houses in Paris, Rome, and Venice, and his dramatic works were widely performed throughout Europe during his lifetime. Even as his works dropped from performance, and he wrote no new operas after 1804, he still remained one of the most important and sought-after teachers of his generation, and his influence was felt in every aspect of Vienna's musical life. Franz Liszt, Franz Schubert, Ludwig van Beethoven, Anton Eberl, Johann Nepomuk Hummel and Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart were among the most famous of his pupils. In the last year of his life he struggled with health issues related to a head injury and passed away at the age of 74.

popular name: Dinah Washington

date_of_death: December 14, 1963

age: 39

cause_of_death: Accidental overdose - prescription diet and sleep medication mixed with alcohol

claim_to_fame: Music

best_know_for: Dinah Washington was an American singer and pianist who has been cited as "the most popular black female recording artist of the 1950s". Primarily a jazz vocalist, she performed and recorded in a wide variety of styles including blues, R&B, and traditional pop music and gave herself the title of "Queen of the Blues". It all started when she won a talent show at the age of 15. Shortly after she teamed up with Lionel Hampton and stayed with his orchestra until 1946. Going solo she released a diverse catalog of hits for the mainstream black population including Hank William's "Cold, Cold Heart," the Orioles "It's Too Soon To Know" and her biggest hit of the 1940s "Baby, Get Lost". Washington continued her chart success maintaining a spot on the Top 10 R&B charts from 1949 through 1955 with "I've Got You Under My Skin" and "What A Difference A Day Makes". In July 1963, football great Dick "Night Train" Lane married jazz singer Dinah Washington at a ceremony in Las Vegas. It was the sixth marriage for Washington and the second for Lane. Just five months later early in the morning of December 14, 1963, Lane went to sleep with Washington who awoke later to find her slumped over and not responsive. She was pronounced her dead at the scene at age 39. An autopsy later showed a lethal combination of secobarbital and amobarbital, prescriptions for her insomnia and diet, which contributed to her death. She was a 1986 inductee of the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993.

popular name: Big Joe Turner

date_of_death: November 24, 1985

age: 74

cause_of_death: Heart failure

claim_to_fame: Music

best_know_for: Big Joe Turner, a 300-pound legend who learned to sing the blues as a Kansas City junkman and transformed decades of urban black music into the roots of rock ‘n’ roll. Turner sang rhythm and blues songs such as “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” “Corrine Corrina” and “Lucille” that became the foundation of a new genre of music when white singers such as Elvis Presley and Bill Haley and the Comets popularized them for audiences of white teen-agers in the mid-1950s. The music took the name rock ‘n’ roll because those words appeared in the lyrics of several blues songs.