Joey Ramone

popular name: Nat King Cole

date_of_death: February 15, 1965

age: 45

cause_of_death: Lung cancer

claim_to_fame: Music

best_know_for: Nat King Cole, was a phenomanel jazz pianist, singer and national treasure. He first rose to fame as the leader of the Nat King Cole Trio which became the model for small jazz ensembles that followed. He transitioned into more mainstream musical stylings where he recorded over 100 songs that became hits on the pop charts. He later was the first African-American man to host his own television series but died only two months after going in for treatment for stage 4 lung cancer.

popular name: Felix Pappalardi

date_of_death: April 17, 1983

age: 43

cause_of_death: Homicide - gunshot wound

claim_to_fame: Music

best_know_for: Felix Pappalardi was once a big name. Born in The Bronx on Dec. 30, 1939, and classically trained, he’d been a regular among the Greenwich Village folk crowd in the mid-’60s, first as an arranger for singer-songwriters like Tom Paxton and Fred Neil and then producing albums for Joan Baez and the Youngbloods, among others. His big moment came in 1967 when Cream - the rising British blues-rock trio featuring Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker - hired him to produce their second album. Disraeli Gears catapulted Cream onto rock’s A-list and with it Pappalardi. He also produced their Wheels of Fire and Goodbye albums. After his work with Cream he formed the group Mountain and quickly rose to the top with a performance at Woodstock followed by the hit song Mississippi Queen. His career ended very suddenly with a single bullet to the neck when his wife, Gail Collins, shot him dead in the bedroom of their New York City apartment.

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.