Joey Ramone

popular name: Robert Lockwood Jr.

date_of_death: November 21, 2006

age: 91

cause_of_death: Cerebral aneurysm and a stroke

claim_to_fame: Music

best_know_for: Robert Lockwood Jr. was a Delta blues guitarist who recorded for Chess Records and other Chicago labels in the 1950s and 1960s. He was the only guitarist to have learned to play directly from Robert Johnson. Robert Lockwood was one of the first professional black entertainers to appear on radio in the South, on the King Biscuit Time radio show. Lockwood is known for his longtime collaboration with Sonny Boy Williamson II and for his work in the mid-1950s with Little Walter as well as Elmore James, Howlin' Wolf and B. B. King. In 2008 Lockwood was awarded the Grammy Award for Best Traditional Blues Album and was elected into the Blues Hall Of Fame in 1989. In 1995 he received the National Heritage Fellowship awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts and is a Seven-time W.C. Handy Blues Music Award winner.

popular name: Mark Sandman

date_of_death: July 3, 1999

age: 46

cause_of_death: Heart attack

claim_to_fame: Music

best_know_for: Mark Sandman was an American singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and record label founder best remembered as the bass player and lead singer for the alt indie rock band Morphine. Sandman possessed a distinctive, deep bass-baritone voice and a mysterious demeanor as he fronted a band lacking guitars or keyboards, yet still created a unique yet accessible smoky, addictive grooves achieved with Mark's two-string bass and Dana Colley's baritone saxophone - and tales of low-register living. He was an indie rock icon and longtime fixture in the Boston/Cambridge music scene and was also a member of the blues-rock band Treat Her Right and founder of Hi-n-Dry, a recording studio and independent record label. He was highly regarded by many other bass players for his unique "slow and murky" style, with Les Claypool, Mike Watt, and Josh Homme all citing Sandman as an influence.

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.