Joey Ramone

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.” Upon his death, we was laid to rest at Desert Memorial Park in Cathedral City, California.

popular name: The Greatest Unknown Guitar Player

date_of_death: August 14, 1988

age: 48

cause_of_death: Suicide - hanging (disputed)

claim_to_fame: Music

best_know_for: Roy Buchanan was an blues guitarist and a pioneer of the Telecaster sound, Buchanan worked as a sideman and as a solo artist, with two gold albums early in his career and two later solo albums that made it to the Billboard chart. Guitar Player praised him as having one of the "50 Greatest Tones of All Time." Sweet Dreams, released in 1972, remains the finest moment in the career of the man who was damned with the accolade ‘the guitarist’s guitarist’. Lauded by the likes of Jeff Beck, Gary Moore (who covered the blues-rock thriller The Messiah Will Come Again) and, more recently, Joe Bonamassa, Buchanan never attained any real fame or fortune during his lifetime. These days he’s as infamous for apparently turning down an offer to join the Rolling Stones and his mysterious death in a Virginia jail cell in 1988 as he is for his music. Yet Buchanan’s legacy as a guitarist punches way above that of many of the rock stars who held him in such high regard.

popular name: Buddy Tate

date_of_death: February 10, 2001

age: 87

cause_of_death: Natural causes

claim_to_fame: Music

best_know_for: Buddy Tate was jazz saxophone player who made a name for himself playing with such greats as Count Basie, Lionel Hampton, Benny Goodman as well as with his own band for over 20 years at the Celebrity Club in Harlem, New York City.