Joey Ramone

popular name: Elvis Presley

date_of_death: August 16, 1977

age: 42

cause_of_death: Heart attack

claim_to_fame: Music

best_know_for: Elvis Presley was an American singer, musician and actor. He is regarded as one of the most significant cultural icons of the 20th century and is often referred to as the "King of Rock and Roll". He is the best-selling solo music artist of all time, and was commercially successful in many genres, including pop, country, R&B, adult contemporary, and gospel. He won three Grammy Awards, received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award at age 36, and has been inducted into multiple music halls of fame. Presley made his film debut in "Love Me Tender". After touring and starring in films, by 1973 Elvis's health was in major and serious decline. Twice during that year, he overdosed on barbiturates, spending three days in a coma in his hotel suite after the first incident. On the evening of Tuesday, August 16, 1977, Presley was scheduled to fly out of Memphis to begin another tour. That afternoon, Ginger Alden discovered him in an unresponsive state on a bathroom floor. According to her eyewitness account, "Elvis looked as if his entire body had completely frozen in a seated position while using the toilet and then had fallen forward, in that fixed position, directly in front of it. ... It was clear that, from the time whatever hit him to the moment he had landed on the floor, Elvis hadn't moved."

popular name: Mel Tormé

date_of_death: June 5, 1999

age: 73

cause_of_death: Stroke

claim_to_fame: Music

best_know_for: Singer, actor, writer, composer, arranger, drummer and pianist Mel Tormé was extraordinarily versatile, but he will primarily be remembered as one of the supreme popular vocalists of this century, a superb song stylist equally persuasive handling tender love-songs, swinging rhythm numbers or giving a cool jazz sound to the best of popular song. As a singer, his name ranks in the top echelon along with Crosby and Sinatra, but he excelled them when it came to jazz stylings, particularly with the series of superb recordings he made with arranger Marty Paich starting in the mid-Fifties. As a composer, his best-known work, "The Christmas Song" ("Chestnuts roasting on an open fire . . ."), is a perennial favourite. His own autobiography, It Wasn't All Velvet, is an oblique reference to the label given him by the disc jockey Fred Robbins, "The Velvet Fog", an attempt to sum up the warm, mellow timbre that gave Torme's voice its unmistakable individuality. Sadly on August 8, 1996, a stroke ended Tormé's 65-year singing career. In February 1999, he was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. He died from another stroke on June 5, 1999, at the age of 73.

popular name: Bix Beiderbecke

date_of_death: August 6, 1931

age: 28

cause_of_death: Lobar pneumonia coupled with edema of the brain and the effects of long-term alcoholism

claim_to_fame: Music

best_know_for: Bix Beiderbecke was an American jazz cornetist, pianist and composer who was one of the most influential jazz soloists of the 1920s. As a cornet player noted for an inventive lyrical approach and purity of tone and with such clarity of sound that Eddie Condon described it like "Beiderbecke took out a silver cornet. He put it to his lips and blew a phrase. The sound came out like a girl saying yes." His solos on seminal recordings such as "Singin' the Blues" and "I'm Coming, Virginia" (both 1927) demonstrate his gift for extended improvisation that heralded the jazz ballad style. Sadly he died at the young age of 28 due primarily to his prodigious consumption of alcohol.