Joey Ramone

popular name: Whitney Houston

date_of_death: February 11, 2012

age: 48

cause_of_death: Drowning due to coronary artery disease and cocaine intoxication

claim_to_fame: Music

best_know_for: Whitney Houston was arguably one of the greatest American singers of modern history. Nicknamed "The Voice", she generated sales of over 200 million records worldwide and is one of the bestselling music artists of all time. Houston has influenced many singers in popular music, and is known for her powerful, soulful vocals and vocal improvisational skills. She is the only artist to have had seven consecutive number-one singles on the Billboard Hot 100, from "Saving All My Love for You" in 1985 to "Where Do Broken Hearts Go" in 1988. Houston enhanced her popularity upon entering the movie industry, most notable among her films include "The Body Guard" with Kevin Costner and "Waiting to Exhale" with Angela Bassett. Sadly in her final years she treated her talent with the frustrating indifference. While she sold more records and received more awards than almost any other female pop star of the 20th century, she spent most of her last years mired in a drug addiction that sapped her will and ability to sing and left her a broken shell of her former self. Upon her death, she was laid to rest at Fairview Cemetery in Westfield, NJ.

popular name: Adolph Rickenbacker

date_of_death: March 21, 1976

age: 88

cause_of_death: Cancer

claim_to_fame: Music

best_know_for: Adolph Rickenbacker was a Swiss-American remembered as one of the co-founders of the Rickenbacker guitar, and one of the key people who was responsible for the creation and adoption of electric guitars that managed to change the shape and sound of the modern music industry altogether. The Rickenbacker International Corporation (RIC) grew out of the first company founded for the sole purpose of creating and manufacturing fully electric musical instruments and amplifiers-the Los Angeles-based Electro String Instrument Corporation. Founded in 1931 by Adolph Rickenbacker and George D. Beauchamp, this pioneering firm produced "Rickenbacker Electro Instruments", the first modern electric guitars. RIC's history now spans 92 years in business on the leading edge of music trends that have changed popular culture forever. Played by Hawaiian musicians of the 1930s to jazz bassists of the 1990s, by the Beatles the Byrds and Tom Petty (to name just a few) the ringing sound of Rickenbacker instruments has helped define music as we know it today.

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.