Joey Ramone

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.

popular name: Yank Rachell

date_of_death: April 9, 1997

age: 94

cause_of_death: Natural causes

claim_to_fame: Music

best_know_for: One of a few pre-war blues artist to continue performing into the 1990s, Yank Rachell was the primary exponent of the blues mandolin.

popular name: Franco Ventriglia

date_of_death: November 28, 2012

age: 90

cause_of_death: Natural causes

claim_to_fame: Music

best_know_for: Franco Ventriglia was an opera singer who sang bass in every major European opera house during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Serving in the 1st Marine Aircraft Wing in the South Pacific during World War II upon return stateside Franco was working at his brother's filling station in Easton, Connecticut when Mario Pagano, a maestro de Canto at the American Theatre Wing Professional School heard from one of Ventriglia's coworkers about his singing talent. Ventriglia passed an audition and went on to attend the school on the G.I. Bill. After Pagano's death, Ventriglia and his wife Jean boarded the ocean liner SS Constitution for Italy. On board, after singing Ol' Man River for a group in first class, he met a businessman who asked him to contact Toti Dal Monte, a great coloratura soprano who also taught voice in Rome. Ventriglia took singing lessons from Dal Monte and eventually made his operatic debut in Palermo, singing in the Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. He later sang with Luciano Pavarotti in La bohème and Rigoletto. He performed in Samson and Delilah at La Scala, a performance he considered the highlight of his career. He returned to the U.S. in 1978, where he continued to perform at venues including Carnegie Hall, and traveled to perform in southeast Asia, until his retirement in 2001 at age 79. Upon his death he was laid to rest at Oak Lawn Cemetery in Fairfield, CT.