Etta Baker
MORGANTON, N.C. (AP)–Etta Baker, an influential blues guitarist who recorded with Taj Mahal and was awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts, died Saturday, her family said. She was 93.
No cause of death was given, but her health had been failing for years, The News & Observer of Raleigh reported on its Web site. She died in Fairfax, Va., while visiting a daughter.
Baker was raised in a musical family in western North Carolina. In 1956, she appeared on a compilation album called “Instrumental Music of the Southern Appalachians.” The recording influenced the growing folk revival, especially her versions of “Railroad Bill” and “One-Dime Blues.”
She worked for 26 years at a textile mill in Morganton before quitting at age 60 to pursue a career as a musician.
Baker became a hit on the international folk-festival circuit, playing Piedmont blues, a mix of the clattery rhythms of bluegrass and blues. She won a 1991 Folk Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Baker toured well into her 80s, but finally quit because of heart problems.
This year she no longer had the strength to play guitar so she focused on the banjo. She could still play well a month ago, said Wayne Martin, who plays fiddle on her banjo collection coming out next year.
Baker also is to appear on blues-rock guitarist Kenny Wayne Shepherd’s next album due out in November.
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Eddie Driscoll
PORTLAND, Maine (AP)–Eddie Driscoll, a television personality who entertained Maine viewers with a madcap assortment of characters for more than 30 years, died Saturday. He was 81.
His death was reported by family members. A cause was not given.
Driscoll was a broadcasting pioneer who began his TV career in 1954 at WTWO-TV in Bangor, later to become WLBZ-TV, the day the station went on the air.
During the next three decades, Driscoll hosted numerous shows on live TV, using slapstick humor in the vaudeville tradition.
His shows included “Dialing for Dollars,” where he called people randomly at home and asked them questions for paltry cash prizes. Viewers couldn’t hear the people Driscoll was calling, only him as he cracked jokes and read public service announcement for bean suppers.
Driscoll’s quirky characters, offbeat skits and ability to make people laugh made him a household name. His other shows included “Weird,” “My Backyard,” “The Great Money Movie,” “Mason Mutt” and “The Supper-Time Super Show.”
Driscoll grew up in Brewer and served in the Navy until 1948, when he returned home, met and married his wife and went to work at the Eastern Paper mill.
A fan of vaudeville and film, he got his first job after responding to an ad for an announcer for WTWO.
From the 1950s through the 1970s, Driscoll was a mainstay of the station. He retired from TV in 1987, when he began suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.
Driscoll was inducted into the Maine Association of Broadcasters Hall of Fame in 1996.
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Yutaka Egashira
TOKYO (AP)–Yutaka Egashira, Japanese Crown Princess Masako’s grandfather, died over the weekend, the Imperial Household Agency said Monday. He was 98.
Egashira died at a hospital in the city of Fuji in Shizuoka prefecture, where he had been treated for an unspecified illness. The agency did not disclose the cause of his death.
Egashira was a former chairman of Japanese chemical company Chisso Corp., which caused Minamata disease, one of Japan’s worst industrial pollution cases. More than 2,000 people are officially recognized by the government as Minamata victims.
Egashira’s link to Chisso was initially considered a sticking point for Masako’s marriage to Naruhito, but top palace officials eventually approved it after concluding Egashira was sent to Chisso from a now-defunct Industrial Bank of Japan to reconstruct the financially strapped chemical firm in the 1960s and was not responsible for the pollution scandal.
Minamata disease–which causes spasms, blurred vision and can lead to birth defects in the children of infected parents–was linked to the consumption of fish from Minamata Bay, where Chisso had been dumping tons of mercury until 1970 despite the terrifying effects of the poisoning.
Masako, 42, wife of Crown Prince Naruhito, withdrew from official duties in December, and palace officials later announced she had a stress-related disorder and was receiving counseling and medication.
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Joseph Hayes
ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla. (AP)–Joseph Hayes, the acclaimed author who transformed his gripping 1954 novel “The Desperate Hours” into a Tony Award-winning play and Hollywood screenplay, died Sept. 11. He was 88.
Hayes died of complications from Alzheimer’s disease in a St. Augustine nursing home, his family said.
Hayes, a novelist, playwright and producer, is best know for the “The Desperate Hours,” a fictional tale of a suburban Illinois family taken hostage by three escaped convicts.
He adapted the novel into a Broadway play with a cast that included Paul Newman and Karl Malden. It won the 1955 Tony Award for best play.
He also developed the novel into a screenplay that was produced twice. The 1955 version starred Humphrey Bogart and Fredric March. It was remade in 1990 with Anthony Hopkins and Mickey Rourke.
Born in Indianapolis in 1918, Hayes was a graduate of Indiana University. He was a writer for New York television and radio before his first success with the 1949 Broadway release of his play “Leaf and Bough.”
Hayes often collaborated with his wife, Marrijane. In 1962, they penned “Bon Voyage!” The Disney film starred Fred MacMurray.
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Martha Holmes
NEW YORK (AP)–Martha Holmes, a former Life magazine photographer known for her signature pictures of famous people including painter Jackson Pollock and film stars Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, died Tuesday. She was 83.
Holmes died at home in Manhattan, said Bobbi Baker Burrows, a Life picture editor who worked with Holmes and other members of the magazine’s famed group of photographers. She said family members reported the death was from natural causes.
A native of Louisville, Ky., Holmes was hired by Life in 1944 from the Louisville Courier-Journal after another Life photographer on assignment there noticed her work. She was the third female addition to the elite magazine staff after Margaret Bourke-White and Marie Hansen, and worked mainly out of Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and later New York.
In 1949, she photographed Pollock at work with a cigarette dangling from his mouth. The image became a U.S. postage stamp, “with the cigarette airbrushed out,” Burrows said.
Holmes depicted Bogart and Bacall standing by a table at a House Un-American Activities Committee hearing on Communist influence in Hollywood in 1947, CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow driving a tractor on his Connecticut farm and Eleanor Roosevelt walking in woods with a group of orphans.
Other notable subjects were United Mine Workers president John L. Lewis, comedian Groucho Marx, jazz immortal Louis Armstrong and singer Frank Sinatra.
Holmes was married for 46 years to Arthur Waxman, a theatrical executive and early general manager of the Actors Studio. Waxman died in 1998.
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Aladar Pege
BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP)–World-renowned bassist Aladar Pege, who moved with ease from jazz to classics and lifted his bulky instrument to star status, died Saturday. He was 67.
The state MTI news agency cited family members as saying Pege died in the hospital after “patiently enduring brief suffering.” It did not specify his illness.
Pege’s jazz ensemble, which he formed in 1963, gained quick international recognition and his 1982 appearance at New York’s Carnegie Hall with Herbie Hancock was widely acclaimed. Sue Mingus, the widow of American jazz bassist Charlie Mingus, subsequently gave Pege her late husband’s instrument.
Before that, Pege had been named the “Festival Virtuoso” at a jazz event in Prague in 1964, and “Europe’s Best Soloist” at the 1970 Montreux, Switzerland, jazz festival. His most memorable performances included virtuoso duet recordings with pianist Walter Norris and tours with Mingus Dynasty.
A dazzling player with deep knowledge of the capacities of his instrument, critics called Pege the “Paganini of the bass,” after violin virtuoso Nicolo Paganini. Pege moved in his later years to classical works, often transcribing and performing pieces written for other instruments because of the bass’ limited solo repertoire.
He was given his own country’s top artistic award, the “Kossuth Prize,” in 1982.
Born into a family of Gypsy musicians in Budapest on Oct. 8, 1939, Pege did not start playing the bass until age 15. But he quickly grabbed the attention of teachers at the Bartok Bela Musical Training College and fellow musicians he freelanced with in jazz groups.
After finishing his studies at the Liszt Ferenc Music Academy in Budapest in 1969, Pege became a teaching assistant and later a professor at the school.
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Patrick Quinn
BUSHKILL, Pa. (AP)–Patrick Quinn, newly appointed executive director of Actors’ Equity Association, died Sunday. He was 56.
Quinn died of a massive coronary at his summer home in the Poconos, the organization said.
He had served as president of the organization, which represents more than 45,000 stage actors and stage managers, for six years before being named executive director last month. He was to assume the post Oct. 5.
Quinn had served in the organization since 1977 and was elected president in 2000, leading Actors’ Equity through the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
A native of Philadelphia and a graduate of Temple University, he made his Broadway debut in the revival of “Fiddler on the Roof” with Zero Mostel and appeared in 10 other Broadway shows, including “A Class Act,” “Beauty and the Beast” and the revival of “The Sound of Music.”
He most recently appeared in the Cape Playhouse production of “Sylvia” and appeared earlier this season in “Gunmetal Blues.” Last year, he starred as Daddy Warbucks in “Annie” and reprised the role in this season’s “Annie Warbucks.”
Quinn was given the “Edwin Forrest Award for Outstanding Leadership in the Arts” in March 2005 for his work on stage and as the association’s president.
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