Joyce “Dottie” Rambo, 74, an influential gospel singer and songwriter, died early Sunday when her tour bus ran off the highway and struck an embankment.
Seven others on the bus were injured in the wreck near Mount Vernon, Mo., the Missouri Highway Patrol said.
Rambo, of Nashville, Tenn., was on her way to a Mother’s Day performance in Texas, according to her website.
Dolly Parton sent condolences: “Dottie was a dear friend, a fellow singer, songwriter and entertainer, and as of late my duet singing partner.”
Rambo was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame last year and the Kentucky Music Hall of Fame in 2006. She had more than 2,500 published songs, including the 1982 Gospel Music Association Song of the Year, “We Shall Behold Him.”
Murray Jarvik, 84, a pioneer researcher of smoking addiction and co-inventor of the nicotine patch, died Thursday, said a University of California, Los Angeles spokesman.
In the early 1990s, Jarvik, a professor of psychiatry and pharmacology, and Jed Rose, then a postdoctoral fellow, invented the transdermal nicotine patch. When they could not get approval to run experiments on human subjects, they tested their idea on themselves. “Our heart rates increased, adrenaline began pumping, all the things that happen to smokers,” Jarvik recalled in an interview.
In 1992, the patch became available in the United States by prescription for smoking cessation. It was approved for over-the-counter sale four years later.
The Associated Press
