On the morning of July 21, I woke up to find a text message on my phone informing me that Khia “DJ K-Swift” Edgerton, Baltimore’s most popular radio personality and a focal point of the percolating Baltimore club music scene, had been pronounced dead at a hospital after a swimming pool accident at her home. The shock of the unexpected news was magnified by the fact that I had just seen her perform her second-to-last DJ set at the Artscape festival two nights earlier. But for several years, I had religiously listened to her nightly radio show and hunted down every mix CD she released, much like the thousands of other Baltimore club fans that looked to her to break the latest hits and expose the newest club producers. MORE »
Posts Tagged ‘Obituaries’
80 '08 (And heartbreak)
Heartbreak No. 2: The Death Of Baltimore Club Music’s Queen, DJ K-Swift
Dennis Yost, R.I.P.
Dennis Yost, singer and drummer for late sixties act Classics IV, passed away of respiratory failure on Sunday outside of Cincinnati, Ohio. MORE »
Dennis Yost, singer and drummer for late sixties act Classics IV, passed away of respiratory failure on Sunday outside of Cincinnati, Ohio. top
Odetta Holmes, R.I.P.
Odetta, famed African-American folk singer, songwriter, actress, and activist, passed away in New York City at the age of 77 last night. Beloved by everyone from Maya Angelou to Bob Dylan to Martin Luther King, Jr. Born in Birmingham and raised in Los Angeles, she began her career in musicals before heading up to San Francisco and falling in with the folk crowd, mixing it up with Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. She was signed to Vanguard Records, which was home to darn-near everybody who was anybody in the folk scene at the time. It’s important to keep in mind that “folk music” of that time was more than just people singing sad songs on acoustic guitars. It was more of a movement than a sound, and it tied directly into the social movements of the time, of which Odetta was an active participant. It was also more than a little non-white, led by artists like Harry Belafonte and Odetta. In fact, MLK himself called Odetta the “The Queen of American Folk Music.” MORE »
Richey Edwards, R.I.P.
Thirteen years after his abandoned car was found… MORE »
Guy Peellaert, R.I.P.
Guy Peellaert, the Belgian artist probably best… MORE »
Jody Reynolds, R.I.P.
Rockabilly singer Ralph Joseph “Jody” Reynolds… MORE »
Mitch Mitchell, R.I.P.
The final living member of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, drummer John “Mitch” Mitchell, has passed on at the age of 61. To call him influential would be an understatement: The work that the Jimi Hendrix Experience did over their brief existence and three proper albums is fairly unimpeachable, mostly killer with little filler. Forget the stuff they’ve scavenged off Jimi’s bones in the nearly forty years since his death–the Experience stuff is where it’s at, an astounding blend of blues and psychedelic rock that still sounds avant to these ears. MORE »
Miriam Makeba, R.I.P.
Miriam Makeba, who died after collapsing onstage yesterday in Italy, would be legendary for her music alone. She was one of South Africa’s great singers, full stop, beginning in the ’50s, when she accompanied the smooth male vocal group Manhattan Brothers, before branching off into her own vocal group, the Skylarks, and then solo. In 1959, she starred in a stage version of King Kong with her future husband Hugh Masakela. But a year later, she was exiled from South Africa, disallowed from returning for her mother’s funeral, after she was featured in the anti-apartheid film Come Back, Africa; Makeba would not return to South Africa until the early 1990s. MORE »
Nathaniel Mayer, R.I.P.
Nathaniel Mayer, the Detroit rock and R&B singer,… MORE »
Yma Sumac, R.I.P.
Peruvian singer Zoila Augusta Emperatriz Chavarri del Castillo, who went by the stage name Yma Sumac, passed away at her home in California on Saturday morning. Sumac, who claimed that her voice had a five-octave range, sang around South America before being signed to Capitol Records in 1950. Her albums for Capitol brought together traditional South American folk songs and splashy Hollywood arrangements, and she performed at the Hollywood Bowl and in Las Vegas during that decade. The ’60s took her around the world and resulted in her recording a live album–the only one she would release during her career. In 1971 she made a foray into rock with the album Miracles and subsequently semi-retired, only coming out to play the occasional concert or perform the odd track (like her interpretation of “I Wonder” from Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, which appeared on the 1987 Disney covers album Stay Awake). Sumac was 86. MORE »
