Deaths (Obituaries)

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      Matisyahu Salomon, Rabbi Who Warned of the Internet’s Dangers, Dies at 86

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      As a supervisor at America’s largest yeshiva, he wielded influence across the world of ultra-Orthodox Jews. He feared the internet jeopardized the observance of Jewish customs.Rabbi Matisyahu Salomon, a longtime spiritual counselor at America’s largest yeshiva who spearheaded a crusade to warn observant Jews of the risks posed by the internet, died on Jan. 2 in Lakewood, N.J. He was 86.The death was confirmed by Rabbi Avi Shafran, public affairs director of Agudath Israel of America, the umbrella organization for numerous Hasidic and other ultra-Orthodox groups. He said Rabbi Salomon had been ill for many years.Rabbi Salomon’s title during his three decades at Beth Medrash Govoha, a religious school in Lakewood whose enrollment of almost 9,000 students is exceeded only by the Mir Yeshiva in Israel, was dean of students. But he achieved far more influence than the title might suggest, through weekly lectures and personal encounters that guided thousands of young men on ethical and pious conduct.Many of his acolytes became leaders of the teeming haredi, or ultra-Orthodox, communities in Brooklyn, England and Israel, as well as in smaller enclaves around the world.He capitalized on that influence in a campaign he led a decade ago to warn observant Jews that new technologies were threatening observance of the laws, traditions and principles that are the backbone of their faith.Ultra-Orthodox Jews had been as enthusiastic about the benefits of computers, the internet and smartphones as their non-Jewish and more secular neighbors. But it became apparent to Rabbi Salomon and other community leaders that these new technologies could also be dangerous, beguiling pious Jews with videos. images and temporal content that would distract them from their family life, daily religious obligations and pursuits like Torah study.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Wayne Kramer, Influential MC5 Guitarist, Dies at 75

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      Mr. Kramer was one half of the twin-guitar attack that drove the Detroit band’s incendiary live performances, helping to set the stage for punk rock.Wayne Kramer, whose explosive guitar playing with the influential Detroit band the MC5 in the late 1960s and early 1970s helped to set the template for punk rock, died on Friday. He was 75.The death was confirmed in a post on his official Instagram account, which said the cause was pancreatic cancer. It did not say where he died.The MC5 (short for Motor City Five) formed in Lincoln Park, Mich., in 1965.Mr. Kramer and Fred (Sonic) Smith teamed to provide the twin-guitar attack that was at the heart of the band’s sound, and the centerpiece of its notoriously loud and frenetic live performances.In ranking Mr. Kramer and Mr. Smith, together, at No. 225 last year on its list of the 250 greatest guitarists of all time, Rolling Stone said the two “worked together like the pistons of a powerful engine” to “kick their band’s legendarily high-energy jams deep into space while simultaneously keeping one foot in the groove.”Mr. Kramer performing with the MC5 in Ann Arbor, Mich., in 1969.Leni Sinclair/Michael Ochs Archive, via Getty ImagesThe band, which also featured the vocalist Rob Tyner, the bassist Michael Davis and the drummer Dennis Thompson, splintered in the early 1970s after just two studio albums.Its debut, “Kick Out the Jams,” a live set recorded at the Grande Ballroom in Detroit in 1968, is considered one of the most influential albums of its era, and inspired generations of musicians, including the Clash, the Sex Pistols, the Ramones and Queens of the Stone Age.Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine said on Instagram on Friday that Mr. Kramer and the MC5 “basically invented punk rock music.”Mr. Kramer was arrested on drug charges in 1975 and was sentenced to four years in prison.In 2009, after he returned to performing and recording as a solo artist, he established Jail Guitar Doors U.S.A., a nonprofit that donates musical instruments to inmates and offers songwriting workshops in prisons, in partnership with his wife, Margaret, and the British singer-songwriter Billy Bragg.The name comes from “Jail Guitar Doors,” a song by the Clash that opens with a line about Mr. Kramer’s struggles with substance abuse and the law: “Let me tell you about Wayne and his deals of cocaine.”“The guitar can be the key that unlocks the cell,” Mr. Kramer told High Times in 2015. “It can be the key that unlocks the prison gate, and it could be the key that unlocks the rest of your life to give you an alternative way to deal with things.”A full obituary will follow. More

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      Adele Springsteen, Bruce Springsteen’s Mother, Dies at 98

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      Bruce Springsteen has long said that his mother was among his greatest influences and credited her with encouraging his musical ambitions.Adele Springsteen, who nurtured the budding musical talent of her son, the pioneering rock star Bruce Springsteen, died on Wednesday. She was 98.Mr. Springsteen announced his mother’s death in an Instagram post on Thursday. No cause was given, but Ms. Springsteen had struggled for more than a decade with Alzheimer’s disease.Her son has been outspoken about his relationship with his mother and her influence on him.Ms. Springsteen rented him his first guitar when he was 7, he said in 2021 during his Broadway show, “Bruce on Broadway,” which ran for more than two months as the city began to emerge from pandemic-related closures. The show had wide-ranging reflections, including thoughts about his mother.It was also Ms. Springsteen, he told the brimming Broadway audiences, at the St. James Theater, who danced to 1940s swing music and impressed in him the joys of bop-inspiring tunes, according to the NBC program “Today.”He also spoke of his mother’s ability to persist in her vivacious spirit even as aging and a punishing disease took their toll.“She’s 10 years into Alzheimer’s,” he said. “She’s 95. But the need to dance, that need to dance is something that hasn’t left her. She can’t speak. She can’t stand. But when she sees me, there’s a smile.”Ms. Springsteen was born Adele Zerilli on May 4, 1925, in Brooklyn. She married Douglas Springsteen, with whom she had her son in 1949 and later two daughters, Virginia and Pamela.She worked as a legal secretary and raised a young working-class family in Freehold, N.J., while her husband often struggled to find steady work and grappled with mental illness. He died in 1998.“She willed we would be a family and we were,” Mr. Springsteen wrote in “Born To Run,” his memoir. “She willed we would not disintegrate and we did not.”Ms. Springsteen’s high-spirited ethos, ever-present, seemed to be the through line in her life, and one that buoyed the lives of the people around her.“My mother is the great energy — she’s the energy of the show,” Mr. Springsteen told The Miami Herald in 1987. “The consistency, the steadiness, day after day — that’s her.” He added that “it was she who created the sense of stability in the family, so that we never felt threatened through all the hard times.”In the Instagram post on Thursday announcing his mother’s death, Mr. Springsteen shared a video of his mother, in old age, dancing to “In the Mood” by Glenn Miller, captioned with an excerpt from his own 1998 song about her, “The Wish.”“I’m older but you’ll know me in a glance,” it read. “We’ll find us a little rock ’n’ roll bar and we’ll go out and dance.”Aimee Ortiz More

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      Jean Carnahan, First Woman to Represent Missouri in U.S. Senate, Dies at 90

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      Ms. Carnahan was appointed to the seat after her husband was posthumously elected to it just weeks after he was killed in a plane crash in 2000.Jean Carnahan, who in 2001 became the first woman to represent Missouri in the U.S. Senate after being appointed to fill her husband’s seat following his posthumous election, died on Tuesday. She was 90.Her family released a statement saying that Ms. Carnahan died following a brief illness.“Mom passed peacefully after a long and rich life,” the statement said, without specifying the cause of death. “She was a fearless trailblazer. She was brilliant, creative, compassionate and dedicated to her family and her fellow Missourians,” her family said in the statement.Ms. Carnahan, the wife of Mel Carnahan, was appointed to the U.S. Senate from Missouri in December 2000, following the posthumous election of her husband, who was killed just weeks beforehand with their son and a longtime aide in a plane crash. She was sworn in on Jan. 3, 2001.Ms. Carnahan, a moderate Democrat who had never held public office before being appointed to fill in for her husband, served for nearly two years. She lost to Jim Talent, a Republican, by 22,000 votes in November 2002.Following her defeat, Ms. Carnahan told The New York Times that despite the tumult and heartache she had endured, she had always pushed bitterness aside. “It’s an acid in your life that corrodes your soul,” she told The Times.Sheelagh McNeill More

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      Jimy Williams, A.L. Manager of the Year in Boston in ’99, Dies at 80

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      He led the Red Sox into the playoffs twice, had managing stints in Toronto and Houston, and won more than 900 games as a dugout skipper.Jimy Williams, the 1999 American League Manager of the Year for Boston who won 910 games over a dozen seasons that included stints with Toronto and Houston, died on Friday in Tarpon Springs, Fla. He was 80.The Red Sox said his death, in a hospital, came after a brief, unspecified illness. He lived in nearby Palm Harbor, on Florida’s west coast about 25 miles from Tampa.Williams was voted A.L. Manager of the Year after leading the Red Sox to their second straight playoff appearance. He had replaced Kevin Kennedy as Boston’s manager after the 1996 season.Williams at Boston’s spring training camp in Fort Myers, Fla., in 2000. The team won 85 games that year, and he was fired the next season. He went on to manage the Astros.Jim Mone/Associated PressThe Red Sox won 78 games in Williams’s first season and then more than 90 in each of the next two. In 1998, Boston made the playoffs as a wild card team but was defeated by Cleveland in the A.L. division series. The next year, down 0-2 in the division series, again against Cleveland, the Red Sox rallied to win it 3-2. (Boston lost to the New York Yankees, 4-1, in the A.L. Championship Series.)The Red Sox won 85 games in 2000, and Williams was fired in August 2001, with the team at 65-53. He was hired that fall by the Houston Astros, but after two winning seasons with them he was fired midseason in 2004 with the team at 44-44.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Marlena Shaw, Venerable Nightclub Chanteuse, Dies at 84

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      She sang jazz (with Count Basie, among others) and later funk and disco, frequently in intimate venues, where she regaled audiences with tales of old love affairs.Marlena Shaw, who cultivated a sultry stage presence and husky voice from the final echoes of the big-band era, to the go-go Playboy Clubs of the 1960s, to the rise of funk, to disco and finally to the modern cabaret circuit, died on Jan. 19. She was 84.Her daughter MarLa Bradshaw announced her death on social media but did not share any further details.Ms. Shaw first came to public notice in the mid-1960s, when she performed at Playboy Clubs around the country. Describing one of those performances in 1966, The Los Angeles Times labeled her a “pretty girl singer” but also called her “the surprise of the bill.” That same year, Jet magazine reported that “three record companies were waving contracts in her face” after a New York engagement.She signed with Cadet Records, which in 1967 released her recording of “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy,” a vocal version of the Joe Zawinul tune that had been a hit for Cannonball Adderley. It reached No. 58 on the Billboard pop chart and 33 on the R&B chart.It also got the attention of Count Basie, who invited Ms. Shaw to try out for a job singing with his band.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Jo-El Sonnier, Who Sparked a Revival of Cajun Music, Dies at 77

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      An accordion virtuoso and a gifted vocalist, he scored country hits in the 1980s by putting a Cajun spin on songs like Richard Thompson’s “Tear-Stained Letter.”Jo-El Sonnier, the singer and accordionist who revived Cajun music within popular culture with hit versions of Richard Thompson’s “Tear-Stained Letter” and Slim Harpo’s “Rainin’ in My Heart,” and with appearances on recordings by Mark Knopfler and Elvis Costello, died on Jan. 13 after a performance in Llano, Texas. He was 77.The cause was a heart attack, the music promoter Tracy Pitcox wrote on social media. He said Mr. Sonnier had been airlifted to a hospital in Austin, where he was pronounced dead.Recordings by Cajun singers and players of stringed instruments like Rusty and Doug Kershaw and Jimmy C. Newman often reached the country Top 40 in the 1950s and ’60s. But it wasn’t until Mr. Sonnier’s arrival three decades later that Cajun accordion music became more than a regional phenomenon.Mr. Sonnier in 1966, when he was 20 years old. A versatile multi-instrumentalist, he first picked up the accordion when he was 3.via Sonnier familyWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Herbert Coward, Actor Who Played Toothless Man in ‘Deliverance,’ Dies at 85

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      The actor was killed in a motor vehicle accident in North Carolina, the authorities said.Herbert Coward, the actor whose modest career included the small but memorable role of Toothless Man in the 1972 thriller “Deliverance,” was killed on Thursday in a motor vehicle accident in North Carolina. He was 85.Mr. Coward died after he drove onto U.S. Highway 23 in Haywood County in the western part of the state and was struck by a truck, said Sgt. Marcus Bethea, a North Carolina State Highway Patrol spokesman. A passenger in Mr. Coward’s vehicle, Bertha Brooks, 78, was also killed, as were a Chihuahua and pet squirrel, Sergeant Bethea said.Mr. Coward, who lived in Canton, N.C., in Haywood County, was often seen with his pet squirrel, according to local news reports.The 16-year-old driver of the truck was taken to a hospital with minor injuries, according to Sergeant Bethea. He said that it was unclear what had led to the crash and that no charges had been filed.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More