Where Are They Buried? (73 page)

Most Baby Boomers remember Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong on variety shows as a smiling older uncle warbling his gravelly voice through “What a Wonderful World” and playing a bit of trumpet afterward. But jazz aficionados remember Louis differently and freely refer to him as a genius. According to Tony Bennett (who ought to know), Armstrong “practically invented jazz singing singlehandedly.” Further, outside of jazz circles it’s largely unknown that, as a young avant-garde musician, Louis’ Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings of the 1920s spurred a musical revolution.

Louis’ achievements are all the more remarkable given his early life of extreme poverty in a New Orleans slum. But he somehow turned that adversity into opportunity and, while in the Colored Waifs’ Home for Boys after a brush with the law, Louis discovered the cornet and began making music. In Joe Oliver, a cornet king playing the new music called jazz, Louis found a mentor and father figure. Sent to join Oliver’s Chicago-based Creole Jazz Band in 1922, Louis shortly thereafter made his first recordings, which have since been called “the Rosetta Stone of Jazz.”

Before those recordings, jazz musicians modestly limited their solos, but Louis’s were longer and bolder, and he started improvising on the chord structure. With his rhythmic fluidity, he also began playing on and around the beat, heralding the swing style that emerged in the 1930s. Louis also pioneered a new style of singing, imitating the horn with his voice and substituting improvised nonsense syllables for the lyrics. With the passing of the big band era, he formed his All Stars, and they became goodwill ambassadors of jazz throughout the world, helping break down racial barriers wherever they played.

Louis never forgot where he came from and recognized that he was blessed twice, first with a sandpapery, distinctive voice and second with keen trumpet skills. Together, his talents helped him reap the rewards that eluded most of the influential creators of his era. The affinity he felt for his trumpet superseded everything else. As he reflected once, “Anything that’ll get in the way of blowing my horn, out it goes. The trumpet comes first, before everything, even my wife.”

Louis died in his sleep of natural causes and was buried at Flushing Cemetery in Queens, New York.

At the turn of the century, no one paid much notice to the birth of an illegitimate black baby boy in New Orleans, and Louis, never
knowing his real birthday, chose to celebrate it as July 4, 1900. A baptismal certificate listing his birth date as August 4, 1901, was finally discovered in 1989, making Louis 69 at his death, not 71, as is generally recorded.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From I-495, take Exit 25 and follow Utopia Parkway north for a half-mile to Pigeon Meadow Road. Turn left on Pigeon Meadow Road and, after a mile, it will intersect with 46th Avenue, where you’ll make a right turn into the cemetery.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery and bear left, keeping 46th Avenue on your left. Count the paved drives on your right and park at the fourth one. Section Nine will be in front of you, and Louis’s dark brown stone, easily recognizable with a trumpet engraved on its face, is a couple rows off the curb.

SEPTEMBER 29, 1907 – OCTOBER 2, 1998

In the early days of Western serials, when the good guys wore white hats and the bad guys wore black, Gene Autry always wore white, rode his horse, Champion, and always had a song to sing. He was best known as “the Singing Cowboy,” and while partnered with Roy Rogers, the two actors were the country’s best-loved cowboy team.

Gene made 95 movies and hosted his own TV show, which ran for six seasons. He also recorded over 600 songs including his trademark tune, “Back in the Saddle Again,” as well as the timeless
kiddie recordings “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “Here Comes Santa Claus,” and “Peter Cottontail.”

He hung up his performing spurs by the early 1960s, then devoted his time to numerous successful business ventures—for many years the Gene Autry name was on
Forbes
magazine’s list of the 400 richest Americans.

At 91, Gene died of natural causes and was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Hollywood Hills, California.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From Highway 134, which is the connector between Highway 101 and I-210, take the Forest Lawn Drive exit. Proceed west for a mile and the park’s entrance will be on the left.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery and proceed to the Sheltering Hills section, which is the first big lawn on the right after the information booth. There you’ll see a white statue belonging to S.E. Wong and there lies Gene just four rows in front.

JUNE 30, 1943 – FEBRUARY 22, 1976

Stylizing rhythm and blues with a pop flair, the Motown-based Supremes were the number-one American recording group between 1964 and 1967. The vocal trio of Florence Ballard, Diana Ross, and Mary Wilson came from the low-income Brewster housing project in Detroit and rose to international acclaim, enjoying a fantastic rags-to-riches fairy tale. At the height of their fame they sang their blockbuster songs, including “Stop in the Name of Love,” to mobs of fans at concert venues worldwide. In those heady days, the girls were featured in fashion magazines, Florence drove a plum-rose Cadillac, and they even had a loaf of bread named after them. The Supremes struck gold.

But in the real world, fairy tales can have unhappy endings, and so it went for Florence, who, in 1967, just as the Supremes reached the peak of their popularity, either quit or was fired from the group, depending upon whose account you believe. Signing away all her rights for only about $100,000, Florence soon lost her home to foreclosure, ballooned to almost 200 pounds, and was living back in the Detroit projects on a $95-per-week stipend from the Aid to Dependent Children program. During that time, she said, “When I go to sleep at night, I have dreams of what it was like when Diana, Mary, and I worked great places like the Copa. Once I had it all. I was Supreme. Now? Now I have nothing.”

One evening in February 1976, two months after reconciling with her husband and moving into his home, Florence became alarmed when her hands and feet began to feel numb. She checked into a hospital that night and, at 32, died the next morning of heart failure. Florence now rests at Detroit Memorial Park in Warren, Michigan.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From I-696, take Exit 20 and follow Dequindre Road north for two miles to its intersection with 13 Mile Road. Turn right and the park is a short distance ahead on the right.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Florence’s marker is inscribed with her given name, Florence Glenda Chapman, and she’s in plot Number 291A, Section D, fifty yards straight past the gate.

MAY 11, 1888 – SEPTEMBER 22, 1989

Irving Berlin set the tone and the tempo for the tunes America played, sang and danced to for much of the 20th century. Interestingly, it was Irving’s opinion that there really were only six tunes that existed in the world. Nonetheless, from those six tunes he fashioned a remarkable number of songs (about 1,500) that were by turn romantic, tragic, sentimental, and sophisticated.

His was a classic American success story. His family arrived from Russia penniless when he was five, and three years later his father died. Irving took to selling newspapers to help support his family and this marked the end of his schooling, which totaled less than two years.

Irving married at 24, and his wife died of typhoid fever six months later. To express his grief, he wrote “When I Lost You,” which sold more than a million copies. It was like a dam broke when he followed that effort with dozens of standards like “White Christmas,” “Always,” “Blue Skies,” “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” and “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” Of course, Irving also wrote America’s unofficial national anthem, “God Bless America.”

Irving’s lack of schooling left him illiterate and, curiously, he could never read or write music; he left it to arrangers to transcribe his melodies. Throughout his long life in the world of music, he never learned to play in any key but F-sharp, and to overcome this limitation he used a specially built piano that had a hand clutch to change keys. It now resides in the Smithsonian Institution.

Irving died in his sleep at 101, at home in Manhattan, just a few miles from the Lower East Side tenement where he had lived while hawking newspapers some 95 years earlier.

He was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, New York.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
Woodlawn is located at 233rd Street and Webster Avenue, immediately off the Bronx River Expressway’s 233rd Street exit.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Woodlawn Cemetery is enormous, with 350,000 guests on 400 acres. Stop at the booth at the front gate and get a map. Then follow the dashed line painted in the road to its intersection with Prospect Avenue. Turn left on Prospect Avenue and then, at the next intersection (Walnut Avenue), you’ll see the mausoleum of a James Hill on the right. Irving’s grave is a flat stone just left of the Hill mausoleum.

MARCH 2, 1950 – FEBRUARY 4, 1983

During the 1970s, silky-voiced Karen Carpenter and brother Richard comprised their own soft-rock group, the Carpenters, which proved to be a can’t-miss, hit-making association. Their light, airy melodies were in direct contrast to much of the day’s gaudy rock. While many of the musicians who ridiculed them have been mostly forgotten, the Carpenters’ meticulously crafted singles have stood the test of time.

Early on Karen was a drummer, but it soon became obvious that her talent was in vocals, and she began to focus on singing. Her rich alto would become the hallmark of the Carpenters’ sound. Richard described their emerging style as “a choral approach to pop,” and they created almost two dozen hit singles including, “Yesterday Once More,” “Close to You,” and “We’ve Only Just Begun,” the last becoming a popular choice for post-hippie weddings.

By the late 1970s, though, the Carpenters were disintegrating from within; Richard was often strung out on a variety of methamphetamines while Karen was short-tempered and constantly fatigued. Finally, at a November 1978 show in Las Vegas, Richard announced that the Carpenters planned an extended hiatus from touring. In fact, that engagement proved to be their last.

Karen’s mysterious fatigue turned out to be caused by self-induced starvation; she suffered from anorexia nervosa. Over the next few years, her attempts to control the disease sent her body on a roller-coaster ride; psychological counseling would help her to
gain a healthy amount of weight, but soon she’d be secretly fasting again. In February 1983 it seemed that Karen had finally turned the corner for good; she weighed 110 pounds and seemed to have reached a mental balance, as well. But though her body looked well, it had been malnourished for almost a decade.

One evening, Karen went to a Bob’s Big Boy restaurant with her mother and enjoyed a shrimp salad. Upon returning to her mother’s home, she complained of being tired and retreated to her old bedroom where she ended up spending the night. The next morning, Karen’s mother heard her get out of bed and open her closet door. When Karen failed to come downstairs, her mother went up to the room and found Karen on the floor of her walk-in closet, eyes rolled back, not breathing. At 32, Karen was dead of heart failure.

She rests at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Cypress, California.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From Highway 91, take Carmenita Road south, turn west onto Lincoln Avenue and Forest Lawn Park is a mile ahead on the right.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Go through the main gate, turn right, and drive up to the Ascension Mausoleum. Park in front and enter through the glass doors on the left. Turn left at the first hall, which is the Sanctuary of Compassion, and the beautiful Carpenter crypt is at the end.

When the money started rolling in, Karen and Richard invested some of it in real estate. They bought two apartment buildings in their hometown of Downey, California, and named them Close to You and Only Just Begun. The buildings still retain those names, and you can see them at 8356 Fifth St.

Though neither graduated, Richard and Karen honed their music skills at the University of California in Long Beach. In 1994 the Carpenter Performing Arts Center opened there and it houses a small but interesting Carpenters museum.

FEBRUARY 26, 1932 – SEPTEMBER 12, 2003

JUNE 23, 1929 – MAY 15, 2003

Johnny Cash liked to recount the story of the day his voice “broke.” It was after a long day of cutting wood at his family’s
Arkansas farm. “I came in the back door singing, and my Mama turned around and said, ‘Who’s that?’ And I said, ‘That’s me.’ She came over and hugged me and said, ‘God’s got his hand on you, son. Don’t ever forget this gift.’” The rumble-voiced performer never forgot the gift, but for a time he threw it away when an addiction to alcohol and amphetamines landed him on the fast track to a short life.