In 2024, we've experienced the loss of several luminaries in the world of entertainment. These beloved figures—actors, comedians, musicians, singers, and coaches—have touched our lives with their talent, passion, and dedication. They've left an indelible mark on our hearts and shaped the world of entertainment in ways that will continue to inspire and influence generations to come.
Among the incredible actors who bid farewell this year, we mourn the loss of a true chameleon who effortlessly.
James Luther "Jim" Dickinson died he was 67. Dickinson was an Americanrecord producer, pianist, and singer who fronted, among others, the Memphis based band, Snake Eyes.
His sons Luther and Cody, who played on his 2002 solo effort Free Beer Tomorrow, and the 2006 Jungle Jim and the Voodoo Tiger, have achieved success on their own as the North Mississippi Allstars.
Dickinson also made a recording with Pete (Sonic Boom) Kember of Spacemen 3 fame. "Indian Giver" was released in 2008 by Birdman Records under the name of Spectrum Meets Captain Memphis, with Captain Memphis, obviously, referring to Dickinson.
In 2007 Dickinson played with the Memphis-based rock band, Snake Eyes. The band, formed by Memphis musican Greg Roberson (former Reigning Sound drummer), featured Jeremy Scott (also from the Reigning Sound), Adam Woodard, and John Paul Keith. While the band disbanded in October 2008, Dickinson and Roberson went on to form another Memphis group, Ten High & the Trashed Romeos. This band included Jake and Toby Vest (of Memphis band The Bulletproof Vests) and Adam Hill. There is no information on whether or not the band recorded any material.
Dickinson died August 15, 2009 at Methodist Extended Care Hospital in Memphis following triple bypass heart surger
Kim Dae-jung[2]; died he was 85. Dae-Jung was President of South Korea from 1998 to 2003, and the 2000 Nobel Peace Prize recipient. He is the first and only Nobel laureate from Korea.[3] A Roman Catholic since 1957, he has been called the "Nelson Mandela of Asia"[4] for his long-standing opposition to authoritarian rule.
(6 January 1924[1] (o.s. 3 December 1925) – 18 August 2009)
The son of a middle-class farmer, Kim was born in Mokpo in what was then the Jeolla province; the city is now in South Jeolla province. Kim graduated from Mokp’o Commercial High School in 1943 at the top of the class. After working as a clerk for a Japanese-owned shipping company, he became its owner in 1945 and became very rich. Kim escaped Communist capture during the Korean War.[5]
Kim first entered politics in 1954 during the administration of Korea's first president, Syngman Rhee. Although he was elected as a representative for the National Assembly in 1961, a military coup led by Park Chung-hee, who later assumed dictatorial powers, voided the elections.[5] He was able to win a seat in the House in the subsequent elections in 1963 and 1967 and went on to become an eminent opposition leader. As such, he was the natural opposition candidate for the country's presidential election in 1971. He nearly defeated Park, despite several handicaps on his candidacy which were imposed by the ruling regime.[6] Park never forgot or forgave Kim for making the race such a close one.
A very talented orator, Kim could command unwavering loyalty among his supporters. His staunchest support came from the Jeolla region, where he reliably garnered upwards of 95% of the popular vote, a record that has remained unsurpassed in South Korean politics.
Kim was almost killed in August 1973, when he was kidnapped from a hotel in Tokyo by KCIA agents in response to his criticism of President Park's yushin program. Although Kim returned to Seoul alive, he was banned from politics and imprisoned in 1976 for having participated in the proclamation of an anti-government manifesto and sentenced for five years in prison, which was reduced to house arrest in 1978.[6]
Kim was reinstated in 1979 after Park was assassinated. However in 1980, Kim was arrested and sentenced to death on charges of sedition and conspiracy in the wake of another coup by Chun Doo-hwan and a popular uprising in Gwangju, his political stronghold.[7] With the intervention of the United States government,[8] the sentence was commuted to 20 years in prison and later he was given exile to the U.S. Kim temporarily settled in Boston and taught at Harvard University as a visiting professor to the Center for International Affairs, until he chose to return to his homeland in 1985.[9] During his period abroad, he authored a number of opinion pieces in leading Western newspapers that were sharply critical of his government.
Pope John Paul II sent a letter to then-South Korean President Chun Doo-hwan on December 11, 1980, asking for "clemency" for Kim, a Catholic, who had been sentenced to death a week before. The National Archives of Korea revealed the contents of the letter at the request of the "Kwangju Ilbo," the local daily newspaper in Gwangju (Kwangju). [10]
Kim Dae-jung took the name Thomas More as his Christian name at his Baptism. Thus, his name is most correctly written as Thomas More Kim Dae-jung.[11]
Kim was again put under house arrest upon his return to Seoul, but resumed his role as one of the principal leaders of the political opposition. When Chun Doo-hwan succumbed to the popular demand in 1987 and allowed the first democratic presidential election to take place since the 1972 coup, Kim Dae-jung and Kim Young-sam both ran. As a result, the opposition vote was split in two, with Kim Young-sam receiving 28% and Kim Dae-jung 27% of the vote. The ex-general Roh Tae-woo — Chun Doo-hwan's hand-picked successor — won easily with 36.5% of the popular vote.
In 1992, Kim made yet another failed bid for the presidency, this time solely against Kim Young-sam, who won as a candidate for the ruling party.[5] Many thought Kim Dae-jung's political career was effectively over when he took a hiatus from politics and departed for the United Kingdom to take a position at Clare Hall, Cambridge University as a visiting scholar.[9] However, in 1995 he announced his return to politics and began his fourth quest for the presidency.
The situation became favorable for him when the public revolted against the incumbent government in the wake of the nation's economic collapse in the Asian financial crisis just weeks before the presidential election. Allied with Kim Jong-pil, he defeated Lee Hoi-chang, Kim Young-sam's successor, in the election held on December 18, 1997, and was inaugurated as the fifteenth President of South Korea on February 25, 1998. This inauguration marked the first time in Korean history that the ruling party peacefully transferred power to a democratically elected opposition victor.[5][12] The election was marred with controversy, as two candidates from the ruling party split the conservative vote (38.7% and 19.2% respectively), enabling Kim to win with a 40.3% of the popular vote.[13] Kim's chief opponent, Lee Hoi Chang, was a former Supreme Court Justice and had graduated at the top of his class from Seoul National University School of Law. Lee was widely viewed as elitist and his candidacy was further damaged by charges that his sons dodged mandatory military service. Kim's education in contrast was limited to vocational high school, and many Koreans sympathized with the many trials and tribulations that Kim had endured previously.
The preceding presidents Park Chung Hee, Chun Doo-hwan, Roh Tae-woo, and Kim Young-sam all came from the relatively wealthy Gyeongsang region. Kim Dae-jung was the first president to serve out his full term who came from the Jeolla region in the southwest, an area that traditionally has been neglected and less developed, at least partly because of discriminatory policies of previous presidents. Kim's administration was in turn overrepresented in individuals from the Jeolla province, leading to charges of reverse discrimination.
Kim Dae-jung took office in the midst of the economic crisis that hit South Korea in the final year of Kim Young-sam's term. He vigorously pushed economic reform and restructuring recommended by the International Monetary Fund, in the process significantly altering the landscape of South Korean economy.[5] After the economy shrank by 5.8 percent in 1998, it grew 10.2 percent in 1999.[4] In effect, his policies were to make for a fairer market by holding the powerful chaebol (conglomerates) accountable, e.g., greater transparency in accounting practices. State subsidies to large corporations were dramatically cut or dropped.
His policy of engagement with North Korea has been termed the Sunshine Policy.[4] In 2000, he participated in the first North-South presidential summit with North Korea's leader Kim Jong-il, which later led to his winning the Nobel Peace Prize. This was later determined to have occurred after alleged payment through directing payments of $500 million for Kim Jong Il.[7] The North Korean leader, however, never kept his promise to reciprocate by visiting South Korea. North Korea has not reduced the heavy presence of troops in the DMZ and has continued to work on developing nuclear weapons, which it tested in October 2006. During Kim's administration, North Korean naval vessels intruded into South Korean waters and fired upon a South Korean naval vessel without warning, killing and wounding South Korean sailors.[citation needed] Citing security concerns, Kim skipped the historical soccer match between the US and South Korean teams in the 2002 World Cup.[14]
Kim completed his 5-year presidential term in 2003 and was succeeded by Roh Moo-hyun. A presidential library at Yonsei University was built to preserve Kim's legacy, and there is a convention center named after him in the city of Gwangju, the Kim Dae-jung Convention Center.
Kim actively called for restraint against the North Koreans for detonating a nuclear weapon and defended the continued Sunshine Policy towards Pyongyang to defuse the crisis. [15] He also received an honorary doctorate at the University of Portland on April 17, 2008 where he delivered his speech, "Challenge, Response, and God."
Kim's presidential legacy is mixed. Although commentators have frequently given him credit for forwarding democratic reforms and navigating Korea through the 1997-1998 financial crisis, his policies attracted widespread charges that he had sold out the nation's economic assets to foreign firms or private equity firms, which certainly made enormous profits from these deals. The most controversial case involved the Korea Exchange Bank, which went on sale when the transfer of power was taking place from Kim's administration to Roh's administration. Kim was also criticized for favoring his home province, Jollah Province, which had been historically neglected by previous administrations. In addition Kim was widely blamed for releasing a credit card bubble in order to boost the economy during the final years of presidency, this bubble bursting in 2003, causing the collapse of one of the largest credit card companies in Korea, namely LG Card. Also, his treatment of the financial crisis in general has often been censured for its political motivations; many accuse him of intentionally not bailing out Daewoo because the company did not undertake the restructuring his government demanded of it.
Born John William Saunders in Kansas City, Kansas, Quade attended Perry Rural High School in Perry, Kansas before transferring to Highland Park High School in Topeka on September 7, 1954. While at Highland Park, he was a football tackle and also participated in basketball and track.[1] He was a member of the Stamp, Radio, and Chess/Checkers clubs. He graduated from Highland Park in May 1956.
He made many guest appearances on television shows ranging from Bonanza, Gunsmoke, Knight Rider in the pilot episode "Knight of the Phoenix", Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, The A-Team to On the Air. With his drawling accent, stocky build and squinty eyes, he was often called on to play Southern or rural law enforcement officers.
Quade was an outspoken opponent of the U.S. Government and believed it had become drastically different from the founding fathers' intent. He gave numerous lectures on the New World Order of the current government. In short, he was opposed to the 14th Amendment to the Constitution (guaranteeing all citizens equal protection of the law), Social Security numbers, and drivers' licenses. He was often referred to as an "actor, aerospace engineer, and Christian activist". He was a supporter of the Allodial Title belief in common law.
Rashied Ali was born and grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; his family was musical: his mother had sung with Jimmie Lunceford.[2] His brother, Muhammad Ali, is also a drummer, who played with Albert Ayler, among others. Ali, along with his father and brother, converted to Islam.[3]
Ali moved to New York in 1963 and worked in groups with Bill Dixon and Paul Bley.[4] He has also recorded or performed with Pharoah Sanders, Alice Coltrane, Arthur Rhames, James Blood Ulmer and many others. In addition, Ali was scheduled to be the second drummer, alongside Elvin Jones, on John Coltrane's landmark free jazz album Ascension, but he dropped out just before the recording was to take place. Coltrane did not replace him, and settled for one drummer. Ali began to record with Coltrane from Meditations in November 1965 onwards.
Among his credits are the last recorded work of John Coltrane's life (The Olatunji Concert) and Interstellar Space, an album of duets with Coltrane recorded earlier in 1967. Ali "became important in stimulating the most avant-garde kinds of jazz activities".[5] During the early 1970s, he ran an influential loft club in New York, called Ali's Alley. [6] Ali also briefly formed a non-jazz project called Purple Trap with Japanese experimental guitarist Keiji Haino and jazz-fusion bassist Bill Laswell. Their double-CD album, Decided...Already the Motionless Heart of Tranquility, Tangling the Prayer Called "I", was released on John Zorn's Tzadik label in March 1999.
Though most known for his work in the Jazz idiom, Rashied Ali also made his contributions to other experimental art forms including multi-media performances with The Gift of Eagle Orchestra and Cosmic Legends. Performances such as Devachan and the Monads, Dwarf of Oblivion which took place at the Kitchen center for performance Art, and a special tribute to John Cage in Central Park, have taken 'Performance Art' to new levels with the addition of fully improvised large scale performance pieces. Other artists of the orchestra and Cosmic Legends have included Hayes Greenfield (sax), Perry Robinson (clarinet), Wayne Lopes (guitar), Dave Douglas (trumpet), Gloria Tropp (vocals), director/pianist Sylvie Degiez along with Poets and actors, Ira Cohen, Taylor Mead, Judith Malina (Living Theater). More recently, Ali has played with Sonny Fortune.
In the last years of his life, Rashied Ali led his own eponymous Quintet. A double CD entitled Judgment Day was recorded in February 2005 and features: Jumaane Smith on Trumpet, Lawrence Clark on Tenor Sax, Greg Murphy on Piano, Joris Teepe on Bass and Rashied Ali on Drums. This album was recorded at Ali's own Survival Studio, which has been in existence since the 1970s.
In 2007, Ali recorded "Going to the Ritual" in duo with bassist / violinist Henry Grimes (Porter Records #PRCD-4005), with a second duo recording in post-production at the time of Ali's death. Ali and Grimes also played five duo concerts together between 2007 and 2009, and a sixth concert in June 2007 with pianist Marilyn Crispell.
Rashied Ali died aged 74 in a Manhattan, New York City hospital after suffering a heart attack.[7][8] He is survived by wife Patricia.
LEXINGTON, Va. (AP) - Mike Seeger, who helped revive traditional American folk music, has died at age 75.
Seeger's wife, Alexia Smith, said Monday that Seeger died of cancer Friday night at their home in Lexington, Va.
Seeger was born in New York City and raised near Washington, D.C., in a musical family. Two of his siblings became key figures in the folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960s: his half brother, Pete, and sister Peggy.
Mike Seeger associated with traditional musicians such as Maybelle Carter and Dock Boggs.
He sang and played a number of instruments, including banjo, fiddle and guitar, and helped form the traditional music group The New Lost City Ramblers in 1958. He recorded more than 40 albums solo and with others, and received six Grammy Award nominations.
ROME (AP) — Riccardo Cassin, a mountaineering pioneer credited with 100 first ascents from the Himalayas to Alaska, is dead at the age of 100.
Cassin died Aug. 6 at his home in Piani Resinelli, a hamlet north of Milan at the foot of the Alps, his climbing equipment company said. The cause of death was not announced.
"He has left us a wealth of values, dreams and climbs that will continue to guide us," said a statement from the company, Cassin Srl. "His rope is still tied to us and continues to drive us."
Italian media remembered Cassin as a man who helped to transform mountaineering from a romantic 19th century challenge into a highly technical sport.
He was born into poverty on Jan. 2, 1909, in the northeast village of San Vito al Tagliamento. His father died in a Canadian mining accident when Riccardo was still a toddler.
As a young man, Cassin began work as a blacksmith in the town of Lecco on Lake Como. Sunday outings with friends in the nearby mountains sparked his love for climbing over a six-decade career. He and his companions were known as the Ragni di Lecco, "the Spiders of Lecco." They went on to pioneer daring routes that are still used today to climb some of the world's most treacherous peaks.
The most memorable of Cassin's first ascents included the 1961 climb up the previously "unclimbable" southern ridge of Alaska's Mt. McKinley, the highest peak of North America at 20,320 feet (6,194 meters).
Cassin and his five companions received a congratulatory telegram from U.S. President John F. Kennedy after they conquered McKinley at the cost of severe frostbite. The most daunting McKinley ridge is named after Cassin today.
Cassin continued to climb until the late 1980s, totaling around 2,500 ascents.
Lester William Polfuss, known as Les Paul died he was 94. Paul was an American jazz guitarist and inventor. He was a pioneer in the development of the solid-body electric guitar which "made the sound of rock and roll possible."[2] His many recording innovations included overdubbing, delay effects such as "sound on sound" and tape delay, phasing effects, and multitrack recording. He is often credited as being the 'father of modern music'.
He was born in Waukesha, Wisconsin to George and Evelyn Polsfuss.[3] The family name was first simplified by his mother to Polfuss before he took his stage name of Les Paul. He also used the nickname"Red Hot Red".
Paul first became interested in music at the age of eight, when he began playing the harmonica. After an attempt at learning to play the banjo, he began to play the guitar. By 13, Paul was performing semi-professionally as a country-music guitarist. At the age of 17, Paul played with Rube Tronson's Texas Cowboys, and soon after he dropped out of high school to join Wolverton's Radio Band in St. Louis, Missouri on KMOX.
In the 1930s, Paul worked in Chicago in radio, where he performed jazz music. Paul's first two records were released in 1936. One was credited to Rhubarb Red, Paul's hillbilly alter ego, and the other was as an accompanist for blues artist Georgia White.
In January 1948, Paul was injured in a near-fatal automobile accident in Oklahoma, which shattered his right arm and elbow. Doctors told Paul that there was no way for them to rebuild his elbow in a way that would let him regain movement, and that his arm would remain in whatever position they placed it in permanently. Paul then instructed the surgeons to set his arm at an angle that would allow him to cradle and pick the guitar. It took him a year and a half to recover.
Paul was dissatisfied with the acoustic guitars that were sold in the mid 1930s and began experimenting with a few designs for an electric model on his own. Famously, he created "The Log," which was nothing more than a length of common 4" x 4" lumber with bridge, guitar neck, and pickup attached. For the sake of appearance, he attached the body of an Epiphone hollow-body guitar, sawn lengthwise with The Log in the middle. This solved his two main problems: feedback, as the acoustic body no longer resonated with the amplified sound, and sustain, as the energy of the strings was not dissipated in generating sound through the guitar body.
In 1938, Paul moved to New York as part of a trio that included Jim Atkins (older half-brother of guitarist Chet Atkins) and bassist/percussionist Ernie Newton. They landed a featured spot with Fred Waring's Pennsylvanians radio show. Paul moved to Hollywood in 1943, where he formed a new trio. As a last-minute replacement for Oscar Moore, Paul played with Nat King Cole and other artists in the inaugural Jazz at the Philharmonic concert in Los Angeles on July 2, 1944. Also that year, Paul's trio appeared on Bing Crosby's radio show. Crosby went on to sponsor Paul's recording experiments. The two also recorded together several times, including a 1945 number one hit, "It's Been A Long, Long Time." In addition to backing Crosby and artists like The Andrews Sisters, Paul's trio also recorded a few albums of their own on the Decca label in the late 1940s.
Paul's innovative guitar, "The Log", built in 1939, was one of the first solid-body electric guitars.[4] (Leo Fender also independently created his own solid-body electric guitar around the same time and Adolph Rickenbacher had marketed a solid-body guitar in the 30s). Gibson Guitar Corporation designed a guitar incorporating Paul's suggestions in the early fifties, and presented it to him to try. He was impressed enough to sign a contract for what became the "Les Paul" model (originally only in a "gold top" version), and agreed never to be seen playing in public, or be photographed, with anything other than a Gibson guitar.
The arrangement persisted until 1961, when declining sales prompted Gibson to change the design without Paul's knowledge, creating a much thinner, lighter, and more aggressive-looking instrument with two cutaway "horns" instead of one. Paul said he first saw the "new" Gibson Les Paul in a music store window, and disliked it. Though his contract required him to pose with the guitar, he said it was not "his" instrument, and asked Gibson to remove his name from the headstock. (Others claimed that Paul ended his endorsement contract with Gibson during his divorce, to avoid having his wife to get his endorsement money.) Gibson renamed the guitar "Gibson SG" (which stands for "Solid Guitar"), and it also became one of the company's best sellers.
The original Gibson Les Paul guitar design regained popularity when Eric Clapton began playing the instrument a few years later (although he also played an SG and an ES-335). Paul resumed his relationship with Gibson, and has endorsed the original Les Paul guitar design ever since (though his personal Gibson Les Pauls are much modified by him — Paul always used his own self-wound pickups and customized switching on his guitars). To this day, various models of Gibson Les Paul guitar are used all over the world, by both novice and professional guitarists. A less expensive version of the Les Paul guitar is also manufactured for Gibson's lower-priced Epiphone brand.
In 1947, Capitol Records released a recording that had begun as an experiment in Paul's garage, entitled "Lover (When You're Near Me)", which featured Paul playing eight different parts on electric guitar, some of them recorded at half-speed, hence "double-fast" when played back at normal speed for the master. ("Brazil", similarly recorded, was the B-side.) This was the first time that multi-tracking had been used in a recording. These recordings were made not with magnetic tape, but with acetate disks. Paul would record a track onto a disk, then record himself playing another part with the first. He built the multi-track recording with overlaid tracks, rather than parallel ones as he did later. There is no record of how many "takes" were needed before he was satisfied with one layer and moved onto the next.
Paul even built his own disc-cutter assembly, based on auto parts. He favored the flywheel from a Cadillac for its weight and flatness. Even in these early days, he used the acetate disk setup to record parts at different speeds and with delay, resulting in his signature sound with echoes and birdsong-like guitar riffs. When he later began using magnetic tape, the major change was that he could take his recording rig on tour with him, even making episodes for his 15-minute radio show in his hotel room.
Les Paul and his wife Mary Ford at work recording during the late 1940s.
Electronics engineer Jack Mullin had been assigned to a US Army Signals unit stationed in France in WWII. On a mission in Germany near the end of the war, he acquired and later shipped home a German Magnetophon (tape recorder) and 50 reels of I.G. Farben plastic recording tape. Mullin rebuilt and developed the machine back in the US with the intention of selling it to the movie industry, and held a series of demonstrations which quickly became the talk of the US audio industry. Mullin's second demonstration was witnessed by Murdo MacKenzie, technical director for the Bing Crosby radio show.
Within a short time Crosby had hired Mullin to record and produce his radio shows and master his studio recordings on tape, and he invested US$50,000 in local electronics firm Ampex. With Crosby's backing Mullin and Ampex created the Ampex Model 200, the world's first commercially-produced reel-to-reel audio tape recorder. Crosby gave Les Paul the second Model 200 to be produced and Les immediately saw its potential both for special effects, like echo, and eventually its suitability for multitrack recording, of which he is considered the father. Using this machine, Paul placed an additional playback head, located before the conventional Erase-Record-Playback heads. This allowed Paul to play along with a previously recorded track, both of which were mixed together on to a new track. Keep in mind that this was a mono tape recorder - just ONE track across the entire width of quarter-inch tape - and so the recording was 'destructive' in the sense that the original recording was erased and replaced with the new recording.
One need only listen to any of the early Capitol recordings from the early 1950s to realize how great a challenge this process was. These revolutionary recordings were made with his wife, Mary Ford, who sang. The couple's hits included "How High the Moon", "Bye Bye Blues", "The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise", and "Vaya Con Dios". These songs featured Mary harmonizing with herself, giving the vocals a very novel sound.
Les Paul's need for multiple non-destructive tracks was obvious and his re-invention of the Ampex 200 inspired Ampex to develop two-track and three-track recorders. These machines were the backbone of professional recording, radio and television studios in the 1950s and early 1960s. In 1954, Paul continued to develop this technology by commissioning Ampex to build the first eight tracktape recorder, at his expense. The machine took three years to get working properly, and Paul says that by the time it was functional his music was out of favor and so he never had a hit record using it. His design became known as "Sel-Sync," (Selective Synchronization) in which a specially modified electronics could either record or playback from the Record Head, which was not optimized for playback but was acceptable for the purposes of recording an "overdub" (OD) in sync with the original recording. This is the core technology behind multi-track recording.
Like Crosby, Paul and Ford also used the now-ubiquitous recording technique known as close miking, where the microphone is less than six inches from the singer's mouth. This produces a more intimate, less reverberant sound than is heard when a singer is a foot or more from the microphone. When implemented using a cardioid-patterned microphone, it emphasizes low-frequency sounds in the voice due to a cardioid microphone's proximity effect and can give a more relaxed feel because the performer isn't working so hard. The result is a singing style which diverged strongly from un-amplified theater-style singing, as might be heard in musical comedies of the 1930s and 40s.
Paul had hosted a 15-minute radio program, The Les Paul Show, on NBC in 1950, featuring his trio (himself, Ford, and rhythm player Eddie Stapleton) and his electronics, recorded from their home and with gentle humour between Paul and Ford bridging musical selections, some of which had already been successful on records, some of which anticipated the couple's recordings, and many of which presented dazzling re-interpretations of such jazz and pop selections as "In the Mood," "Little Rock Getaway," "Brazil," and "Tiger Rag." Several recordings of these shows survive among old-time radio collectors today.
The show also appeared on television a few years later with the same format, but excluding the trio and retitled The Les Paul & Mary Ford Show (aka Les Paul & Mary Ford At Home) with "Vaya Con Dios" as a theme song. Sponsored by Warner Lambert's Listerine, it was widely syndicated during 1954-'55, and was only five minutes (one or two songs) long on film, therefore used as a brief interlude or fill-in in programming schedules. Since Les created the entire show himself, including audio and video, he has maintained the original recordings and is in the process of restoring them to up-to-date quality.[5]
During his radio shows, Paul introduced the legendary "Les Paulverizer" device, which multiplies anything fed into it, like a guitar sound or a voice. Paul has stated that the idea was to explain to the audience how his single guitar could be "multipled" into an orchestra. The device even became the subject of comedy, with Ford multiplying herself and her vacuum cleaner with it so she could finish the housework faster. Later Paul claimed to have made the myth real for his stage show, using a small box attached to his guitar which is really just a stage prop. He typically pretended to lay down one track after another on stage, in-sync, and then play over the repeating forms he had recorded.
In the late 1960s, Paul went into semi-retirement, although he did return to the studio occasionally. He and Mary Ford (born Iris Colleen Summers) had divorced in December 1964, as she could no longer countenance the itinerant lifestyle their act required of them. Paul's most recognisable recordings from then through the mid-1970s were an album for London Records, Les Paul Now (1967), on which he updated some of his earlier hits; and, backed by some of Nashville's celebrated studio musicians, a meld of jazz and country improvisation with fellow guitar virtuoso Chet Atkins, Chester and Lester (1976), for RCA Victor.
By the late 1980s, Paul had returned to active live performance. In 2006, at the age of 90, he won two Grammys at the 48th Annual Grammy Awards for his album Les Paul & Friends: American Made World Played. He also performed every Monday night, accompanied by a trio which included guitarist Lou Pallo and pianist John Colianni, at the Iridium Jazz Club on Broadway in New York City.[6][7]
On August 13th, 2009, Les Paul died of complications from pneumonia at White Plains Hospital in White Plains, NY. His family and friends were by his side. [8]
