Free The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars by Jeremy Simmonds

(his sister Mabel became one of Ray Charles’s Raelettes), John was signed to King Records at eighteen, enjoying sporadic crossover hits starting with ‘Fever’ (1956), which, like many black records of the era, became a bigger hit for a white artist (in this case, Peggy Lee), while another was later picked up by The Beatles. Willie John’s last and biggest hit was ‘Sleep’ (1960), and King decided to drop him when it became apparent his moment had passed. This did not sit well with John, as noted for his unstable personality as for his music: in 1964, he was charged with assault in Miami but jumped bail and headed to Seattle where, during an after-hours lock-in at one of his infrequent live engagements, John returned from the lavatory to discover a patron, Kendall Roundtree, had helped himself to his seat. When he refused to move, a scuffle inevitably broke out, Roundtree somehow sustaining a fatal injury. Many sources claim that this was from a blow to the head, while some state that John – who often carried a weapon – had used a knife. Despite the charges against him (and the fact that he had already breached bail), John continued to perform while he awaited trial. In the event, he only avoided a conviction for murder when his defence lawyer pointed out that Roundtree was the much bigger man; even so, on 18 May 1966, he was facing eight to twenty years at Washington State Penitentiary.
    Then, having completed just two years of his sentence, Willie John died mysteriously. Keen to put the case behind them, authorities returned a verdict of ‘heart attack’, though there have been unsubstantiated tales over the years of mistreatment by both staff and inmates, possibly resulting in asphyxiation.
    JUNE
    Friday 14
    Ken Errair
    (Detroit, Michigan, 23 January 1928)
    The Four Freshmen

    In May 1953, Ken Errair was recruited as replacement for tour-tired Hal Kratzsch in the jazz-styled vocal four-piece The Four Freshmen – an acclaimed vocal harmony troupe formed by brothers Don and Ross Barbour while at the Arthur Jordan Conservatory of Music in Indianapolis. Before Errair joined, the group had had several sheet-music hits, but his first recording session that July spawned a radio-airplay hit in ‘Holiday/It Happened Once Before’ (1953). Success for Errair was brief – he had married actress Jane Withers (soon to be seen in the epic movie Giant) just ahead of joining the group, and, like his predecessor, found constant touring detrimental to his domestic life. The decisive Barbours were quick to give Errair his marching orders (replacing him with Ken Albers), preventing him from enjoying the US Top Twenty hit ‘Graduation’ in June 1956.
    Ken Errair attempted to crack the market on his own with the self-explanatory Solo Session album for Capitol a year later but, now a settled man with a wife and two children, found a seemingly more stable future in real estate instead. Sadly, travelling to a California development, he was killed instantly when his light aircraft crashed in bad weather. His colleague Don Barbour had died in a Los Angeles car crash in 1961, while Kratzsch succumbed to cancer in 1970.
    Sometime Four Freshmen multi-instrumentalist Ken Albers died in April 2007, while founder Ross Barbour and tenor vocalist Bob Flanigan both passed on four years later.
    JULY
    Wednesday 24
    Nervous Norvus
    (James Drake - Memphis, Tennessee, 13 May 1912)

    One of the more idiosyncratic characters to emerge from early pop culture, Nervous Norvus initially pushed himself as working musician/writer Singing Jimmy Drake before finally earning notoriety with a brace of novelty hits that baffled US radio listeners in the fifties – that is, once the authorities had given the go-ahead to let them be heard. With the combined restrictions of the Depression and crippling asthmatic and heart conditions, Drake endured a housebound upbringing. However, having learned the ukulele while young, he set off as a young man to busk in