The game is easy, just don’t duplicate someone else’s response. Musician and song, please, and no, it doesn’t have to be the singer of said song who’s dead. (The level of attained fame has to at least be moderate to count.)
Since I’m starting the thread, I’m drunk with power and will be a complete hack and use Israel Kamakawiwo’Ole, a Hawaiian singer famed for his version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”, which is quite pretty.
Who’a YOU got?
I would have to say Eva Cassidy. She was a british singer with a small cult following until after she passed away. Then she became a big selling sensation with beautiful covers of pop songs. Her version of the Sting tune “Fields of Gold” is a personal favorite.
I’m chagrined to say I wasn’t at all familiar w/ Elliot Smith until his friends released an album of his stuff a year or so after his apparent suicide. NPR played some of it and it was awesome; but I understand he had a following beforehand, so MY hearing of him hardly makes or breaks his fame quotient.
My entry: ‘Joe Lee’s Rock’ (by Boy Blue, Willie Jones and Joe Lee), an obscure Delta blues recorded in 1959 and famous much later when Moby sampled it to make ‘Find My Baby’.
Actually she was born in Washington D.C.
I had never heard of Selena until the movie. Except maybe just a mention of her when she was murdered.
Actually I wasn’t that aware of Jennifer Lopez until she played her. Must get out more often . . .
I would say Nick Drake, who died very young and early in his career but is really loved today. His best-known song is the beautiful “Pink Moon,” which was used to great effect in a Volkswagen commercial a few years ago.
Robert Johnson. He died young, in obscurity, with two albums of material that sold adequately, but were in too limited a genre to gain much notice. As time went by, he was recognized as one of the seminal geniuses of the Blues, and his more recent reissues sell well enough and have added to his fame.
Jeff Buckley. Just you wait.
Brad Nowell. What a dumbass.
Leadbelly the blues singer.
Marc
Mea culpa! :smack: I assumed that because her albums sold well in Britain, that she was british.
Beat me to it. I love Nick Drake’s music.
Pink Moon - would that be the dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee DA DA DA song that plays while the passenger in the car plays w/ a collapsing man toy?
That would be “Da-da-da” by Trio. “Pink Moon” is featured in the one where the kids are driving through the country at night to a party, then they get there and decide they’d rather keep driving and listening to “Pink Moon.” Pink, pink, pink, pink-pink…pink moon.
WAAAAYYYY off topic, I remember that commercial because as the kids pull up to the party, there’s a Pinto parked not far away. We were a family that drove almost nothing but Pintos for about 20 years (raced 'em, too!), so I spotted it right away. You don’t see them on the road much anymore, and never in ads. It gave me a warm fuzzy feeling…
Have there been any bands who made it big after a founding member died?
The Beatles made it big after the death of founding member Stu Sutcliffe.
Had they recorded anything by then or were they still just playing around their Liverpudlian digs?
Sublime had been around for years, but they didn’t crack the mainstream until right after singer/guitarist/songwriter Bradley Nowell overdosed and died, around late 1996 or early '97. Then their self-titled album became a HUGE hit, on the strength of singles like “What I Got,” “Wrong Way,” and “Santeria.”
People have mentioned Brad Newell twice now, one saying he was a dumbass. Was his OD particularly stupid?
I think that there are really two categories here. The first consists of musicians like Selena, Elliot Smith, Nick Drake, Jeff Buckley, Israel Kamakawiwo’Ole, and maybe Brad Newell. These people had moderate-sized cult audiences before they died. They may be more famous now since dying, but they weren’t unknown befoe they died. (And none of them has become super-famous.) I’m not so sure about Robert Johnson and Leadbelly. Didn’t they have significant cult audiences before they died?
The second category consists of musicians like Eva Cassidy and the team of Boy Blue, Willie Jones and Joe Lee. These people were really unknown except for the few people who heard them live or who bought their poorly distributed recordings. I think Eva Cassidy wins this competition, since she is fairly well known now, while Boy Blue, Willie Jones and Joe Lee are apparently only known to people who also know Moby.
Eva Cassidy was so little known before her death in 1996 at age 33 that people can assume that she was British because she didn’t break through to fame until three and a half years after her death (and then only in the U.K., not in the U.S.) She is literally 10 times as popular now in the U.K. as in the U.S. She has a significant cult audience in the U.S., having one album that’s a gold record and pushing being a platinum record, but in the U.K. she has had three #1 albums. Before her death, she had one solo album, one duet album, and one album where she was the lead singer in a band, but all of those only sold a few tens of thousands of recordings total, compared to the millions she’s now sold worldwide. She never sang anywhere except in the music clubs of the Washington, D.C. area with two exceptions. One was that she did a two-week gig in Iceland while visiting her brother who lived there. The other was that she did a tour with the group Pieces of a Dream because a record producer persuaded her it would be a good idea to get more touring experience. It didn’t work well and ended quickly.
She wasn’t even well known in the Washington, D.C. area except by the regulars of the local music clubs. The only reason that there were so many recordings of her that appeared after her death was that her musical friends loved her voice, even though they couldn’t persuade the general listening audiences or any record producers of it, so they made and kept recordings of her for themselves. Heck, she never even made a living from music. She worked most of her life in a plant nursery.