Ken Hunt jan-june.99

The jazz and blues singer Joe Williams died in Las Vegas, Nevada on 29 March 1999. He had been having treatment for a respiratory condition and decided to discharge himself. On the walk back home, he died. Born Joseph Goreed in Cordele in Georgia on 12 December 1918, his UK reputation went before him, long before he was ever able to get to Britain. Williams had cut "Every Day I Have The Blues" with the Memphis Slim band in 1955 and its reputation was spread by word of mouth. Williams sang with Count Basie and because of Britain's Musicians Union rules, Basie never had a chance to perform until 1957. Williams, who had joined Basie in 1954, hit the vinyl spotlight with Count Basie Swings, Joe Williams Sings for Clef. In 1961 he moved on, having chosen to work as a soloist. Williams had made his professional debut in 1937 as a singer with the clarinettist Jimmy Noone. He even got to work with the tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins and bandleader Lionel Hampton. In his time Williams recorded with Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan. He also achieved a high profile as an actor on The Cosby Show in the 1980s as Bill Cosby's father-in-law.

Skip Spence passed through a number of the most important San Francisco bands of the 1960s yet by the time of his death he had sunk low. Born in Windsor, Ontario on 18 April 1946, he came to many people's attention for the first time on Jefferson Airplane's patchy debut Takes Off but had moved on long before they hit the big time with their next, Surrealistic Pillow in 1967 He co-founded Moby Grape ("What's blue, large, round and lives in the sea?"), one of most hyped of the San Francisco groups. Amid one of biggest record company pushes ever, their tight-harmony, three-guitar sound tended to talked about less than tales of hype and the simultaneous release of five singles. Their debut album, however, was full of excellent, anthemic rock songs. Like many of their contemporaries, live they jammed but Spence's "Dark Magic", a period slice of raga-rock, proved elusive when pinning it down to disc. Spence was partaking heavily from the cup of excess by now and things were clearly well out of hand when Spence began chasing Don Stevenson around the studio with an axe during the sessions for their lacklustre next album, Wow (which included a track to be played at 78 rpm) He wound up in Bellevue Hospital after this episode in New York. He came out in 1968 into the soon less-than-welcoming arms of his Moby Grape bandmates. Suggesting they change their name to The Cows didn't help! He departed. In a burst of creativity, over four days he cut his solo debut, Oar, one of the weirder offerings of the period and something regularly described as 'psychedelic folk'. Spence had become a paranoid schizophrenic and music was largely beyond him. Later he guested at Moby Grape reunions, their differences long since patched up, and worked with the former Airplane bassist Jack Casady on a piece for an X-Files-inspired album. But time in institutions, homelessness and poor health ultimately did for him. He died on 16 April in Santa Cruz, California. Lung cancer was the cause. Oar achieved a cult status, assisted by Sony's expanded reissue in 1991. Indeed such is its status that More Oar, a tribute revisiting, was nearing completion at the time of his death. It features covers by the likes of Beck, Robert Plant, Tom Waits and REM.

The photographer and art lecturer Raghubir Singh died on 18 April in New York aged 56. Born on 22 October 1942 in Rajasthan, Singh's images captured the sheer vibrancy of Indian life and folkways like few before him. He produced a series of photographic studies based around geographical themes, such as Ganges: Sacred River of India, Banaras: The Sacred City and Kerala: The Spice Coast of India. Another book, River of Colour: The India of Raghubir, published this year, is an art history of Indian colourists. Singh exhibited in Bonn, Chicago, London and Paris over the course of his life. To see Singh's work is to inhale India. On a personal note, his images have often been propped before me while I wrote about India.

Jack Kerouac inspired a generation and his influence continues to ripple outwards. The American critic Gilbert Millstein, who died on 7 May in New York aged 83, was one of the first to acknowledge Kerouac's talent in print. Millstein's 1957 review of On The Road for the New York Times extolled the book as "an authentic work of art, the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as 'beat,' and whose principal avatar he is." Millstein wrote for many periodicals including the New York Times and the Saturday Evening Post.

"Shel Silverstein, Zany Writer and Cartoonist, Dies at 67" ran the lead obituary in the New York Times of 11 May, the day after his death in Key West, Florida. Born on 23 September 1932 in Chicago, the shaven-headed artist juggled the visual and written arts for decades. He wrote children's books, did cartoons and wrote for Playboy and had a droll wit. His songs were woven from the twisted fabric of American society. Johnny Cash turned Silverstein's bizarre country anthem - it would have been bizarre for any genre but its piquancy for an often conservative genre like country was astonishing - called "Boy Named Sue" into an international hit. Loretta Lynn covered "One's On The Way". Dr Hook and the Medicine Show did his "Sylvia's Mother" and "The Cover of Rolling Stone". They also backed him on one of his finest solo albums, Freakin' At The Freakers Ball in 1972, an album that gave the world one of the best dopin' songs of all time, "I Got Stoned And I Missed It" and the VD caution, "Don't Give A Dose To The One You Love". "Emmylou Harris" recorded a glorious version of "Queen of the Silver Dollar". Marianne Faithfull snarled "The Ballad of Lucy Jordan". The list could go on and on.

James Blades was one of the most influential percussionists of all time. It is also arguable that he was the most-heard percussionist of his time. He was born into a working-class British family on 9 September 1901 in Peterborough and left school barely in his teens. The Depression took him out of engineering and somehow he wound up playing percussion at silent films screenings and, from June 1921, for a circus. His name got around. He played all the time and his xylophone and marimba solos for dance bands were sufficiently unusual for his reputation to spread still further. By 1931 he was a member of the band playing at the Piccadilly Hotel in London. In 1935 or thereabouts, the Rank Organisation selected him to come up with a trademark sound for opening sequence for their cinema presentations. While a muscular torso'd man struck an enormous gong, off-camera Blades provided the struck sound with a Chinese tam-tam (gong). That mimed image and Blades' playing greeted generations of British cinema-goers. The next year he bumped into the composer Benjamin Britten and theirs would be a long and fruitful relationship that would last for decades. Blades had the knack of coming up with memorable percussion sounds and special effects for Britten. Perhaps Blades' most enduring sonic image was one he devised in 1940 for the BBC. He created the 'V for Victory' signal which was broadcast into occupied Europe. He did it using an African hand drum struck four times with a timpani stick to create the Morse letter V; the three short notes being obtained by dampening with a handkerchief. After the War he continued to play extensively and taught, handing on his knowledge liberally to students such as Simon Rattle, Ray Cooper, David Munrow and Evelyn Glennie. He authored several books but the most influential was Percussion Instruments and Their History published in 1970. He died at Cheam in Surrey on 19 May.

The Bauls are a clan of itinerant minstrels and mystical storytellers although many have been settled for generations. Their homeland is the eastern Indian region of Bengal and neighbouring Bangladesh. Subhendu 'Bapi' Das Baul represents the eighth generation to follow the non-conformist path of the Baul. Their philosophy, a mystic blend of faiths, holds that the human is the Divine. They see no point of mosque or temple. Baul songs are ecstatic communications with the divine within us and their song has profoundly affected people at home and abroad. Bapi's grandfather, Nabani Das, proved an influence on the Bengali Renaissance giant Rabindranath Tagore. Baul characters appear in a number of Tagore's works. Purna Das, Bapi's father, was the first to carry the message abroad and reach sizeable numbers of people. Hitherto, Baul culture was a pretty intellectual domain with most attention focused on it as an obscure religious cult. The availability of recordings and books on them enabled the recondite to become the familiar. The championing of Purna Das by Allen Ginsberg (who became fascinated by Baul philosophy during an extended visit to India) and Bob Dylan (he appears on the cover of John Wesley Harding) further spread the word in a sort of fame through association way. Although Subhendu Das has performed and recorded extensively with his father, he has now completed work on his solo debut for the Cologne-based Heaven and Earth label. To be called Jaan Sufi - meaning 'The Heart of Sufi' but also, in Bengali, carrying the alternative meaning of 'Understand Sufi' - it focuses on the Sufi Islamic mystic tradition which permeates of Baul philosophy as much as mystic Hinduism and Buddhism. The album was recorded live in Potter's Studio in Duisburg with additional material recorded in Calcutta. It is due out this summer.

It would be impossible to over-estimate the influence of the English composer and folk song collector Cecil Sharp in Britain's folk music revival during the 20th Century. In the second half of the century, his star waned somewhat. Certainly the scale of his achievement and his importance became the subject of periodic reappraisal. (A fresh look at his influence is overdue.) In December 1899 he met the concertina player William Kimber and the Headington Quarry Morris Dancers for the first time. Morris dancing would figure large in his work and Kimber's playing was long a source of delight for Sharp. To commemorate the centenary of the English Folk Dance & Song Society and the importance of William Kimber, the EFDSS is releasing an enhanced CD. It includes his playing of course but also will present recently discovered recordings of Kimber reminiscing as well as contemporary recordings illustrating how the influence of this ritual dance form and Kimber both persist to the present.

The Rough Guide to World Music, edited by Simon Broughton, has been given a complete overhaul for its upcoming second edition. The encyclopedia has now gone to artwork stage for publication later this year. Unlike the first edition which had everything in one volume, Broughton explained the new organisation for us thusly: "The Rouhg Guide to World Musicc is going to be split into four. The first two parts are out in October and they are Europe and Middle East and Africa. The second two parts- the Indian subcontinent, Asia and the Pacific, and North and South America and the Caribbean- in February."

June Tabor, one of England's finest singers, has begun recording her next album for Topic with John Ravenhall as producer. The repertoire will feature the material she broke in live on tour with the Creative Jazz Orchestra last October and her Trio in November. The Belfast-based writer Colin Harper is working on a biography of the highly influential Bert Jansch for Bloomsbury. Jansch is co-operating on book due for publication next year.