Post Mortem

A full obituary on Mr. Isaacs is here.

Gregory Isaacs, 59, the Jamaican-born reggae singer known as the "cool ruler" for his smooth, romantic singing style, died of lung cancer Oct. 25 at his home in London.

Unlike so-called roots rock singers Bob Marley and Burning Spear, who popularized songs that reflected the rastafarian culture, Mr. Isaacs was best known for his love songs, many of which he wrote.

Nattily-attired with his fedora hats and sports jackets, Mr. Isaacs conveyed a combination of prowess and vulnerability that invited comparisons to American rhythm and blues singers Tyrone Davis and Marvin Gave.

With his seductive baritone, Mr. Isaacs often pleaded for love or begged a lover for understanding.

Writing in the New York Times, music critic Milo Miles called Mr. Isaacs "the most exquisite vocalist in reggae," adding that "his lustful songs are not simple seductions or sexual boasts but sensuous daydreams, escapes from tribulation that invite the listener along."

Please leave your thoughts on "cool ruler" below.

In case you haven't used Google today (Oct. 21), you may not have noticed an unusual design on the home page: a razzmatazz boogie of semi-abstract art with a likeness of Dizzy Gillespie.

Today would have been Dizzy's 93rd birthday, and -- 17 years after his death -- he remains one of the most unforgettable characters of American music. It's sad that jazz has become such a marginal part of modern life, because if more people knew the story of Dizzy's life and music, the world would be an immeasurably better place.

If he's remembered in the popular imagination at all, it's as the puff-cheeked joker of jazz, a garrulous, laughing character with his trumpet bent at an odd angle. Dizzy Gillespie was actually a much more serious person than his image would suggest, and, as one of the prime architects of bebop, he is one of the five most important figures in jazz history.

For a glimpse of his music, check out this high-quality video from the early 1960s of Dizzy playing "Tin-Tin Deo," accompanied only by the superb bass work of Chris White. (For a brief view of a more exuberant Dizzy, go to this 1959 video of him directing and playing the first chorus of "Manteca.")

In one of my earlier journalistic incarnations, when I was a jazz critic in Florida, I cut out a small photo of Dizzy and pasted it over my own face on my company ID badge. Whenever I entered the building, I proudly showed my badge with Dizzy's face in place of mine. No one ever stopped me.

When Dizzy died in January 1993, long before I became an obituary writer, I wrote the following appreciation:

Bob Guccione, a seminary school dropout who revolutionized the adult entertainment industry in the late 1960s as the publisher of Penthouse magazine, filling its glossy pages with photographs of nude co-eds in explicitly erotic positions, and selling millions of copies in the process, has died of cancer age 79.

Mr. Guccione, who often wore pelvic hugging leather pants and collared shirts unbuttoned to his navel, exposing his wealth of chest hair and gold chains, estimated Penthouse earned $4 billion during his tenure as publisher.

He attributed his magazine's success to the way he had the nude models pose.

"We followed the philosophy of voyeurism," Mr. Guccione said in 2004. "To see her as if she doesn't know she's being seen."

Along the way, Mr. Guccione became one of the 400 wealthiest Americans, accruing a personal fortune of about $400 million in the early 1980s.

He became a respected art collector and had works by Van Gogh, Matisse, Renoir, Chagall, Degas and Picasso hanging in his 22,000-square-foot mansion in New York City.

While the graphic pictures alone made the magazine popularly controversial, Penthouse made news headlines in 1984 after it published nude photographs of Vanessa Williams, the first black woman to become Miss America.

After publication, Williams lost her title and sued Penthouse for damages, which made $14 million alone off that issue and sold six million copies. The lawsuit was later dropped.

Despite his magazines success, Penthouse suffered financially in the 1990s after circulation numbers began to dip with the rise of internet pornography. In the first months of 2010 circulation has dropped to 178,000.

Mr. Guccione also made a series of ill-advised investments, including a failed $18 million movie production of an X-rated adaptation of "Caligula," and $45 million in delinquent taxes, which contributed to his empire's downfall. His business filed for bankruptcy in the early 2000s.

He was forced to sell many pieces from his art collection at auction and sold his Manhattan mansion for $49 million.

A full obituary on Mr. Guccione is on the way.

Tom Bosley, 83, a Tony Award-winning stage actor who enjoyed a long career on television, notably as the wry Cunningham patriarchon "Happy Days," a small-town sherriff on "Murder, She Wrote" and a crime-hunting priest on "The Father Dowling Mysteries," died Oct. 19 at a hospital near his home in Palm Springs, Calif. He had lung cancer.

A soft-featured man, Mr. Bosley cultivated an avuncular public persona in his best-known roles. But if there seemed an additional poignancy to Mr. Bosley's absence, it was likely because his death followed three days after that of Barbara Billingsley, who played the wholesome mother of the Cleaver clan on "Leave it to Beaver."

If Billingsley helped define the 1950s family sitcom, and in a sense the cultural ideal of American suburban motherhood, Mr. Bosley did the same for middle-American fatherhood in "Happy Days," which was set in Milwaukee in the 1950s and aired from 1974 to 1984 on ABC.

Barbara Billingsley, the actress who played June Cleaver on "Leave It to Beaver," the classic 1950s TV show about suburban family life, has died at 94.

As Adam Bernstein, our resident pop culture expert, writes: "June Cleaver was presented as the flawless housewife, lovingly going through the motions of running a home: stuffing celery with peanut butter, vacuuming in high heels, greeting her husband when he came home at night and tucking in her two adorable sons."

Billingsley also had a memorable part in the 1980 spoof "Airplane!," in which she utters the memorable line, "Oh, stewardess, I speak jive." View the scene here.

Update: The full obituary has been posted.

Betty Peebles, the senior pastor of the Jericho City of Praise, died at a Baltimore hospital Tuesday night. She was 76 and had cancer.

Apostle Peebles, a longtime gospel artist, educator and radio personality, led a congregation that has grown from 10 people to more than 19,000 members -- making it one of the largest congregations in the Washington area. The church sits on a sprawling $36 million campus in the shadows of FedEx Field in Landover, where it also operates Jericho Christian College and the Jericho Christian Academy.

Apostle Peebles often talked about the humble beginnings of the Jericho City of Praise in a public housing complex in the Kenilworth Gardens section of Northeast Washington. It was in a small cinder-block structure there that she and her husband, the late Bishop James Peebles Sr., and their three sons built a Washington-area institution from scratch.

-- Hamil R. Harris

Tweet Are you on Twitter? How has Betty Peebles' death affected you or your community? Tell us in a reply by using #BettyPeebles on Twitter.

Another dispatch from our resident music guru Terence McArdle:

On Sunday, Grammy-winning soul and gospel singer, ordained minister and mortician Solomon Burke died. His obituary appears here.

Here he is in performance with a version of "I Can't Stop Loving You" a country song interpreted in the soul genre by Ray Charles.

Mr. Burke helped define the uptown soul genre with such country-soul classics as "Just Out of Reach." and the pop song, "Cry To Me" which was featured in the movie "Dirty Dancing (1987)."

I had the pleasure to talk to Mr. Burke when he was doing a promotional tour for one of his albums in 1993.

I asked him if he had a favorite of his recordings. While he didn't have one favorite, he said that was this version of the Christmas hymn, "Silent Night" performed live with a church choir -- during a church service in the middle of summer -- stood out.
Mr. Burke, often called King Solomon or the King of Rock and Soul, weighed over 400 pounds and often wore a crown and carried a scepter on stage.

His contract had a provision for the rental of a throne; a provision that sometimes proved problematic for promoters.

As Michael Jaworek, a promoter for the Birchmere night club in Alexandria, recalls, "I told our tech director, "No problem: call the Washington Shakespeare Company and see if they have one they use for 'Falstaff' or some other 'outsized' role."

The cost: $150 and four comp tickets. When Mr. Burke saw it, his face lit up. "I will remember that moment and that smile, whenever i hear him sing."

Feel free to share your remembrances of Solomon Burke.

This article has been updated.

Australian-born soprano Joan Sutherland, who was known as "La Stupenda" and was widely acclaimed as the best opera singer of her time, died Oct. 10 at her home near Geneva.

Ms. Sutherland made her debut in 1947 as Dido in "Dido and Aeneas," and spent decades performing regularly at the major opera houses of Europe and the United States. An agile vocalist with an impressive stage presence, she helped revive the bel canto repertoire -- romantic Italian operas from the 18th and 19th century that had largely fallen out of fashion.

She was one of the last links to a time when opera played a much more significant role in the popular imagination than it does today -- a time when she was a frequent guest on the Ed Sullivan Show or the Tonight Show. She was also instrumental in getting early attention for Luciano Pavarotti, whom she took on tour in 1965, when he was a young and largely unknown tenor.

She retired in 1990 after singing in 48 operas and recording 60 albums. Her last performance was in Sydney; she sang Margaret de Valois in a production of Les Huguenots.

Update: The full obituary can be viewed here.

Carla Cohen, who founded the beloved Connecticut Avenue bookstore Politics and Prose and was a driving force behind its evolution from a simple storefront into the center of Washington's literary scene, died this morning. She was 74 and had a rare cancer of the bile ducts.

News of her ill health reached customers in June, when Mrs. Cohen and co-owner Barbara Meade announced that they were putting the store up for sale.

"Whenever an institution having to do with the printed word ... is put on the auction block, there's always the fear that it is about to become a memory," wrote New Yorker political commentator Hendrik Hertzberg in June. "I pray this will not be the case with Politics & Prose, an outpost of intellectual and literary vitality that the nation's capital can ill afford to lose."

Mrs. Cohen was a former urban planner who conceived of Politics and Prose as a salon where Washington readers and writers could gather to challenge each other in discussion about the big ideas of the day -- a place that would reach beyond customers' pocketbooks and become part of their lives.

That concept proved wildly successful: Even as other independent bookshops in the District and around the country have folded under the pressure of competition from Internet booksellers and big-box chains, Politics and Prose has thrived, remaining profitable through multiple recessions and the advent of electronic books.

The store distinguished itself as the purveyor of public affairs books, literary nonfiction and other genres not known for impressive sales figures. The collection has been embraced by a particularly Washington mix of customers -- journalists, think-tankers and other book-hungry types drawn by the intersection of literature and big ideas.

"We don't have to carry anything that's just ordinary," said Mrs. Cohen, who often worked the phones and the cash register to keep tabs on what people were asking for. "We don't have a romance section."

Politics and Prose is also known for its steady stream of author talks, which has given scads of local writers a platform unlike any other to air their ideas and promote their books.

Mrs. Cohen and Meade's reach as literary tastemakers, however, reached past the leafy streets of Upper Northwest to the publishing houses of New York and beyond. Twenty-six years after it opened, Politics and Prose has become a near mandatory stop for authors promoting books on tour.

Literary luminaries John Updike and Alice Walker have spoken at the store, as have investigative reporter David Halberstam, former President Bill Clinton and photographer Annie Leibowitz.

This month, the events calendar features former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Nobel Prize-winner V.S. Naipaul and Haitian-born writer Edwidge Danticat, who won a MacArthur Fellowship in 2009.

Mrs. Cohen's family and Barbara Meade said they are undergoing a rigorous and methodical process to identify the next owners of Politics and Prose. Many potential buyers have already stepped forward and the next step is to winnow that group to a handful, said Meade, but the process will pause during a period of mourning for Mrs. Cohen.

Let me take you down, cause I'm going to...

On Oct. 9, 1940 John Winston Lennon was born in Liverpool, England, the only son of a merchant sailor who was away at sea that day.

It wasn't until 13 years later that the schoolboy with a penchant for mischief picked up a guitar and began to write some tunes.

By his early 20s, the skinny lad with long brown hair became a worldwide sensation--- the master songsmith behind a little British band known as The Beatles.

By 1969 the super group had broken up. He went out on his own and wrote several chart topping album. He penned more than a few memorable melodies. He was still one of the most popular musicians in the world.

On Dec. 8, 1980 Mr. Lennon was walking toward the entrance of his home in the Dakota on Central Park West when a man called out to him.

Mr. Lennon turned. It was in that moment that Mark David Chapman pulled out a .38-caliber pistol and shot the Beatles frontman four times.

"Do you know what you just did?" The Dakota doorman shouted at Chapman, whose face was sprayed with blood.
"I just shot John Lennon," the assailant replied, coolly.

Only hours before Mr. Lennon had signed an autograph for Chapman.

It was a violent end for a man who once wrote the lyrics: "You may say that I'm a dreamer/ But I'm not the only one/ I hope someday you'll join us/ And the world will live as one."

Today, on Mr. Lennon's birthday, Beatles fans are celebrating the artist's momentous achievements in the world of music.

Here's my favorite song by Mr. Lennon:

What's your favorite Lennon tune? Leave your thoughts and memories of him below.