Richard Sandomir

The death was reported by the newspapers Ming Pao in Hong Kong and The Malay Mail in Kuala Lumpur. No other details were given.

Yao was called “the silver voice” in Shanghai, her music influenced by jazz and Chinese folk. She was not famous well beyond Asia, but at least two of her songs made an impact in the United States. An English-language version of one of her hits, “Rose, Rose, I Love You” (1940), was recorded by American singer Frankie Laine in 1951 and rose to No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

And last year, “Ren Sheng Jiu Shi Xi” (or “Life Is Just a Play”), which she released in Hong Kong in 1959, was used on the soundtrack of Jon M. Chu’s romantic comedy “Crazy Rich Asians” (2018), a movie about a New Yorker who travels to Singapore to meet her boyfriend’s wealthy family.

With her soft, high voice, Yao was long referred to as one of the seven great singing stars of Shanghai, along with her idol, Zhou Xuan, who was known as “the olden voice.” The music of Shanghai bore not only the rhythms of jazz but also global sounds like Cuban rumba and the Hawaiian steel guitar.

Yao thrived in that milieu, working at times with her brother, Yao Min, a leading songwriter with whom she also sang duets.

“They created a modern Chinese popular music that moved elegantly between swing, the blues, Hollywood standards and Chinese folk,” Andrew F. Jones, who teaches modern Chinese literature and media culture at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in an email, “while incorporating traces of many other styles and sounds from the multinational soundscape of colonial-era Shanghai.”

She continued to record after the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 and during Japan’s occupation of Chinese cities through 1945. One number, “Congratulations” (1946), sung by Yao and her brother, became a familiar song to celebrate the Chinese New Year. But it was also a commentary on the defeat of Japan in World War II, Jones said.

“The song’s rather melancholy tone,” he wrote, “reflects both the exhaustion and misery wrought by eight years of Japanese occupation” and the distress that ensued over the social unrest and civil war that engulfed China in the wake of the Allied victory.

Yao (whose name was sometimes spelled Yao Lee) was born Sept. 3, 1922, and raised in Shanghai. As a girl in the early 1930s she listened to Zhou on the radio but was too poor to buy her records. Yao began singing on the radio at 13 — at least once on a program with Zhou — and signed her first contract, with Pathé Records, a part of EMI, three years later. She became a popular nightclub attraction.

“Big movie stars like Li Lihua would come every Sunday to watch me perform and request specific songs,” she recalled in an interview in 2013 with The Glass, a cultural magazine.

She married Huang Baoluo in the late 1940s but did not stay in Shanghai much longer. The Communist Party took power in 1949 and, fearing that she might have to endure reeducation by the new regime, she fled to Hong Kong with her husband the next year.

“I was so scared and very sad,” she told The Glass. “I thought my life, and career, were finished.”

They were not. The musical world of Shanghai was largely re-created in Hong Kong, which was then a British colony. EMI opened offices there and invited her and other Pathé artists to record. She also started working in the film industry, providing vocals that were lip-synced by actress Chung Ching in a series of pictures, including “Songs of the Peach Blossom River” (1956).

By then Yao had begun to emulate pop and country singer Patti Page by deepening her voice. She continued to sing into the mid-1960s. After her brother’s death, in 1967, she took an executive job at EMI.

Information about her survivors was not available.

Yao stopped making records, she said, because of the encroachment of modern studio technology.

Today, she said, “the singer needs only to sing to prerecorded music, and she can do as many takes as she wishes,” she lamented in an interview with the newspaper The Straits Times in Singapore in 1992.

“For me,” she added, “I could never do without a live band. Pretaped music kills all the spontaneity and feelings in me.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/arts/music/yao-li-dead.html" id="30003daa-8bb7-33b8-a9a1-1fb22f6fd83e">The New York Times</a>.

Yao Li, a celebrated singer in Shanghai in the midst of war in the 1930s and ’40s, whose music remained popular after she moved to Hong Kong when China turned communist, died July 19. She was 96.

Yao Li, 'Silver Voice' of Shanghai, Dies at 96

Edith could never shake the awful sense that Juanita had received substandard care because her family was poor. She recalled that a doctor had visited Juanita just once during her illness while spending more time tending to better-off typhoid patients living nearby.

At that young age, Edith resolved to become a doctor who would find her reward in service, not wealth.

“I was going to particularly see those who did not have money and those who were less fortunate, who would get the kind of care that they needed,” she said as Dr. Edith Irby Jones in a 2006 oral history interview at the University of Arkansas.

She added, “And I was going to do it as much as I could and I was going to instill into others that they must do it, too.”

By the time of her death on July 15 in a Houston hospital, Jones, who was 91, had fulfilled her ambition. For a half-century, until she retired in 2013, she had devoted her career to treating lower-income patients in Houston’s Third Ward, making house calls and sometimes picking up patients in her van.

More than a local doctor, however, she also founded one hospital and co-owned another; did humanitarian work in Haiti, where a clinic was named for her; and became the first woman to lead a venerable medical association for black doctors.

Jones had stood out early as the first African American student admitted to the University of Arkansas Medical School in 1948. (It is now the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.) She is widely believed to have been the first black student enrolled in any all-white medical school in the South — an educational milestone that preceded the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education by six years.

A photograph of Jones on her first day in medical school emphasizes how isolated she had been. Published in Ebony magazine, it shows her alone in a corridor as white students mill about, some looking at her.

But she was optimistic and confident, believing that most white people were fair-minded.

“I hope to make a record that will reflect to the honor of my race,” she said in an interview with The Pittsburgh Courier, a black newspaper, in 1948, “and that will obviously show that we only want to be accorded the rights deserved by human beings and good American citizens.”

She played down the impact segregation had on her at the medical school — she could not use the white students’ dining, bathroom and residential facilities, but some fellow students studied and ate with her at her off-campus apartment.

“She didn’t harp on the difficulties,” her daughter, Myra Jones Romain, said in a phone interview. “She’d say to me, ‘If you cry every time someone said something that hurt your feelings, you’d run out of tears.’ ”

While attending school, she joined three lawyers to form a group called the Freedom Four, which traveled to churches and homes around Arkansas, urging black people to get involved in the nascent civil rights movement.

“I was young and brave and fearless and felt that I had a cause for which to be concerned,” she told in the oral history interview.

After graduating from medical school in 1952, she started a general practice in Hot Springs, Arkansas, then, in 1959, moved to Houston, where she became the first black woman to be named a resident at Baylor College of Medicine Affiliated Hospitals. She later opened a practice in Houston, and didn’t wait for all her patients to come to her.

“She’d pick people up, and when I learned to drive, she’d say, ‘Pick up so and so,’ ” Romain said. “She was especially cognizant that the elderly were written off, not honored and often isolated.”

Jones expanded her work as a staff doctor for several hospitals around Houston; founded Mercy Hospital, a small facility, with several other African-American doctors, and became a part-owner of Park Plaza Hospital.

In 1985, Jones became the first woman elected president of the National Medical Association, an organization that has represented black physicians since 1895. During her year in office, she and a group of doctors from the NMA treated patients and trained physicians in Haiti. She helped found a clinic named for her in Vaudreuil, in the northern part of the country.

“Calling her a trailblazer underestimates her accomplishments,” Dr. Niva Lubin-Johnson, the NMA’s current president, said. “She chose to work in underserved areas and still did so many other things.”

Edith Mae Irby was born on Dec. 23, 1927, in Mayflower, Arkansas. The family lived on a farm, where Edith’s father, Robert, was a sharecropper; her mother, Mattie (Buice) Irby, was a domestic worker.

When Edith was about 3 years old, a horse her father had been riding was stung by a bee and kicked him in the chest, causing fatal injuries. The family was forced off the land because her father had left a small unpaid debt to the owner.

After moving to Conway, Edith contracted rheumatic fever, which prevented her from attending school for a year and gave her a lifelong heart murmur. She recovered, but witnessed her mother’s anguish at watching Juanita die and Robert nearly succumb to typhoid fever.

“I remember my mother putting her head on the table, weeping unreservedly, particularly when my brother was so very sick,” Jones said in the oral history interview.

The family moved to Hot Springs, where Edith went to segregated schools. A high school teacher helped her get a scholarship to historically black Knoxville College in Tennessee, where she studied physics, biology and chemistry.

That set the stage for her breaking the color barrier at the University of Arkansas Medical School in 1948. (The university had opened its doors to a black law student the year before.)

“When I applied and they accepted me, everybody made such a big thing of it, but I wasn’t surprised at all,” she told the Texas Medical Center’s women’s history project in 2014. “Because not only did the University of Arkansas accept me, every medical school I applied to accepted me.”

While attending medical school, she married James B. Jones, an educator who became a dean at Texas Southern University. He died in 1989.

Before she graduated, Jones gave a lecture to a sorority at Philander Smith College, in Little Rock, that moved one student, Joycelyn Elders, to become a doctor. Elders would go on to serve as the U.S. surgeon general in the 1990s.

“After that day,” Elders once said, “all I wanted to be was just like Dr. Irby.”

In addition to her daughter, who confirmed the death, Jones is survived by her sons, Gary and Keith; seven grandchildren; and 10 great-grandchildren.

Romain said that she was concerned about her mother’s health when she was still practicing into her mid-80s.

“She was starting to get forgetful, and I’d tell her she needed to retire,” Romain said. “She’d fight me about it, and I’d say, ‘You can do anything you want.’ But she said, ‘All I’ve ever wanted to do in my life is practice medicine.’ ”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/obituaries/dr-edith-irby-jones-dead.html" id="f61d2197-adfa-3fa7-ad3c-539969c2577b">The New York Times</a>.

Edith Irby Jones, Pioneering Black Doctor in the South, Dies at 91

Edith Mae Irby was about 7 years old in the early 1930s when her older siblings contracted typhoid fever in their little house in Conway, Arkansas. Her brother Robert recovered, but her sister, Juanita, died.

Jones had stood out early as the first African-American student admitted to the University of Arkansas Medical School in 1948. (It is now the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.) She is widely believed to have been the first black student enrolled in any medical school in the South — an educational milestone that preceded the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education by six years.

Her death, in a hospice, was confirmed by Heather Garrison, her granddaughter.

Wyman — whose work for Life, Look and other magazines went largely unheralded for decades — discovered what she called a “special kind of happiness” in photographing subjects like a little girl wearing curlers, a peddler hauling a block of ice from a horse-drawn cart and four boys holding dolls, pretending to be the plastic girls’ fathers.

“Taking pictures enabled me to hear the stories of the people I photographed,” she said in an essay for the Stephen Cohen Gallery in Los Angeles, one of her dealers, “which satisfied an immense curiosity to learn and understand the lives of others, lives different in experience and age from my own.”

She was 19 and working in Manhattan as a photo printer for the Acme Newspictures agency when she photographed several men in Manhattan’s garment district in April 1945. One held up a copy of The Jewish Daily Forward, the Yiddish-language newspaper, as the others read about President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death. The rich details of the well-dressed men’s clothing contrasted with the mysteriously hazy background, which seemed to suggest uncertainty for the United States after Roosevelt’s death.

Four months later, amid the celebration after Japan’s surrender ended World War II, Wyman came upon a group of ecstatic servicemen in Manhattan. A sailor tightly embraced a smiling woman — a picture that serves as a sort of bookend to Alfred Eisenstaedt’s better-known photograph, taken that day in Times Square, of a sailor kissing a nurse.

Wyman did not remain at Acme much longer. She had been the agency’s only female printer, and with men returning from the war, she was fired. She became a freelance photographer, selling pictures to magazines including Business Week, Fortune and Coronet. By 1948 she was in Los Angeles, working on assignments for Life.

She found street subjects there, as she had in New York and on other assignments in Chicago, St. Louis and Houston. But she also expanded her repertoire with Life to include the 1950 U.S. senatorial campaign between Richard M. Nixon and Helen Gahagan Douglas, the wedding of a Marine about to be shipped to Korea, a young couple at the beach and Hollywood actors making movies.

She photographed James Cagney wielding a shotgun while shrouded in smoke as the psychotic killer Cody Jarrett in “White Heat” (1949); Elizabeth Taylor joyously dancing in “A Place in the Sun” (1951) with Montgomery Clift (only his right hand is visible); and Ronald Reagan with his chimpanzee co-star in “Bedtime for Bonzo” (1951).

“I used to walk around the set with him, holding his hand,” Wyman told The Journal News of White Plains in 1984, referring to Bonzo, the subject of a Life assignment. “You began to think of him as a big kid with hair, except he had a very powerful grip, not like a 5-year-old.”

Ida Dora Wyman was born on March 7, 1926, in Malden, Massachusetts, to Joseph and Rebecca (Michalow) Wyman, and moved as a child to the Bronx, where her parents, immigrants from Latvia, owned a small grocery store.

Her parents bought her a box camera when she was 14, and soon after that she began taking pictures of people and buildings in her neighborhood. At Walton High School she joined the camera club, honing her skills at taking and printing pictures.

After graduating in 1943, she found work at Acme, first in its mailroom and then as a printer. At lunch hour, she photographed nearby laborers and office workers with her Graflex Speed Graphic camera.

“Wearing the camera trumped my shyness,” she said in “Chords of Memory” (2014), a book of her photographs and text on which she collaborated with Melanie Herzog. “I wasn’t threatening and I wore saddle shoes and bobby socks.”

The six years featuring her most memorable work ended in 1951. By then she had married Simon Nathan, a photographer at Acme, who encouraged her to join the Photo League, a radical collective. Working there further inspired her to produce honest photographs that could effect social change. But when their first child, David, was born that year, she became a homemaker. Their daughter, Nancy, arrived three years later.

When she returned full time to photography in 1962, Wyman shifted her focus, working for Haskins Laboratories, a scientific research organization in Manhattan. Then, from 1968 to 1983, she was chief photographer at the department of pathology at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. She then returned to freelancing for various commercial clients.

During that period she also graduated from Empire State College in Manhattan.

She stopped freelancing in 1990 because of the physical toll of carrying camera equipment, but by then recognition of her earlier work was starting to grow. Her photographs appeared in various group and solo exhibitions, mostly in New York City, and fine-art galleries were taking notice.

“When people talk about the Photo League and Life magazine photographers, Ida’s name hasn’t often been in those conversations,” Sid Monroe, who with his wife, Michelle, owns Monroe Gallery of Photography in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Wyman’s lead representative since the mid-1990s, said in a phone interview. “But she was every bit as good as the better-known names.”

In 2014 she was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Watrous Gallery in Madison, where she had moved eight years earlier.

Martha Glowacki, the gallery’s former director and curator of the show, “The Chords of Memory,” said Wyman’s work was distinguished by her empathy.

“Unlike many street photographers,” Glowacki said, “she’d always introduce herself to her subjects and ask to take their photographs. If they said yes, she’d do it. She’d come and observe them again and again. She didn’t pose them. Because of that, she captured their genuine expressions. They weren’t looking furtively at her.”

In addition to her granddaughter, Wyman is survived by her son, her daughter and two great-grandsons. Her marriage to Nathan ended in divorce.

Wyman said the steady increase in attention to her early work when she was in her 70s and 80s surprised her.

“When I was making those pictures or doing assignments, I never dreamed they would have any value — or interest, even,” she told The Santa Fe New Mexican in 2007. “When you are shooting, you just want to get into print.

“It generated more work; the more you published, the more likely you were to get assignments. You wanted to get that credit line — that means a lot.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/arts/ida-wyman-dead.html" id="a2c93a27-ff06-3aad-a6d4-669af2c05feb">The New York Times</a>.

Ida Wyman, a photographer who in the 1940s and ’50s roamed New York and other cities to capture compelling images of everyday people working, playing, idling, dancing or selling newspapers, died July 13 in Fitchburg, Wisconsin, near Madison. She was 93.

Ida Wyman, Whose Camera Captured Ordinary People, Dies at 93

His death was confirmed by Jen Dillon, a family spokeswoman, who said the cause appeared to have been cardiac arrest.

The Absolut campaign, appearing largely in upscale magazines, started in 1980 when Roux was the No. 2 executive at Carillon Importers, which marketed and distributed Absolut in America.

Conceived by the agency TBWA, the ads imbued Absolut with a sophisticated image. “I want to make a fashionable business out of the booze-peddler business,” Roux told W magazine in 1988.

TBWA used Absolut’s squat, transparent bottle as its muse, with ads like “Absolut Heaven,” which pictured the bottle with angel’s wings, and “Absolut Perfection,” which placed it under a halo.

The bottle served as model, adorned with decorations and garb, to describe states of mind like optimism, generosity, elegance and anticipation. The bottle’s shape was depicted in myriad creative ways, appearing as if carved into a computer chip (Absolut Intelligence), Central Park (Absolut Manhattan) and a golf course (Absolut 19th).

Roux, who became Carillon’s president in 1982, added to the campaign by commissioning Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, Ed Ruscha and many other artists and photographers to reimagine the bottle in a long-running series of ads. Kurt Vonnegut drew himself playing with string — a nod to his novel “Cat’s Cradle” — with the bottle’s spout turned into a cat’s head.

Hiring Warhol — for $65,000 (about $157,000 today), a ceiling Roux would not exceed for any other artist — was a breakthrough in the campaign.

“I knew Andy Warhol very well,” Roux said in an interview with Chilled, a magazine about beer, wine and spirits. “He was a teetotaler; he didn’t drink. He made me believe he was using Absolut as a perfume.”

But Richard Lewis, TBWA’s former worldwide managing director of the Absolut brand, said the agency had initially opposed using the artists.

“Michel pushed us on that,” Lewis said in a telephone interview. “The agency was against because it wasn’t their idea, but more so because the brand was doing well, and they didn’t want to splinter the existing campaign. They weren’t ready to use an artistically driven bottle.”

Ultimately, Lewis said, the artist-created ads accelerated the campaign by attracting other artists, as well as Hollywood stars and others among the rich and famous, as Absolut consumers.

Lewis wrote a book about the campaign, “Absolut Book,” published in 1996.

“He was a very demanding fellow who loved anybody who had an idea,” William Tragos, a founder and former chairman and chief executive of TBWA, said of Roux in an interview. “So to our creative people he was an encourager. But at the same time, he was able to say, ‘That’s not good enough.’”

Roux used Absolut advertising as early as 1981 to court gay and lesbian consumers, believing they were trendsetters. In 1992, Carillon sponsored a 16-page portfolio of works by gay and lesbian artists in the gay periodical The Advocate. It included images of same-sex marriage, a gay-pride parade and the 1969 Stonewall uprising.

Absolut became a corporate sponsor of the Gay &amp; Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation in 1989.

The brand overtook Stolichnaya as the No. 1 imported vodka in 1985, and held that rank until 2015, when Svedka, another Swedish product, overtook it, according to Impact Databank, which tracks trends in the alcoholic beverage industry as the research unit of M. Shanken Communications.

Despite his success, though, Roux had to surrender his rights to market and distribute Absolut in 1994. Vin &amp; Spirit AB, which produces Absolut, shifted its import rights in the United States from Carillon to the Seagram Spirits and Wine Group.

“It’s a child I gave birth to and nourished properly to teen age,” Roux told The New York Times in 1993, when the change was announced. “I hope they don’t screw it up.”

A few months later, Carillon acquired the rights to sell Stolichnaya, then the No. 2 import — an unexpectedly happy turn of events for Roux.

“I think we can make a big brand out of Stoli,” he told The Times, “maybe as big as Absolut someday, without damaging Absolut.”

The Absolut campaign that was essential to Roux’s career continued until 2006.

Michel Pierre Roux (pronounced roo) was born on Aug. 31, 1940, in Soyaux, France, to Emmanuel and Louisette (Lecocq) Roux. After graduating from the University of Strasbourg with a degree in hotel management and serving as a paratrooper in the French army, he emigrated to the United States in 1964 with the help of a family from Texas, who sponsored him.

He started as a dishwasher at the Rice Hotel in Houston and moved quickly into a job at the reception desk. He left Houston for a job as an assistant manager at a hotel in Rockport, Texas, before opening his own French bistros in Corpus Christi and Dallas.

In 1970 he became Carillon’s only salesman, peddling Grand Marnier and other products nationwide.

Roux’s success with Absolut overwhelmed his work with other brands at Carillon. In addition to helping make Grand Marnier more popular, he introduced Bombay Sapphire, an offshoot of Bombay Dry Gin, with a distinctive blue bottle inspired by the Star of Bombay sapphire. Bombay Sapphire became the world’s second-largest gin brand.

Roux left Carillon in 1998 and the next year founded a similar company, Crillon Importers. He was its chairman and chief executive at his death.

He is survived by his wife, Kathleen (Hazlett) Roux, known as Kitty, and his sons, Dominique and Maximilien.

One of Roux’s signature spirits at Crillon was absinthe, the anise-flavored spirit known for its popularity among 19th-century artists like van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec. It was banned by the United States in 1912 amid concerns that wormwood, one if its ingredients, which contained thujone, caused hallucinations.

In 2000 Roux introduced a legal absinthe, Absente, which used a sister botanical, Southern wormwood, with only trace amounts of thujone.

“People who drink Absente have said they’ve waited for the hallucination,” Roux said with a laugh during an interview with The Detroit Free Press in 2000. “But you would have to wait a long time with our product.”

After the government approved the use of wormwood in absinthe in 2007 — with limits on the amount of thujone — Crillon reformulated its absinthe products. And in 2010 it introduced one called Michel P. Roux Supreme Absinthe, with a picture of Roux on the label.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/10/obituaries/michel-roux-dead.html" id="894726d0-af9f-35b2-a400-9e64c7b28c03">The New York Times</a>.

Michel Roux, a French-born liquor executive who used a distinctive and witty advertising campaign to turn Absolut, a little-known Swedish brand, into the top imported vodka in the United States, died on April 30 at his home in Palm Coast, Florida. He was 78.

Michel Roux, Whose Vodka Success Was Absolut, Is Dead at 78

His death was confirmed by Gary King, a longtime friend, who found Albertson’s body. No cause was given, but he had been ill for some time, King said.

In 1959, Albertson took what became an inadvertent first step toward resurrecting Smith’s recordings when he invited John Hammond, the celebrated Columbia Records producer who had supervised her last sessions, to his apartment in Philadelphia.

Albertson, who was then a disc jockey at a jazz station, wanted Hammond to listen to two veteran jazz musicians, guitarist Lonnie Johnson and banjo player Elmer Snowden, in the hope he would sign them.

While no deal was made, Hammond and Albertson stayed in touch over the next decade and spoke often about Bessie Smith. Albertson eventually persuaded Hammond to reissue her recordings, a cache of musical history, made between 1923 and 1933, that includes acknowledged classics like “Downhearted Blues” and “T’ain’t Nobody’s Bizness if I Do.” Her accompanists included Louis Armstrong on cornet and Fletcher Henderson on piano.

In 1968, Hammond agreed to the project in 1968, naming Albertson its producer and Larry Hiller its engineer. In “Bessie” (1972), his biography, Albertson described listening to all 159 of Smith’s recorded songs as “a remarkable experience that only the raw power and emotion of an artist like Bessie Smith could keep from becoming mind-numbing.”

In all, 10 LPs of her work were released, in five two-disc sets. The first, “Bessie Smith: The World’s Greatest Blues Singer” (1970), earned Albertson a Grammy Award for best liner notes. The other four were released through 1972.

Reviewing the first four two-album sets in The New Yorker in 1971, Whitney Balliett called the results “a wonder.”

“Columbia, with Chris Albertson heading up the project, has done a herculean job on the Bessie Smith reissues,” he wrote, noting that the strong sales for the first four sets had shown that “what started out as sort of a foundation altruistic project, a musical-archaeological dig into the works of a blues singer who died 34 years ago, has become a thriving investment.”

Albertson’s work on those reissues led to a contract with the publishing house Stein &amp; Day to write Bessie Smith’s biography.

One of his goals in writing “Bessie” was to debunk the many myths about her.

They included the long-held belief — spread early on by Hammond — that after the auto accident in 1937 in Mississippi that proved fatal to Smith, a white hospital refused to treat her. Albertson reconstructed the accident, which took place on a dark road when Smith’s lover, Richard Morgan, driving a Packard, hit the rear end of a truck.

Smith was thrown out of the car on impact, and her right arm was nearly severed.

Dr. Hugh Smith, who was white, told Albertson in an interview for the book that he had been driving to a fishing trip and stopped to treat her, but that soon after, another car, with a white couple in it, plowed into his. Eventually, two ambulances arrived; one of them took Smith to a black hospital, where she died. No white hospital was involved.

Smith was at first reluctant to speak to Albertson, and referred him to some new Columbia LPs of her music, Albertson recalled in an interview with Terry Gross on the NPR program “Fresh Air” in 2003, when a revised and expanded version of “Bessie” was published. “Read those liner notes and you’ll find the closest thing to the truth,” Smith said.

Albertson said he had responded, “I wrote the liner notes,” and the doctor agreed to talk.

“Bessie” was quickly acknowledged as the definitive Bessie Smith biography. Reviewing it in The Los Angeles Times, jazz critic Leonard Feather called it “the most devastating, provocative and enlightening work of its kind ever contributed to the annals of jazz literature.”

Christiern Gunnar Albertson was born on Oct. 18, 1931, in Reykjavik, Iceland. His father abandoned him and his mother, Yvonne, before his first birthday; she married three more times.

He was living in Copenhagen in 1947 when he first heard Bessie Smith on a tiny radio speaker. Impressed by the sincerity of her voice, he borrowed books on African American music from the United States Information Service library.

The discoveries transformed him, as they transformed other young Danes who dreamed of going to New Orleans to hear its blues and jazz musicians.

“We found magic in such names as Kid Ory, King Oliver, Johnny Dodds, Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey,” he wrote on his blog, Stomp Off, in 2010.

By 1955 he had moved back to his homeland and was a disc jockey for Armed Forces Radio in Keflavik, Iceland. Two years later he emigrated to the United States, where he found radio work in Philadelphia.

Albertson moved to New York in the 1960s and became a producer for Riverside Records, where he recorded the final sessions of blues singer Ida Cox and pianist Meade Lux Lewis and supervised the label’s “Living Legends” album series, which featured artists like Alberta Hunter, Sweet Emma Barrett and Louis Cottrell Jr.

He returned to radio in 1964, spending about a year as station manager of WBAI, the iconoclastic listener-supported New York FM station.

By then he had begun writing liner notes for jazz albums; a few years later he started a long association with Stereo Review magazine as a critic. He also contributed to DownBeat and other publications.

Information on Albertson’s survivors was not immediately available.

In “Bessie,” Albertson wrote about Smith’s final Columbia session, in 1933, at which she recorded “Do Your Duty” and “Gimme a Pigfoot (and a Bottle of Beer).”

“Following Bessie’s session, the studio closed for the weekend,” he wrote. “But when it opened again, Monday morning, a nervous 18-year-old Bessie Smith-inspired singer named Billie Holiday made her debut. Fate had neatly arranged a changing of the guard.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/09/obituaries/chris-albertson-dead.html" id="f4bd2612-4f16-301d-a969-8a74fd0e5c84">The New York Times</a>.

Chris Albertson, Biographer of Bessie Smith, Is Dead at 87

Chris Albertson, who as a teenager in Denmark became captivated by blues singer Bessie Smith and decades later produced a widely praised multivolume reissue of her recordings and wrote an equally acclaimed biography, was found dead April 24 at his home in New York. He was 87.

His death was confirmed by Gary King, a longtime friend, who found Albertson’s body.

In 1959, Albertson took what became an inadvertent first step to resurrecting Smith’s recordings, made between 1923 and 1933: He invited John Hammond, the celebrated Columbia Records producer who had supervised her last sessions, to his apartment in Philadelphia.

While no deal was made, Hammond and Albertson stayed in touch over the next decade and spoke often about Bessie Smith. Albertson eventually persuaded Hammond to reissue her recordings, a cache of musical history that includes acknowledged classics like “Downhearted Blues” and “T’ain’t Nobody’s Bizness if I Do.” Her accompanists included Louis Armstrong on cornet and Fletcher Henderson on piano.

In 1968, Hammond agreed to the project, naming Albertson its producer and Larry Hiller its engineer. In “Bessie” (1972), his biography, Albertson described the process of listening to all 159 of Smith’s recorded songs as “a remarkable experience that only the raw power and emotion of an artist like Bessie Smith could keep from becoming mind-numbing.”

In all, 10 LPs of her work were released, in five two-disc sets. The first, “Bessie Smith: The World’s Greatest Blues Singer” (1970), earned Albertson a Grammy Award for best liner notes. The other four were released gradually through 1972.

Albertson’s work on those reissues quickly led to a contract with the publishing house Stein &amp; Day to write Bessie Smith’s biography.

They included the long-held belief — spread early on by Hammond — that after the auto accident in 1937 in Mississippi that would prove fatal to Smith, a white hospital refused to treat her. Albertson reconstructed the accident, which took place on a dark road when Smith’s lover, Richard Morgan, driving a Packard, hit the rear end of a truck.

The impact of the crash forced Smith onto the road and nearly severed her right arm.

Albertson said that he responded, “I wrote the liner notes,” and the doctor agreed to talk.

Christiern Gunnar Albertson was born on Oct. 18, 1931, in Reykjavik, Iceland. His father abandoned him and his mother, Yvonne, before his first birthday; she would marry three more times.

He was living in Copenhagen in 1947 when he first heard Bessie Smith on a tiny radio speaker. Impressed by the sincerity of her voice, he borrowed books on African-American music from the United States Information Service library.

By 1955 he had moved back to his homeland and was a disc jockey for Armed Forces Radio in Keflavik, Iceland. Two years later he immigrated to the United States, where he found radio work in Philadelphia.

In the 1960s he moved to New York, where, as a producer for Riverside Records, he recorded the final sessions of blues singer Ida Cox and pianist Meade Lux Lewis and supervised the label’s “Living Legends” album series, which featured artists like Alberta Hunter, Sweet Emma Barrett and Louis Cottrell Jr.

By then he had begun writing liner notes for jazz albums, and a few years later he started his long associations as a critic for Stereo Review magazine. He also contributed to DownBeat and other publications.

His wife, Marion (Dusser de Barenne) Kilson, said the cause was congestive heart failure.

A son of a Methodist minister, Kilson was a prolific writer, an expert on ethnic politics in Africa and the United States, and a mentor to generations of students, among them writer, teacher and philosopher Cornel West.

He also found vigorous public debate irresistible during his nearly 40 years as a professor of government at Harvard.

“Lord, oh, Lord, Brother Kilson loved combat,” West said in a telephone interview.

Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard professor, writer and filmmaker, wrote of Kilson in an email, “He prided himself on the role of the gadfly, challenging hierarchies, speaking truth to power and arguing against the grain, all in the name of the pursuit of veritas.”

Kilson, an avowed integrationist, was already teaching courses in African politics in the 1960s when black students were starting to assert themselves on predominantly white campuses like Harvard.

“Naturally, the Negro wants to lay down the conditions and call the shots, something done for him by the white liberal in an earlier day,” Kilson told The Harvard Crimson in 1964. “His friendship is not spurned but merely held in abeyance, giving us both time to think over what is going on inside and outside of us.”

Kilson was a faculty sponsor of the Harvard-Radcliffe Association of African and Afro-American Students. But after the university’s Afro-American studies department was established in 1969, he became disenchanted with its governance, criticizing it as lacking academic rigor and maintaining that it had become an enclave for radical black students.

“Black solidarity forces are distinctly anti-intellectual and anti-achievement in orientation,” he wrote in a provocative essay about Harvard in The New York Times Magazine in 1973. “They indulge in the ‘black magic’ of nationalism, believing that miracles are possible if Negroes display fidelity to black nationalism or separatism and its anti-white attitudes, rituals and symbols.”

Kilson argued that the radical politics of separatists was an academic dead end.

“It took extraordinary courage in 1969 to challenge Black Panther and black power rhetoric,” the Rev. Eugene Rivers III, a former student of Kilson’s, said in a telephone interview. “And he was right.”

But critics of the professor — including Ewart Guinier, the founding chairman of the Afro-American studies department — disagreed with both his methodologies and his conclusions.

During a debate broadcast by a New York City television station in late 1973, Guinier was scornful of Kilson, saying he “shouts loudly about rigorous thought, standards and superior white universities, all the while encouraging people to think of him as a major scholar.”

Kilson responded, “I am certainly not as much of an ideologue as Ewart Guinier.”

Decades later, in “A Companion to African American Studies” (2016), edited by Lewis Gordon and Jane Ann Gordon, Kilson wrote that Harvard’s Afro-American studies department did not flower until the 1990s, when Gates became its chairman.

He described Gates as a “top-rank academic-entrepreneurial black scholar.”

Martin Luther Kilson Jr. was born Feb. 14, 1931, in East Rutherford, New Jersey, and grew up in Ambler, Pennsylvania, a factory town north of Philadelphia. His mother, Louisa (Laws) Kilson, was a homemaker. Martin Sr. was not the only minister in the family; there were preachers on both sides, including young Martin’s great-great-grandfather, Isaac Lee, a freed black who founded an African Methodist Episcopal church in Maryland in 1848.

Kilson encountered Du Bois, the pioneering urban sociologist who was a founder of the NAACP, as a freshman at Lincoln University, a historically black college in Oxford, Pennsylvania. Du Bois had come to the campus to encourage its students to become part of the educated, community-based black leadership he called “The Talented Tenth,” calling on them to help improve the lives of needy black people.

Du Bois remained an influence throughout Kilson’s career. In his book “Transformation of the African American Intelligentsia, 1880-2012” (2014), he wrote that it is “a moral imperative for today’s variant of Du Bois’ ‘Talented Tenth’ to mobilize its new socioeconomic and political resources to help ameliorate some of the social crises that now plague about 40 percent of African American families.”

After receiving his master’s degree and Ph.D. in political science from Harvard, he did field work in Sierra Leone under a Ford Foundation fellowship, studying the political system in that country as it shifted from British control to independence in 1961.

When he returned to the United States that year, he became a research associate at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs, where he started turning his Sierra Leone research into a book, “Political Change in a West African State,” published in 1966.

Harvard hired him as a lecturer in government in 1962. He was named an assistant professor two years later and granted tenure in 1968.

“He took a lot of pride in that accomplishment,” his daughter Hannah Kilson said in a telephone interview. “But it isn’t what made him a decent person. He was a decent man with a strong moral compass that guided and informed us, and a sharp tongue and a sharp pen.”

Kilson used that sharp pen in 2002 when he challenged Randall Kennedy, a distinguished African-American professor at Harvard Law School, over the title of Kennedy’s book “Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word.”

Writing in Black Commentator, an online journal, Kilson called the use of the epithet an insult to black people and to former Harvard teachers like Du Bois, Ralph Bunche and John Hope Franklin.

He suggested that Kennedy’s goal was to “assist white Americans in feeling comfortable” in their use of the epithet.

Kennedy responded angrily. “Martin Kilson seems to think that all of America has the same view of this term,” he told The Crimson. “This view is palpably incorrect. How does he know what my motive is?”

The two men did not speak for a long time, but “a couple of years ago, I saw him at a gathering and we embraced,” Kennedy said in an email. “I was glad to see him, and I’d like to think he was glad to see me.”

He added that “being castigated by Kilson was a rite of passage.”

Kilson cut a distinctive figure on the Harvard campus, wearing used tweed jackets and fedoras or cowboy hats and carrying armfuls of out-of-town newspapers.

“He dressed and talked like a cross between a preacher and an Oxford don,” Mark Whitaker, a former Newsweek editor and another former student of Kilson’s, wrote in a memoir, “My Long Trip Home” (2011).

But Kilson ran into trouble in 1979, when he was accused of sexual harassment after trying to kiss a freshman woman during his office hours. He was reprimanded by Henry Rosovsky, a Harvard dean, and required to write the woman a letter of apology.

“I did commit an act of impropriety,” he told The Harvard Crimson. But he added that “my general affectionate air could be misinterpreted.”

Kilson served as the Frank G. Thomson professor of government at Harvard from 1988 to 1999, when he retired from teaching.

In addition to his wife, a social anthropologist and college administrator, and his daughter Hannah, he is survived by another daughter, Jennifer Kilson-Page; a son, Peter; six grandchildren; one great-grandchild; and a sister, Gwendolyn Coleman.

West and Rivers recalled Kilson as a curmudgeonly mentor who nurtured scholars like them over long conversations, often at dinner at his house near Harvard or at his summer home in New Hampshire.

“So many of us wouldn’t exist without him,” West said. Acolytes, he added, were drawn to his “joy in the life of the mind, his discipline, his rigor, his unbelievable devotion and his sharing of that with young people.”

Martin Kilson, a leftist scholar, fierce debater and follower of W.E.B. Du Bois who became the first tenured African American professor at Harvard, died April 24 in hospice care in Lincoln, Massachusetts. He was 88.

Richard Sandomir

Articles written by the author

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