Rock Stars Who Were Murdered
You would think that being a musician would be a very safe existence\u2026I mean, your job is to write and perform music\u2026yeah, you might get into the odd altercation and fight, but it\u2019s not like you\u2019re going to war, right?...yet every once in a while, we hear about a musician being murdered\u2026\nThe earliest example I can find is Alessandro Stradella, an Italian composer of classical music\u2026back in his day\u2014which was the mid-1600s\u2014he was quite the star and was very influential with his six operas, 170 cantatas, and a long list of instrumental compositions\u2026\nBut then on February 25, 1682, he was found stabbed to death in a public square in Genoa\u2026no one was ever convicted although the story is that he was murdered by one of three brothers who accused Stradella of seducing their sister\u2026\nThe first musician I know of who got shot was Pinetop Smith, a boogie-woogie piano player from Chicago\u2026in 1929, just as he was about to go into a recording session, he was shot during a fight at a dance hall\u2026he might not have been the intended victim, but he died all the same\u2026\nAnd the first musician of the rock\u2019n\u2019roll era to be murdered was probably Sam Cooke on December 11, 1964\u2026fantastic soul singer\u2026he took a gunshot wound to the chest when Bertha Franklin, the manager of the Hacienda Motel in South Central L.A.\u2026she said it was in self-defence but even today, there are a lot of questions about the case\u2026How many other rock musicians have been murdered since then?...fortunately, not a lot\u2026but there is a tragic list\u2026let\u2019s go through it\u2026\nLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices