Where Are They Buried? (77 page)

Having already formed his own band at age twelve, Waylon dropped out of school two years later (he eventually earned his GED at age 51) to pursue an opportunity as a disc jockey. When he was seventeen, Waylon met rising rock-star Buddy Holly at the radio station and the two became fast friends; Buddy produced Waylon’s first record. “Mainly what I learned from Buddy,” Waylon said, “was an attitude. He loved music, and he taught me that it shouldn’t have any barriers to it.”

Buddy later employed Waylon as a bass player, taking him on his 1959 Winter Dance Party tour. In Clear Lake, Iowa, an exhausted Buddy chartered a small plane to get to the next gig and invited Waylon to join him, but Waylon gave his seat to J.P. “Big Bopper” Richardson, who was suffering from the flu. The plane crashed soon after takeoff in the early hours of February 3, 1959, killing everyone aboard—Buddy, the Big Bopper, Ritchie Valens, and the pilot. For years, Waylon was haunted by a joking exchange they’d had just before Buddy left to meet the plane. “Buddy says, ‘You’re not going on the plane tonight, huh?’ I said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘Well, I hope your bus freezes up.’ And I said, ‘Well, I hope your plane crashes.’ I was awful young, and it took me a long time to get over that.”

By the mid-sixties, Waylon had cultivated an instantly identifiable country-rockabilly style that featured a thudding, walk-all-over-you bass, a “chicken-pickin’” guitar technique, and rough-edged, plain-spoken lyrics. His rowdy image made him almost as famous as his music and, for a while, he shared a Nashville apartment with Johnny Cash after their respective marriages broke up. The pair lived high on methamphetamines and general destruction, and after Johnny remarried and got sober, Waylon complained that he’d “sold out to religion.” Waylon also eventually gave up drugs, but he never gave in to religion. Despite his offstage behavior, he became a sought-after club headliner and recorded more than 60 albums and had dozens of hits, including “Walk On Out Of My Mind” and “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way?”

In the 1980s, the original country-music legends fell from favor as the genre reverted to slick stylings, but Waylon, along with Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, and Kris Kristofferson, shrewdly formed a superstar quartet and, as the Highwaymen, the musicians found success anew. But Waylon still remained an outlaw, blowing off his induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame. “It means absolutely nothing,” he said, “if you want to know the truth.”

Waylon was a lifelong sufferer of diabetes and in 2001 had a foot amputated. At 64, he died of the disease and was buried at the City of Mesa Cemetery in Mesa, Arizona.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
Take Exit 52 off of Highway 101 and follow University Drive east for 3½ miles to North Center Street. Turn left and the cemetery is a mile on the left.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Inside the cemetery, turn left on Ninth Street and stop at the sixth tree on the left. Waylon has no marker
as of this writing, but he lies in the fourth row from the curb, alongside a Gertrude Rice.

SEPTEMBER 12, 1931 – APRIL 26, 2013

Though his start was austere, busking for spare pennies and nickels on Beaumont, Texas, streets and paying city bus fare with his singing, the hard-living baritone George Jones became a champion and symbol of traditional country music, eventually recording more than 150 albums.

At nineteen, George was forging his style on a daily radio show, performing six nights a week at a local country show for $17.50, and then had a brief fling with rockabilly, recording as Thumper Jones. But after a stint in the Marine Corps, he found his center, scored his first top-five hit with 1955’s rousing “Why Baby Why,” and began racking up a string of country-classic hits like “White Lightning” and “Window Up Above.”

Universally respected and just as widely imitated, his precise baritone found vulnerability and doubt behind the cheerful drive of honky-tonk. But his up-tempo melodies had undercurrents of solitude, the ballads that were his specialty were suffused with stoic desolation, and even his memorable songs of the pleasures of a down-home Saturday night never seemed to free him from his private pains. Nicknamed “Possum” for his close-set eyes and pointed nose, and later “No-Show Jones” for the scores of concerts he missed during drinking binges, he bought, sold, and traded dozens of houses and hundreds of cars, earning millions of dollars but losing much of it to drug use, mismanagement, and three divorce settlements. And through it all, George still kept recording; as his troubles increased, so did his fame and his album sales. “I was country music’s national drunk and drug addict,” he said.

After rehab in 1969 it seemed he had turned a corner, and that same year George married country music queen Tammy Wynette and quit the road to open the country-themed park, Old Plantation Music Park around his Florida mansion. The seemingly happy couple began recording duets whith elaborate arrangements that reshaped the Nashville sound, and three of those duets—“We’re Gonna Hold On,” “Golden Ring,” and “Near You”—were number-one country hits. But George’s drinking and amphetamine addictions soon rekindled and, though they toured the nation in a bus adorned with a
Mr.
and Mrs. Country Music
mural, the singers marriage was falling apart, becoming a sort of public soap opera, with their audience following each new single as if they were news reports. In 1975, after a fight in which George was put in a straitjacket and hospitalized for a week, the couple divorced and the music park was shut down.

After the divorce, George grew even more erratic. At times he would sing in a Donald Duck voice onstage, his band members’ paychecks bounced, and he began brandishing a gun. He led police on a televised chase through Nashville. When scheduled to play a series of sold-out gigs, he disappeared and rambled around Texas for three weeks instead. As his No-Show Jones nickname gained national circulation his singles slipped lower on the charts and he ended up declaring bankruptcy. Though he blamed his trajectory on everything from bad management to the IRS, it was apparent that his troubles stemmed from abuse of cocaine and whiskey. At one point his wife hid the keys to all his cars, so he drove his lawn mower eight miles to a liquor store. They too were divorced not long afterward.

Yet, though he never bothered to wear a cowboy hat, George came to stand for country tradition and despite his travails he still had hits. “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” a song about a man whose love ends only when his life does, was released in 1980 and is considered by many to be the greatest country song of all time.

In 1985, doctors gave George this choice: dry out or die. He chose to turn his life around in a four-week program. “I
did a lot of thinking,” he said. “Got thousands of encouraging letters and said a lot of prayers. And I made up my mind—enough of that.”

George stayed clean and, though his hit making slowed down, mainly thanks to changing tastes in country music, he became a revered elder statesman, often credited as an influence by generations that followed. “Through it all I kept reading articles that said I was the greatest country singer alive,” he wrote in his 1996 memoir. “My talent, though it brought me fame and fortune, never brought me peace of mind.”

At 81, George died of a respiratory infection. He was buried at Woodlawn Memorial Park in Nashville, the same cemetery in which his ex-wife Tammy Wynette rests.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter at the main entrance, proceed to the four-way stop and turn right at which point you’ll clearly see the tall “Possum Kingdom” monument in the distance.

NOVEMBER 24, 1868 – APRIL 1, 1917

When Scott Joplin settled in St. Louis in 1890 he was just an anonymous pianist, but by the time he left for New York fifteen years later, he’d singlehandedly developed an entirely new musical genre. Scott created the form known as ragtime by blending European classical styles with African American harmonies and rhythms, and by the turn of the century had published 50 compositions in the vein, including “The Ragtime Dance,” “The Easy Winners,” and “The Entertainer.”

In 1905 Scott settled in Harlem in the hope of elevating his new music to greater popularity. Having already successfully incorporated waltz and habanera dance beats into the style, Scott now sought to develop a ragtime opera. By 1910 his opera
Treemonisha
was complete and he turned it over to Irving Berlin for publication, though Berlin rejected it a few months later. The following spring Irving published a new hit song, “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” and Scott was shocked to hear that the master Berlin had stolen the song’s verse from a section of his own
Treemonisha
. This prompted Scott to alter that section of the opera so he himself couldn’t be accused of plagiarizing Berlin, and to publish the opera himself in the summer of 1911.

Unfortunately, there was no interest in Scott’s opera. He was never able to raise any funds for the production of his masterpiece and he died without his
Treemonisha
ever having been performed. As further insult, within a decade after his 1917 death, Scott and his ragtime music were largely forgotten as a new style of jazz stole center stage. But in 1973, several of Scott’s “rags” were selected for the soundtrack of a new movie,
The Sting
, and the film’s widespread popularity led to renewed interest in Scott’s music. Two years later, in 1975, Scott posthumously received his due when his magnum opus
Treemonisha
, after having lain dormant for more than 60 years, received its first professional production. The following year it won a Pulitzer Prize.

By the time Scott was in his mid-40s he was experiencing the physical and mental effects of tertiary syphilis, a disease he had probably contracted almost two decades earlier. Three months before his death from the affliction he was hospitalized, but was soon transferred to a mental institution where he died at 48, on April 1, 1917.

Scott was buried at Saint Michael’s Cemetery in Flushing, Queens, New York.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
Take either Exit 3 from the Grand Central Parkway or Exit 41 from I-278, and the cemetery entrance is located between these two ramps at 7202 Astoria Blvd.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery and proceed straight past the office. At the second intersection, on the left corner near the curb, is the flat marker for Scott’s grave.

MAY 26, 1920 – JANUARY 21, 2002

Norma Deloris Engstrom grew up milking cows on a North Dakota farm and, after singing with the high school glee club, she made her singing debut on a local radio show. The manager there branded her “Peggy Lee,” and she soon began singing with the dance bands of the late-1930s. During a gig at a Palm Springs nightspot, Peggy was unable to shout above the clamor of the audience, so she tried to garner attention by lowering her voice; the softer she sang, the more attentive the audience grew, and that
soft and cool style, punctuated by seductive purrs, became her trademark.

In 1941 she was invited to join Benny Goodman’s band and the next year, after recording “Why Don’t You Do Right?” with the group, Peggy catapulted to fame. By 1944 she had embarked on a solo career, and eventually wrote or collaborated on more than 500 songs. Today, it is common for singers to write their own songs, but in the 1940s, when there was a proliferation of music coming out of Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Hollywood, it was not; Peggy was among the first to pen and sing her own songs. In the 1950s, Peggy began making featured appearances in movies and was especially praised for her 1955 role opposite Danny Thomas in
The Jazz Singer
. However, Peggy is best remembered for her sultry simplicity and slow finger-snaps in the song “Fever,” released in 1958.

Generations of children were introduced to Peggy’s talents via the 1955 Disney animated feature,
Lady and the Tramp
. Peggy provided multiple voices for the film, co-wrote six of its songs, and appeared on the soundtrack, including the cartoon’s show-stopper, “He’s a Tramp.” Peggy had retained all the rights and royalties of her
Tramp
work, but her contract—like the contracts of all performers of the day—didn’t cover video residuals, since video technology was unknown in 1955. In 1988, after Disney trotted the feature out in video but failed to pay residuals to Peggy, she sued. In 1991 she won her case against Disney in a landmark decision, prompting hundreds of other performers to claim their own video residuals.

In 1985 Peggy was seriously injured in a fall in Las Vegas. Later that year she underwent double-bypass heart surgery and, after suffering a stroke and struggling with worsening diabetes in 1999, Peggy was confined to a wheelchair. At 81, Peggy died of a myocardial infarction and was buried at Westwood Memorial Park in Los Angeles, California.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
This little cemetery holds numerous celebrities and is peculiarly located behind the office complex at 10850 Wilshire Blvd., just about a half-mile east of I-405.