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NASHVILLE, Tenn. Nashville record producer
Shelby Singleton, a colorful Nashville record producer and entrepreneur who revived the careers of singers like Roger Miller and Jerry Lee Lewis and who later resurrected the historic Sun Records catalog, died Wednesday. He was 77.
He had been hospitalized with brain cancer, according to the producer and guitarist Jerry Kennedy, a friend and protégé who confirmed the death.
Singleton was probably best known for his 1969 purchase of Sun Records and the subsequent marketing of the label and its legacy, including the early rockabilly hits of Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash. Among these recordings are Presley's "That's All Right," Cash's "I Walk the Line" and Perkins' "Blue Suede Shoes."
Before acquiring the Sun catalog, however, Singleton had for almost a decade worked as a cultivator of musical talent for Mercury Records. He oversaw the careers of country singers like Miller, Ray Stevens and Lewis, as well as those of rhythm and blues acts like Clyde McPhatter, Brook Benton and, for a brief time, James Brown.
In 1962, after hearing the Texas singer Bruce Channel's regional hit "Hey! Baby," Singleton purchased the master and re-released the record on the Mercury subsidiary Smash.
"He had the ears of a record buyer," Kennedy said of Singleton's commercial instincts. "People like me, who are immersed in the actual making of music, don't necessarily always have that advantage."
Kennedy became Singleton's second in command and eventually succeeded him at Mercury. Perhaps his most memorable session working with Singleton, he said, was the one that produced "Harper Valley PTA."
The song, a send-up of small-town hypocrisy written by Tom T. Hall, became a No.1 pop and country hit for Singleton's Plantation label in 1968. It also made Jeanne Carolyn Stephenson, an aspiring singer whose name Singleton changed to Jeannie C. Riley for the session, an overnight sensation.
"He was so sure that he had something magic with that one that he had an acetate of it made just as soon as the session was over," said Kennedy, who played the indelible Dobro guitar part on the record. That evening Singleton got the music into the hands of Ralph Emery, a taste-making disc jockey at WSM in Nashville, and by the following morning it was making its way up the charts.
"Shelby was the all-around record man," Kennedy remarked. "He was a producer, a marketing guy, a merchandising guy, a publisher and a promoter. He did it all, and he was doing it right up until the end."
Lionel Pincus, leader
of private equity firm
NEW YORK Lionel Pincus, founder and chairman of New York-based private equity firm Warburg Pincus, has died, according to a spokesman for his longtime partner, Princess Firyal of Jordan. He was 78.
Pincus died around midnight Saturday in his Manhattan home after a long illness, the spokesman said.
Pincus founded Warburg Pincus in 1966. Since then the firm has invested more than $29 billion in more than 600 companies.
It holds stakes in a variety of companies including Fidelity National Information Services Inc., which processes financial transactions; Nuance Communications Inc., which makes speech recognition software, educational company Bridgepoint Education Inc., and drug developer Inspire Pharmaceuticals Inc.
Associated Press
Israel Gelfand,
master mathematician
Israel Gelfand, a Russian mathematician whose research laid the mathematical framework for the imaging abilities of MRI and CT scanners and who did crucial work in a host of more esoteric fields, died last Monday at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick, N.J. He was 96.
During a century when mathematicians were becoming ever more specialized, focusing on narrow and often exotic areas of research, Gelfand became a legend as a generalist who made contributions in more than a dozen different areas. His work in the field known as representation theory was an underpinning of quantum physics.
He also was an inspiring teacher, creating math seminars in Moscow and at Rutgers University that provided encouragement and education for aspiring math students and establishing correspondence courses that allowed young students access to the best mathematical ideas of their times.
"He was considered the greatest mathematician of the last half of the 20th century," added Vladimir Retakh, his colleague at Rutgers, where Gelfand spent the last part of his career.
His road-building won him many accolades: the Wolf Prize, mathematics' equivalent of the Nobel; a MacArthur "genius" award; the Steele Prize; and the Order of Lenin - three times.
Los Angeles Times
