Where Are They Buried? (78 page)

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery, turn left at the office, then walk into the new Garden of Serenity area adjacent to the chapel. Peggy’s remains are interred here, and a bench dedicated to her memory is in front of the triple fountains.

JANUARY 25, 1756 – DECEMBER 5, 1791

Mozart was a celebrated child prodigy who at age six delighted Salzburg audiences with his astounding ability to read difficult music perfectly and play an entire tune from memory after hearing it just once. By age ten he had grown even more accomplished, equal in talent to that of his older contemporaries, and, as a teenager, he outstripped them.

Despite his reputation, Mozart could find no suitable post open to him, so in 1769 he set off for Italy and there produced his first large-scale opera series, including
Mitridate
and
Lucio Silla
all before the age of eighteen. After prolonged stays in Munich and Paris, Mozart ended up in Vienna at 25, where he would remain for the rest of his life, and there had one of the most prolific careers in the history of music.

In the ten years before his premature death, Mozart’s music rapidly grew beyond the comprehension of many of his contemporaries. Through dozens of works including symphonies and chamber music of the highest levels of imagination, he exhibited gifts that few could appreciate. Even more remarkable, Mozart produced his three greatest operas,
Figaro
,
Don Giovanni
, and
Cosi fan Tutte
, during the last three years of his life.

Finally, Mozart began work on what was to be his last project, the
Requiem
. This mass had been commissioned by a benefactor unknown to Mozart, and he became obsessed with the project for, in effect, he was writing it for himself. Ill and exhausted, he managed to finish the first two movements before being confined to his bed, suffering from blinding headaches, skin eruptions, and fainting spells. He finally became partially paralyzed and, after last rites were given, died quietly at only 35. Today it’s believed that Mozart died either of rheumatic fever or uremia following chronic kidney disease.

For all his musical genius, Mozart was close to destitute at his time of death, received a third-class funeral, and was buried in a pauper’s grave at Saint Marx Cemetery in Vienna, Austria. There’s a monument there now, but it was erected in 1859 at the approximate location of his grave.

About ten years after Mozart’s death, the area where he was buried was dug up to make room for more burials, and the
bones from those graves were crushed to reduce their size. After another hundred years, more or less, the Salzburg Mozarteum was presented with an unusual gift: Mozart’s skull. Allegedly, a gravedigger rescued the skull during the “reorganization,” and his descendants, finally tired of dusting the knick-knack, decided to let others enjoy it, too. It’s still on display there, but there’s no evidence that it’s really the master’s.

AUGUST 12, 1929 – MARCH 25, 2006

The family of Alvis Owens owned a mule named Buck and one day Alvis announced to his parents that from that day forward his name too was Buck. It stuck and nobody called him Alvis again. The Texas farming family headed west in 1937 as part of the Dust Bowl migration but ended up settling in Arizona because of a busted truck. After receiving a mandolin for Christmas at thirteen, music quickly consumed him and Buck hooked up with a honky-tonk band, Mac’s Skillet Lickers. Throughout the 1950s Buck, who was married with a couple children by now, supported his family with session work and produced a number of singles, but they all fizzled. As his music aspirations foundered, Buck bought a one-third share of a tiny Washington state radio station and resorted to selling advertising and spinning records to keep food on the table. “If you had a really good radio, you could pick us up in the station parking lot,” he recalled years later.

In time though, a persistent Buck perfected his songwriting ability and a parade of classics followed, including “I’ve Got a Tiger by the Tail,” and “Together Again.” By the time the Beatles recorded a version of his “Act Naturally” and Ray Charles weighed in with a rendition of Buck’s own “Cryin’ Time,” Buck wasn’t looking back. Crafting a Telecaster-driven, rawer, and edgier structure than the refined and string-heavy traditional country sound of the day, Buck’s new “Bakersfield sound” reshaped the country scene. With his streamlined, fresh yet unadorned style, he became the leading country music star of the 1960s, at one point releasing fifteen consecutive Number One singles.

Opposite Roy Clark, Buck co-hosted the
Hee-Haw
variety television show from 1969 to 1986 which he later acknowledged as a colossal professional blunder. The hokey and dim-witted program of cornball humor completely sullied his hard-earned reputation as a serious songwriter and performer and, perhaps even worse, younger audiences grew up knowing Buck as nothing more than a comedic country rube clad in overalls, strumming a red-white-and-blue guitar in a fake cornfield. In 1978, a few years after his beloved friend and bandmate Don Rich was killed in a motorcycle accident, the devastated artist quit the music business entirely except for the
Hee-Haw
tapings. “I think my music life ended when Rich did. Oh yeah, I carried on and I existed, but the real joy and love, the real lightning and thunder was gone forever,” he confessed 25 years later. In those spare years Buck indulged in a slew of business interests including TV and radio stations, until a new enthusiasm was forged and neo-traditionalist Dwight Yoakam coaxed him back to recording and touring. In 1988 the pair recorded a chart-topping duet version of “Streets of Bakersfield.”

A venture of which Buck was particularly proud was Crystal Palace, his own restaurant, nightclub, and museum, which opened in 1996 and where he performed dozens of impromptu gigs a year. On a Friday night in 2006, after enjoying a favorite meal of chicken-fried steak, he declined to sit in on the night’s music show after explaining to band members he wasn’t feeling well. But before leaving the premises, a group of fans introduced themselves and explained they’d traveled all the way from Oregon on the chance that perhaps he would be joining the house band on stage that night. Predictably, the 76-year-old returned inside and performed an hour-long set, telling the audience, “If somebody comes all that way, I’m gonna give it my best shot. I might groan and squeak, but I’ll see what I can do.” Returning home later that night, Buck died in his sleep of heart failure.

Buck rests at Greenlawn Southwest Cemetery in Bakersfield, California.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From the Route 99 freeway take Exit 20 and head west on Panama Lane where you’ll see the cemetery a short distance on the left.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery, turn at the first right and proceed past the maintenance shed. Buck’s beautiful family mausoleum will be on your right, and you won’t miss it.

MAY 1, 1909 – JUNE 17, 1986

After achieving success on Broadway and in vaudeville, Kate Smith, “the Songbird of the South,” made her radio debut in 1931 and, within a few years, had two shows of her own.
The Kate Smith Hour
was a weekly variety show that featured her perfectly pitched singing and new talent acts (including Abbott & Costello), while her number one daytime radio show,
Kate Smith Speaks
, offered news and homespun commentary that eased an emotionally fraught America through some of its most trying historical times. During World War II, Kate’s on-air appeals for war bonds yielded contributions topping $600 million.

Kate was enormously popular; she made more than 15,000 radio broadcasts, received more than twenty million fan letters, and sold countless millions of records—and her trademark song, “When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain,” itself sold some six million copies. Kate starred in her own movie,
Hello Everybody!
and in 1950 moved her radio program to TV where it stayed, in various incarnations, until 1962.

But despite her long list of accomplishments, Kate Smith will forever be best remembered as the vibrantly brave and passionate singer who made “God Bless America” an unofficial national anthem. Kate introduced the Irving Berlin song to the country in 1938 and, when it became apparent that it had achieved significance beyond that of just another pop tune, she refused to profit from the song, instead donating the royalties from its performances to the Boy and Girl Scouts of America, an arrangement that remains in place. Once, President Roosevelt quite aptly introduced Kate to England’s King George VI by stating, simply, “This is Kate Smith. Miss Smith is America.”

Though, in her life, Kate recorded well over 2,000 songs, fittingly, the last song she ever sang publicly was “God Bless America,” on a bicentennial special just a few days before the Fourth of July, 1976.

At 77 Kate died of complications brought on by diabetes, and was buried at Saint Agnes Cemetery in North Elba, New York.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
North Elba is a village within the town of Lake Placid. From the junction of routes 73 and 86, proceed east on 73 for almost a mile, and Saint Agnes Cemetery is on the left.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery between the stone pillars and turn left at the “T.” You won’t miss Kate’s mausoleum on the back left lawn.

APRIL 16, 1939 – MARCH 2, 1999

In 1960 the soulful British crooner Dusty Springfield was a third of a folksy vocal trio called the Springfields, and on the strength of her sensuously husky voice, the group topped the charts with several singles, the most recognizable of them being “Silver Thread and Golden Needles.”

By 1963 the group parted ways, and Dusty, always experimenting, switched over from a simple folk alto to a sultry and intimate white-soul. With a fresh, raw sound of rare passion, towering beehive hairdo, and panda-eye black mascara, she burst back into the limelight releasing a solo album,
A Girl Called Dusty
. In a short time, Dusty was the newest trailblazer of the fickle fashion and music scene that came to be known as “mod.”

In 1969 she recorded what’s now considered a landmark album,
Dusty in Memphis
, and though its classic single “Son of a Preacher Man” reached the top ten on both sides of the Atlantic, her commercial fortunes were on the decline. Ten years of whirlwind activity had its physical costs, too; her voice was permanently weakened by repeated bouts of laryngitis, and her health had been compromised by substance abuse.

Weary of fame, Dusty retired to California. Apart from a handful of guest-singing contributions and a half-hearted 1978 comeback that attracted little attention, she was musically dormant throughout the remainder of her life, concentrating instead on gay rights and animal protection organizations.

In 1999 Dusty was scheduled to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame but, ten days before the ceremony, she was felled by breast cancer at 59.

She was cremated and some of her ashes were scattered at the Cliffs of Moher in western Ireland. In Henley-On-Thames, England, an hour’s drive west of London, the remainder of her ashes were interred at St. Mary the Virgin Church on Hart Street. In the grass on the left side of the church, it’s easy to find the prominent tablet dedicated to her memory alongside a stone bench appropriately and affectionately called “Dusty’s Bench.”

DECEMBER 31, 1948 – MAY 17, 2012

The “controversy” of disco is now ancient and irrelevant history, but the fact remains that if you were driving around the streets of New York City in the late 1970s and your eight-track wasn’t playing Donna Summer, the original Disco Queen and multimillion-selling singer and songwriter whose hits captured the giddy hedonism of the time, it was more than likely broken.

Born LaDonna Adrian Gaines, Donna grew up with gospel, soul, and rock music, and at the tender age of ten became the soloist of her church choir. “There was no question I would be a singer, I just always knew. I had credit in my neighborhood, people would lend me money and tell me to pay it back when I got famous,” she said. Deciding in her teens to make music her career, she joined the Munich company of the rock musical
Hair
and relocated to Germany, where she worked as a studio vocalist and as a member of the Vienna Folk Opera. She married an Austrian actor, Hellmuth Sommer, and after they divorced she kept his name but changed the spelling.

Returning stateside in 1974, she burst onto the pop scene almost by accident. While writing “Love to Love You Baby” for another artist, producer Giorgio Moroder suggested to Donna that she cut a demo. Obliging him, she recorded the song while lying on her back on the studio floor with the lights out, cooing her breathy, moaning vocals “the way Marilyn Monroe would have.” When the Casablanca record label requested an extended dance version, she delivered a 17-minute remix of whispered vocals and orgasmic groans. Though the track was too risqué for many radio stations, it fueled the decade’s disco mania and made her a club icon and sensation.