Johnny Griffith, 66, a keyboard player with the Funk Brothers, the highly skilled group of Detroit studio musicians who helped create and define the legendary Motown sound, died of a heart attack Sunday at a Detroit hospital.
His death occurred hours before the local premiere of Standing in the Shadows of Motown, a documentary film that gives belated recognition to the anonymous studio band that furnished much of the instrumental sound for the Motown hit machine.
A racially integrated collective of about a dozen top jazz and R&B; musicians in Detroit who worked at Motown from 1959 to 1972, the Funk Brothers provided the background music for greats including Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross and the Supremes, Smokey Robinson, the Temptations, the Four Tops and Stevie Wonder.
Mr. Griffith most notably played electric piano on Mr. Gaye's "I Heard It Through the Grapevine' and the Temptations" "Ain't Too Proud to Beg." the swirling organ on The Supremes" "Stop in the Name of Love' and the organ and shotgun effects on Junior Walker and the All-Stars" "Shotgun."
The Detroit native was one of the few classically trained musicians who worked at Motown. At 16, he was playing with blues superstar John Lee Hooker. And before joining the Motown studio band in 1961, he toured with Dinah Washington, Aretha Franklin and Sarah Vaughn.
Among the non-Motown records Mr. Griffith played on as a keyboardist are Jackie Wilson's "Lonely Teardrops' and '(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher." the Chilite's "Have You Seen Her?' and The Capitols" "Cool Jerk."
Mr. Griffith, who recently moved to Las Vegas after living in Detroit most of his life, returned to his hometown Saturday to promote the film, which features eight Funk Brothers, who range in age from 61 to 73. One of the eight, drummer Richard "Pistol" Allan, died in June.
The Funk Brothers played together in the Detroit club scene from about 1964 until the early 1970s. They got together again to film the documentary, which was shot primarily in Detroit last year.
Margaret "Peg" Phillips, 84, a retired accountant who took acting classes at age 65 and won fame as tart-tongued shopkeeper Ruth-Anne Miller in the television series Northern Exposure, died Thursday at a suburban Seattle health-care center. A smoker, she had lung disease.
CBS issued a statement saying, "Peg Phillips" memorable portrayal of Ruth-Anne Miller ... left an indelible imprint with the millions of loyal fans of this groundbreaking series, as well as with everyone at the network who had the opportunity to know and work with her."
In 1990, she was cast in what was supposed to be an intermittent role in the CBS series on the fish-out-of-water travails of a New York doctor working off his student loan in the fictional town of Cicely, Alaska. Shot in Washington state, the show began as a summer replacement series but became so strong in the ratings it ran through 1995.
Similarly, Ms. Phillips made her character so popular she was given a regular role. On occasion, she wrote her own lines. Criticized for smoking in one episode, she retorted: "I've been smoking since I was 13 years old, and during the Eisenhower administration I peaked at three packs a day. I'm not about to stop now."
Scorning pretension, she wore blue jeans, a red and white checked blouse, blue suspenders and brown sandals to the Emmy Awards ceremony when she was nominated for best supporting actress in 1993. When asked who designed her outfit, she replied, 'Me."
She appeared in at least eight movies and a number of television commercials and made guest appearances in such TV series as Seventh Heaven, Touched By an Angel and ER.
Jerry Sohl, 88, a science fiction writer whose books included The Transcendent Man and The Altered Ego, died Nov. 5 in Thousand Oaks, Calif.
Mr. Sohl, also a scriptwriter for television shows including Star Trek and The Twilight Zone, was a Los Angeles native who grew up in Chicago and dropped out of college for a career in journalism. He worked as a photographer, police reporter, critic and reviewer for several Midwest papers after World War II service in the Army Air Forces.
Other Sohl books included The Mars Monopoly, The Lemon Eaters, The Resurrection of Frank Borchard and The Spun Sugar Hole. He also wrote under the pseudonyms Nathan Butler, Sean Mei Sullivan and Roberta Jean Mountjoy.
John Lynker, 75, a veteran broadcaster who wound up his career at Washington's all-news WTOP radio, died Monday at a hospital in Middletown, Conn. He had heart and lung disease.
Mr. Lynker worked at numerous radio stations across the country during a career that spanned half a century. His final stop was WTOP, where he had first worked in 1969. He returned in 1980 as a news anchor and automotive reporter and stayed until semiretiring in October of last year and moving to Connecticut.
"He was going to commute back here to do periodic reporting, but he never got his health back." said Jim Farley, WTOP vice president of news and programming.
During his stint at WTOP, Mr. Lynker received a Broadcasting Legend award from the Washington Area Broadcasters Association.
Jay Reed, 73, an ex-Marine and journalist who brought his love of the outdoors to newspaper readers in Milwaukee for nearly 40 years, died Friday at a hospice there of lung and bone cancer.
Mr. Reed was hired by The Milwaukee Journal in 1963, and continued writing his columns for the newspaper, now the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, as long as his health permitted.
In addition to writing about hunting and fishing, Mr. Reed covered the Vietnam War in 1967 and 1968, becoming a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. He returned to Vietnam in 1989, writing a series that again made him a Pulitzer finalist.
Selden Rodman, 83, a critic of modern culture who also was a noted poet and the author of more than 40 books on travel and other topics, died Nov. 2 in Ridgewood, N.J.
Known as a tireless promoter of Haitian and other folk art, Mr. Rodman first received public attention in the early 1930s when he and a Yale classmate founded The Harkness Hoot, an acidic but celebrated publication that discussed everything from the school's professors to its gothic architecture.
After spending time abroad, Mr. Rodman returned home to New York and met Alfred Bingham, a leader of left-wing causes. Mr. Bingham asked him to become his partner in a new magazine called Common Sense, which criticized the New Deal while remaining anti-Communist.
In 1932, Mr. Rodman published his first poetry book, Mortal Triumph and Other Poems, and in 1938 he served as editor for New Anthology of Modern Poetry. The latter work drew immediate attention for including selections not usually considered poetry, such as African-American folk songs, light verse, choruses from the experimental theater and Bartolomeo Vanzetti's last plea to the court.
From 1943 to 1945, Mr. Rodman served in the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime spy agency. After the war ended, he wrote several travel books as he made his way through the Western Hemisphere in search of folk art.
Among those works was Horace Pippin, a Negro Painter in America, the first monograph on the artist, published in 1947. He also became co-director of Le Centre d"Art in Port-au-Prince, which was the main exhibition center of voodoo-inspired art.