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Pianist Mulgrew Miller Dies
Mulgrew Miller. Photograph by Jean-Francois Laberine.
Mulgrew Miller, an acclaimed jazz pianist from Mississippi, died as a result of a stroke May 29 at age 57. Miller was bom August 13, 1955, in Greenwood and played on some five hundred recordings throughout his career.
Miller was six years old when his family purchased a piano, and he immediately took to the instrument, picking out hymns by ear. He began formal lessons at age eight and was organist at his church and playing with soul and funk groups in his teens. Miller attended Memphis State University on scholarship, continuing his jazz studies and making contact with other musicians.
Miller was heralded for his musical knowledge as well as his technical skill. Known as a consummate sideman and collaborator, Miller worked with Mercer Ellington’s big band, vocalist Betty Carter, trumpeter Woody Shaw, Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, drummer Tony Williams, and bassist Ron Carter. In 1985 Miller released his debut album as a leader, Keys to the City, and went on to issue more than fifteen albums under his own name.
Miller had been director of jazz studies at William Paterson University in New Jersey and was artist in residence at Lafayette College in 2008-09.
Author, Activist1Campbell Dies
Will D. Campbell, author, clergyman, and civil rights activist, died June 3, 2013, as a result of a stroke. He was 88.
Will Davis Campbell was born July
18,	1924, in Amite County in southwest Mississippi. He went to Louisiana College before joining the Army in 1942 and serving as a combat medic in World War II.
Returning from the war, Campbell earned a degree in English from Wake Forest College and graduated from Yale Divinity School in 1952. He served two years as a minister at a small Baptist church in Louisiana before becoming director of religious life at the University of Mississippi. Campbell faced opposition over his support of integration and resigned his position there after only two years.
From 1956 to 1963 Campbell was employed by the National Council of Churches, working alongside the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Bayard Rustin, John Lewis, and others in confrontations across the South.
Campbell participated in many seminal events of the civil rights era. He escorted African American students through angry crowds outside Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, helped organize the Freedom Rides in 1961, and joined the boycotts, marches, and sit-ins the next year in Birmingham, Alabama.
Campbell faced controversy from within the civil rights movement for visiting James
Will D. Campbell, courtesy Seabury Press.
Earl Ray, the killer of Martin Luther King, in prison. “If you’re gonna love one, you’ve got to love them all,” he would say in later years. “Jesus died for the bigots as well.” The author of nearly twenty works, Campbell’s memoir Brother to a Dragonfly was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1977. He was awarded the 1998 Mississippi Institute for Arts and Letters award for nonfiction and the 2005 Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. In 2000 Campbell received the National Endowment for the Humanities medal.
Bluesman T-Model Ford Dies
James Lewis Carter, a blues musician who performed under the name T-Model Ford, died July 16, 2013. Ford was born on June 24, although the year of his birth is uncertain. It is widely thought to have been the early 1920s but could have been earlier.
Ford grew up near Forest, Mississippi, and began working agricultural jobs early in his life. When Ford was about sixty years old his then-wife bought him a guitar. He taught himself to play, and his style and tunings reflected that. Ford’s raw and energetic music pulsed with a strong, loping rhythm.
The north Mississippi-based record label Fat Possum issued Ford’s first record, Pee-Wee Get My Gun, in 1997, when he was well into his 70s. In the wake of its success he played shows across the United States and around the world. Ford continued to tour until a stroke took him off the road in 2012.
Following his debut Ford issued five other records under his own name, You
T-Model Ford.
Better Keep Still in 1998, She Ain’t None of Your ’n in 2000, Bad Man in 2002, Jack Daniel Time in 2008, The Ladies Man in 2010, and Taledragger in 2011. In 2002 he was featured in “You See Me Laughin’,” a blues documentary.
Ford was married six times and claimed to have fathered at least two dozen children.