Dr. John. (November 20, 1941 – June 6, 2019) was an American singer, songwriter and pianist. His music combined New Orleans blues, jazz, R&B, soul and funk.
Dr John’s real name was Malcolm John Rebennack. His father ran an appliance shop in the East End of New Orleans, fixing radios and televisions and selling records. “Mac” grew up listening to his father’s hoard of 78s by blues artists such as Big Bill Broonzy and Memphis Minnie, jazz by Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis and King Oliver, and country music from Hank Williams and Roy Rogers.
His family was intensely musical, with numerous aunts, uncles and cousins who were amateur musicians. From a young age Mac attended local gigs and, with his father’s assistance, visited recording sessions at the fabled J&M Studio. It was a meeting with the piano player Professor Longhair when he was 14 that persuaded him to pursue a musical career, and he began performing at local clubs. When Jesuit high school told him he must choose between schooling and music, he picked the latter. Proficient on piano and guitar, at 15 he began playing on recording sessions and accompanied artists such as Art Neville, Toussaint and Joe Tex. By 16 he had started producing tracks and was hired as an artists and repertoire man by Johnny Vincent at Ace Records.
In 1960 he was involved in a fight when playing a show in Jackson, Mississippi, and had the ring finger of his left hand almost shot off. He eventually recovered the use of the finger, but it affected his guitar playing and caused him to concentrate on the piano. Working in the New Orleans clubs, he became embroiled in the criminal underworld of drugs and prostitution, and acquired a heroin addiction while dealing drugs himself. After completing a two-year jail sentence in Fort Worth, Texas, for drug possession in 1965, he moved to Los Angeles and soon was in great demand as a studio session musician. He played on countless tracks for the producer Phil Spector for artists including the Ronettes and the Righteous Brothers, worked with Aretha Franklin and Roberta Flack, recorded with Bob Dylan and Doug Sahm and played with Frank Zappa, until Zappa sacked him for using drugs.
His album Gris-Gris, was recorded on studio time borrowed from Sonny & Cher, with whom he had been working in Los Angeles and who had helped him secure a deal with Atco records. Produced by Harold Battiste, it marked the first appearance of Rebennack’s pseudonym Dr John Creaux, alias Dr John the Night Tripper. After The Sun, Moon & Herbs he brought out the album Dr John’s Gumbo (1972). Following the positive reaction to In the Right Place in 1973, his next album, Desitively Bonnaroo (1974), was much less successful and it proved to be his last album with Atco. He moved to United Artists for the live album Hollywood Be Thy Name (1975), which was also unsuccessful.
From the mid-70s onwards Dr John began a long partnership with the songwriter Doc Pomus that led to songs for his albums City Lights and Tango Palace (both 1979). He then made the solo piano album Dr John Plays Mac Rebennack (1981), a virtuosic showcase of his keyboard skills, and repeated the feat with The Brightest Smile in Town (1983). In 1989, the year he signed to Warner Bros and finally put his heroin addiction behind him, he released In a Sentimental Mood, a sleekly-produced collection of standards including Makin’ Whoopee, a duet with Rickie Lee Jones that earned the pair a Grammy for best jazz vocal performance. He won another Grammy for his second Warners album Goin’ Back to New Orleans (1992), this time for best traditional blues album.
In 1994 he published his autobiography, Under a Hoodoo Moon: The Life of The Night Tripper (co-written with Jack Rummel), a lurid memoir of his musical life in New Orleans that did not shy away from details about drugs, violence, prostitution and the dark side of the music industry. Nonetheless he was beginning to assume the aura of a respected senior citizen, winning a third Grammy in 1996 for the track SRV Shuffle from the album A Tribute to Stevie Ray Vaughan, and a fourth in 2000 for his duet with BB King on Is You Is Or Is You Ain’t My Baby. Duke Elegant (2000) comprised John’s takes on favourite Duke Ellington pieces, while Mercernary (2006) was his tribute to another classic songwriter, Johnny Mercer.
The obliteration of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 spurred Dr John to release the fundraising EP Sippiana Hericane, and then City That Care Forgot (2008), an album-length tribute to his grievously wounded home town. It won him Grammy number five, in the best contemporary blues album category, and in 2013 Locked Down brought him a sixth for best blues album. New Orleans was on his mind once again when he made Ske-Dat-De-Dat: Spirit of Satch (2014), a homage to Armstrong, the city’s founding father of jazz. . He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011. On June 6, 2019, Dr. John died of a heart attack in New Orleans, Louisiana at the age of 77 years.
(Edited from Adam Sweeting obit @ The Guardian)