Dr. John, Legend of New Orleans Music, Dead At 77
The music legend, guitarist, piano man, jive talker and psychedelic godfather Malcolm John Rebennack – better known as Dr. John – died "towards the break of day" on Thursday, of a heart attack, a statement has confirmed. He was 77.
That last bit of information was something only, Dr. John had declared his birth date as "just before Thanksgiving 1940." But in a column for the published in November 2018, author John Wirt a birth announcement from the same paper 77 years earlier: Mac, as he was colloquially known, was actually born November 21, 1941. The factual fluidity was, in its way, appropriate to an artist who lived and worked in the shifting, hip space of the trickster, and also to one who was as iconic of New Orleans as Louis Armstrong, to whom his final album, 2014's was a tribute. (Armstrong's real birthday was misreported for decades, too.)
