Eddy Arnold, 1918-2008

When I was a kid, there was no country music in our household — except for one song, Eddy Arnold's truly immortal 1955 smash, "Cattle Call," which somehow got a pass. Like a lot of children of the second half of the 20th century, I grew up with parents who had made the transition from farming to suburbia and who probably rejected country, consciously or unconsciously, as an unnecessary reminder of the rural lifestyle they'd worked so hard to get away from. But my father had an inordinate love for "Cattle Call," which featured Arnold breaking into a falsetto yodel between verses about howling coyotes, wide open prairies, and a cowboy who's "lonesome" but also has a "heart (that's) a feather in all kinds of weather." For somebody who'd actually grown up among the cattle, that had to have been a nice, wistful tonic at the end of a hard day of being a CPA, and we nearly wore the grooves off that record. After Eddy Arnold died Thursday, just days short of his 90th birthday, I had "Cattle Call" running through my head all day — but, as I half-joked to friends, there was nothing unusual about that; I often have "Cattle Call" running through my head.

The funny thing is, "Cattle Call" was completely unemblematic of Arnold's career — at least the second, more successful part of his career, when he set aside anything resembling an agrarian image, was seen almost exclusively in tuxedos, and established himself as more of a pop crooner. He was the original king of country crossover. My dad would buy Arnold's later records but always be confounded by how little these cosmopolitan-sounding songs resembled the Western-themed hit he loved; never mind that Arnold's transition from hillbilly icon to formally dressed gentleman roughly mirrored the farm-to-city transition our family had made. Not very many fans considered Arnold's switch to a slicker style selling out, though. Though he had his first No. 1 country hit in 1947, he had his biggest run of hits in the 1960s, after he'd adopted the smooth "Nashville sound," which involved strings and background chorales — crossing over to pop success and becoming the Rascal Flatts or Shania Twain of his day. In the end, many consider him the most successful country singer of all time, if you combine record sales (85 million sold) with radio successes (145 chart hits, including 28 No. 1s).

Remembering the E Street Band's Danny Federici

When I gave a fairly ecstatic review to Bruce Springsteen’s Magic last year, I made reference to how the presence of any dark or politically disturbing material on the album was emotionally mitigated by those “reassuring Danny Federici organ fills.” In saying that, my tongue was lodged only a couple of millimeters into my cheek: Federici’s organ really did feel like a glue that held the E Street Band together, at least in those moments when they reverted to their classic sound, as they did quite a bit on Magic. And more than any other element, that particular ingredient seemed to signal that Springsteen, who'd more recently favored synthesizer sounds, was no longer afraid that resurrecting that early band alchemy would be mistaken for nostalgia. Federici and pianist Roy Bittan came up when I talked with producer Brendan O’Brien about the album. “I think possibly one reason some of these earlier records were so keyboard oriented — I would have to assume, after working with Roy and Danny — is that those guys are very quick at picking things up," O'Brien said last fall. "Danny’s all over this record. He plays great organ, he’s just a total natural — he’s doing some great solos on it.” Little did most people, if anyone, suspect it would be his final recorded bow with the E Street Band: Federici succumbed to melanoma on Thursday, at age 58.

Federici had been in bands with Springsteen for longer than anyone in the E Street Band, having been part of the Bruce-fronted New Jersey bands Child and Steel Mill in the late '60s and early '70s. He performed through a good part of the still-ongoing Springsteen tour before bowing out in November for treatment. Fans were shocked by the announcement, but heartened when he made a return to the stage less than a month ago. Federici sat in on a March 20 show in Indianapolis for a reported eight numbers — including “Kitty’s Back,” a rarely played number from Springsteen’s second album that it’s just about impossible to imagine the E Street Band ever playing without him. At the time of that gig, Steve Van Zandt described Federici’s seeming recovery as “miraculous,” so it’s hard to know if his bandmates really assumed the best or were just putting a good face on things. What I, for one, would consider the world's greatest ongoing rock & roll band has an irreplaceable hole. But it’s certainly heartening for fans to know that Kitty and Danny both got to come back one last time, for the road.

Remembering Ollie Johnston

You may not know Ollie Johnston's name or face, but you've seen his acting — it's been all but imprinted in your DNA since childhood. Johnston, who died Monday at 95, was the last of the "Nine Old Men," the animators responsible for the classic Disney cartoon features made from the 1930s to the 1970s. They invented the model for how animated features should be made, and each of them took on specific characters in the movie and acted the roles through their drawings. Johnston, in particular, was revered among animators for his emotional directness, from the scene of Bambi's mother's death in Bambi to the plight of the kidnapped orphan Penny in The Rescuers. (That film's Rufus, a wise old cat, was the closest Johnston came to self-portraiture.) The accomplishments of Johnston and his co-worker and lifelong pal Frank Thomas (who died in 2004) were celebrated in the 1995 documentary Frank and Ollie; the pair's website remains a good entry point to their achievements. Even in the age of computer animation, Johnston's work remains enormously influential; Brad Bird paid him homage by giving him voice roles in The Iron Giant and The Incredibles. You can read some good remembrances here and here — or just watch Baloo and Mowgli, strolling hand in hand through The Jungle Book, for the best tribute to Frank and Ollie's friendship.

On the Scene: Norman Mailer's memorial at Carnegie Hall

Norman Mailer's memorial service last night at Carnegie Hall was, I think, a lot like dinner at his Provincetown home must have been: rowdy, bawdy, argumentative, loud, angry, funny, and rip-roaring fun. The near-capacity crowd in the gilded old concert hall listened raptly for hours as family and friends remembered the novelist, the father, the friend who died on November 10 at 84.

Mailer's nine children captivated the crowd, each engaging in long, heartfelt, wickedly funny memories of their dad: his love of oysters, pot roast, and dirty jokes, or the way they brought him rum and orange juice on his deathbed. Michael Mailer remembered how they connected through boxing.  Susan Mailer, the oldest, said her father talked of the family as a tapestry. "To others, he was a great writer. To me, he was a great weaver." Kate Mailer described the grandiose, often dangerous schemes her dad insisted the family undertake. Once, when she refused to climb Mt. Katahdin in a storm, her father told her, "We should all be lucky enough to die on a mountaintop!" But it was Stephen Mailer who brought down the house. After identifying himself as the wild card of the family, he proceeded to fall to the floor and writhe, then got up and announced her was channeling his dad. As his siblings — and the crowd — convulsed with laughter, he grabbed the podium and shouted, "Carnegie Hall? Well, why the f--- not?"

A somber Sean Penn (pictured), clad in a dark suit, read from a text he'd hastily tapped into his Blackberry: "The sentence 'Norman Mailer is dead' is a lament for what greatness once was, and what greatness should aspire to."  The novelist Don DeLillo remembered his dear friend as "a spectacle in three dimensions — or maybe four — or maybe five." Then, holding up his battered 50-year-old Signet edition of The Naked And The Dead, he said, "[Mailer] was a great novelist, figuring out the world sentence by sentence." Tina Brown remembered how she was mesmerized by him when she moved to New York: "There was no writer like him in England... he subscribed to the Hemingway model, novel as pugilist, as beater of words." Novelist William Kennedy, a friend since 1968, said, "Who else was as rewarding, as brilliant, as exasperating?" But it was a wraithlike Joan Didion who perhaps put it best, in her trademark whisper: "I can think of no other writer who risked so much — and brought it home."

My encounter with Charlton Heston

I met Charlton Heston only once, in 1996, but that brief interview cemented for me an admiring fondness for an actor whose politics I disagreed with, whose acting style I often found hammy and quaint, and yet who gave me and millions of other moviegoers enormous pleasure watching his performances over the years. At the time, Heston was promoting the film Alaska (pictured), directed by his son Fraser, a minor film that gave him a rare villainous role, which he bit into with his usual gusto. (Years later, I'm still tickled by his typically clenched-jaw reading of such lines as, "Magnificent creature, the polar bear. Nature's most perfect carnivore.") Heston was proud of his son's work and modest about his own, feeling that, at age 71, he was still just a working actor hoping to get it right one of these days. He talked about his recently completed role as the Player King in Kenneth Branagh's film version of Hamlet (and told a hilarious, unprintable story about one of his fellow cast members in that film, a tale made even funnier since I was essentially listening to the voice of God using the f-word). I asked why, at this stage of his career, with no more worlds to conquer, he'd take a walk-on role in a Shakespeare movie. He replied, again with that famously tightened jaw, "No actor with the brains God gave a goose would turn down the chance to waltz with the old gentleman from Avon." Yes, Heston really spoke that way. It was awesome.

All right, maybe he was putting me on a little; he certainly had the capacity to laugh at himself, as was evident from his self-parodic cameo in Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes remake, or his role as a crazy, trigger-happy coot in Town and Country. Even talking about politics, about which he was famously passionate, he was capable of being tongue-in-cheek. I asked him if he was going to stump for the Republicans in the 1996 election, and he said he might, but that right-leaning actors were generally leery of campaigning because they feared losing work in liberal Hollywood, just as outspoken leftists had during the Hollywood blacklist of the '50s. I told him that sounded disingenuous, especially since he was there at the time and would have remembered seeing film folk not just lose their jobs but sometimes even go to jail or flee the country; surely he didn't think conservatives in Hollywood faced similar peril in 1996, did he? Well, he replied, it still felt that way to him, and he asserted, "There are more conservatives in the closet in Hollywood than there are homosexuals." "You've used that line before, haven't you," I said. "Yes, it's a good line, isn't it?" Now, I don't think Heston had anything against gays or anyone else; back in the '60s, he'd been an active Hollywood supporter of the civil rights movement and had joined Martin Luther King's march on Washington in 1963. Rather, whether Heston was campaigning for the National Rifle Association or selling a character to moviegoers, he was a showman first, an entertainer, and he knew how to please a crowd and play to an audience.

Remembering Frosty Freeze

Now that hip-hop has become a multinational, gazillion-dollar enterprise, it's all too easy to forget how it began: as a startlingly fresh hybrid artform, practiced by a relatively small community of devotees in the Bronx and Manhattan. Wayne Frost, a.k.a. Frosty Freeze, was one of the undeniable greats back then. As a key member of the Rock Steady Crew, he helped take breakdancing beyond the streets of New York — popularizing the new moves on the big screen in films like Wild Style, Beat Street, and Flashdance.

Frosty Freeze died yesterday in a Manhattan hospital at the age of 44. (He'd been suffering from a long illness, which his family has not yet identified publicly.) I just got off the phone with Freeze's fellow b-boy star, Richard "Crazy Legs" Colón, who was kind enough to share a few memories of their early days together. "When we first started taking hip-hop on the road, he was there with me for the first tours," Crazy Legs said, recalling trips they took to dance in London and Paris. "The thing about it is, Frosty Freeze, although he was an inspirational figure, wasn't anyone that was easily imitated. He was that unique. You have your Magic Johnsons and your Larry Birds and your Michael Jordans. Frosty Freeze was at the forefront of originality when it came to b-boying."

Despite all that, Crazy Legs said, the contributions of Frosty Freeze and other early b-boys are often overlooked. "Most people don't know the history of breaking before its primary commercial exposure. People think of it in terms of what went on in the '80s, but the dance started in the '70s, and Frosty Freeze was representative of the DNA of the style. He was the last one to truly represent the original form."

Amen. Let's take this sad occasion as an opportunity to remember Frosty Freeze's legacy — just like the makers of the YouTube tribute below have done. Were you influenced by any of Freeze's movies? What does b-boy culture mean to you?

Remembering Jules Dassin

It's been a bad week for Richard Widmark fans. First, we lost the actor himself; then Abby Mann, screenwriter behind Widmark's Judgment at Nuremberg; and now Jules Dassin, who directed Widmark in the classic noir Night and the City (1950). Dassin, who died Monday at 96, directed some of film's greatest crime thrillers and capers, though he was probably best known for the comedy Never on Sunday (1960), for which he earned writing and directing Oscar nominations, and which starred his muse (later, his wife) Melina Mercouri. That film was made during his years as perhaps the most famous victim of the Hollywood blacklist, hounded into exile and finding refuge in France and, later, in Mercouri's homeland of Greece.

The movie that put Dassin on the map was 1948's pioneering police thriller The Naked City, whose gritty, then-unprecedented use of New York City locations and extras influenced virtually every film and TV cop drama that followed (including, of course, the '50s cop show based on the movie). Around that time, Dassin made other celebrated crime dramas, including Night and the City and Brute Force, and he enjoyed a prolific career as a Broadway director as well (wouldn't you love to have seen his Two's Company, featuring a singing and dancing Bette Davis?). All that ended, however, when he was named a fellow traveler at the height of the Hollywood blacklist era in 1952. Dassin had been a member of the Communist party briefly in the 1930s, and while he was no longer a member when his name came up, the damage was done. Before he could testify against others, he fled the country, settling in France. Even there, he found it hard to obtain film work, since distributors feared that American theaters wouldn't screen his movies. Still, he found success with Rififi (1955), one of the all-time classic heist movies. A decade later, he did a comic variation on that film with another heist classic, Topkapi.

In 1956, he met Mercouri, whom he would marry a decade later, and with whom he made nine films. Their most celebrated was Never on Sunday, which made her an international star. She played a happy-go-lucky prostitute in a Greek fishing village; writer/director Dassin co-starred as a visiting American self-styled intellectual who tried to educate and reform her, with disastrous results. The movie earned five Oscar nominations, including the two for Dassin and a Best Actress nod for Mercouri, and it won Best Song for its ubiquitous, bouzouki-flavored title track. Mercouri (who died in 1994) and Dassin would both come to be revered in Greece as national treasures. It would have been nice if Dassin could have earned similar status in his homeland.

Remembering Abby Mann

It's hard to remember these days, when movies that address social issues routinely die a quick death at the box office, that there was a time (roughly, the late 1940s to the mid-1960s) when Hollywood prided itself on it's so-called social problem pictures, when screenwriters dared imagine (even at the height of the Hollywood blacklist, which also flourished during the same period) that movies could effect change in the real world and improve people's lives. One such screenwriter was Abby Mann, who died Tuesday at 80, and whose works for film and television over nearly 50 years actually did achieve positive, real-world results. His teleplay for the 1973 TV movie The Marcus-Nelson Murders (centering on a favorite Mann topic, the railroading of the innocent) resulted in the freeing of the real-life suspect accused of the crimes. (To Mann's chagrin, the movie served as a backdoor pilot for Kojak, which, aside from the charisma of Telly Savalas in the lead role, Mann found to be a pretty formulaic cops-and-robbers show.) Another Mann project, the 1978 miniseries King, prompted a belated Congressional inquiry into Martin Luther King's assassination. And his 1995 cable movie Indictment: The McMartin Trial, helped mark the end of a wave of a witch hunt of day care providers accused of fantastic and bizarre claims of child molestations and satanic rituals.

Of course, Mann will be best remembered for his Oscar-winning screenplay for 1961's Judgment at Nuremberg. (One of the key players in that film's all-star cast, Richard Widmark, also passed away this week.) Mann managed to adapt his teleplay about Nazi war crime trials to the big screen at a politically sensitive time (the story was seen as a potential embarrassment to our Cold War ally, West Germany). Of course, the film itself was about the determination to see justice done despite political pressure. "I believe that a writer worth his salt at all has an obligation not only to entertain but to comment on the world in which he lives," said Mann during his Oscar acceptance speech, "not only to comment, but maybe have a shot at reshaping the world."

Remembering Richard Widmark

One psychopath who surely deserved a spot in EW.com's current gallery of our favorite movie villains is Tommy Udo, the unforgettable thug played by Richard Widmark (pictured, center, with Victor Mature) in his 1947 film debut, Kiss of Death. With his high-pitched giggle and inventive cruelty (notoriously, he ties up an old woman in a wheelchair and pushes her down the stairs to her death), the indelible Tommy Udo immediately typed Widmark as a premier screen villain, an image he spent the next five decades trying to shake — indeed, that Oscar-nominated performance is the first role that comes to mind when I think of Widmark, who died Monday at 93. With his skull-like visage and perma-scowl, Widmark did indeed seem born to play the heavy, as he did so memorably in such films as Yellow Sky, No Way Out, The Cobweb, The Bedford Incident, and Coma. But even when he played heroes or authority figures (doctors, cops, generals, politicians), he always displayed a dark, desperate edge.

Besides Kiss of Death, Widmark's essential films included 1950's Night and the City (Jules Dassin's noir classic, which stars Widmark as a small-time fight promoter who overreaches), 1953's Pickup on South Street (a taut, grimy thriller from Sam Fuller, in which Widmark plays a pickpocket who finds himself caught up in a web of Cold War spy intrigue), 1961's Judgment at Nuremberg (where Widmark, as a war crimes prosecutor, is the standout among the all-star cast), 1964's Cheyenne Autumn (a John Ford western based on research Widmark had done at Yale; Widmark plays a military captain who risks his career to help the Indians), 1968's Madigan (a cop thriller from Don Siegel, sort of a dress rehearsal for Siegel's Dirty Harry: Widmark parlayed the loner sleuth of the title into his own TV series), and 1972's When the Legends Die (he's an aging rodeo cowboy, alternately generous and backstabbing, who mentors young rider Frederic Forrest).

Widmark always eschewed Hollywood, choosing to live in Connecticut, and he avoided the talk shows, preferring to let his work speak for itself. So it should be enough for me just to recommend the aforementioned movies. Watch Widmark in them, and you're sure to feel a chill. In a good way.

Remembering Paul Scofield

The great British stage actor Paul Scofield, who died today at the age of 86, was an anomaly by the standards of today's tabloid-saturated culture. The Oscar-winning actor and master of the Shakespearean stage — cited as one of the greatest English-speaking actors by playwrights Edward Albee and Arthur Miller — was modest to a fault and harbored a deep dislike of the spotlight, even rejecting an offer of knighthood with the statement, "If you want a title, what's wrong with Mr.?"

One of his first lead film roles — as the principled, headstrong statesman Sir Thomas More in A Man For All Seasons — earned him the 1966 Best Actor Oscar and international recognition, but Scofield, who chose his projects as carefully as he might his family and friends ("Only the dead play harder to get," it was said of him), didn't appear in another major film until assuming the title role in Peter Brook's King Lear (1971), reprising an earlier role from a Stratford production. (That stage Lear was reportedly legendary as well, performed when he was just 40, in 1962. That same year, he won a Tony for the stage version of Man for All Seasons.) His brilliant portrayal of the troubled, aged monarch earned Scofield praise from the Royal Shakespeare Company as the greatest performer ever in a Shakespearean play.

Scofield also originated the role of Antonio Salieri in the play Amadeus, and in 1969, he became the sixth performer to win the Triple Crown of Acting (an Emmy for Best Actor, in Male of the Species, joined the Oscar and Tony on his mantel). His other films — including Albee's A Delicate Balance (1974), Kenneth Branagh's Henry V (1989), Robert Redford's Quiz Show (1994), and the screen version of Miller's play The Crucible (1996) — all displayed an actor with a commanding presence, his words given weight by a deep, crackling, astringent voice weighty with authority. Just watch this famous scene, below, from Man for All Seasons:

The Guardian has some fine Scofield tributes today, this essay and this slideshow. And please share your own memories of Scofield with us below.

Remembering Ivan Dixon

Ivan Dixon, who died Sunday at 76, deserves to be remembered for more than just his role as Sgt. Kinchloe on Hogan's Heroes, though he credited that role with opening a lot of doors for him in television. He in turn opened doors for African-Americans in TV as a director. In the '70s and '80s, when it was still very rare to see blacks behind the camera in movies, Dixon was quietly racking up dozens of directing credits on episodic TV, including such series as The Waltons, The Rockford Files, The Greatest American Hero, and Magnum, P.I.

Dixon also had a memorable film career, though his movies have fallen into undeserved obscurity. Two of them are ripe for rescue: Trouble Man (1972), a Shaft-like blaxploitation drama that Dixon directed, with exciting action and a terrific Marvin Gaye soundtrack; and Nothing But a Man (1964), a Civil Rights-era drama of a man and his wife (Dixon and jazz icon Abbey Lincoln) struggling for dignity in Jim Crow Alabama. Dixon fans regard Nothing as his finest performance — and as the supreme example of what he could do when he wasn't trapped in that prison camp.

Remembering Arthur C. Clarke

The word "visionary" gets tossed around a lot, but it really fits Arthur C. Clarke — though the author, who died early Wednesday at 90, would have disdained it out of modesty. Still, the creator of such sci-fi landmarks as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Childhood's End really did imagine a future destiny for humanity and, through the influence of his writing, helped move us in that direction. Astronauts have credited him with inspiring them to become space travelers, and telecommunications pioneers have credited him with envisioning the global satellite networks we have today. And millions more have read his books, or watched Stanley Kubrick's groundbreaking film version of 2001, and pondered mankind's future.

USA Today has a fine tribute to Clarke today, noting that his speculative work was grounded in his academic study of math and physics, and recommending as must-reads among his 80 books Childhood's End (a much-emulated tale about alien visitors who eradicate human misery at the cost of human liberty), The City and the Stars, The Nine Billion Names of God (a short story collection), 2001 (his novelization of the movie, based in turn on his short story "The Sentinel"), and Rendezvous with Rama (a novel that won pretty much every sci-fi award imaginable). Clarke fans should also visit the website of the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation, which continues to promote his ideals of using science and technology to improve people's lives. Clarke believed that, through applied science, anything that could be imagined could be achieved. He made readers and moviegoers believe it, too.

Remembering Anthony Minghella

British filmmaker Anthony Minghella, who died Tuesday at 54, always seemed like an anachronism, though he hit his stride in the mid-'90s with both critics and audiences. He helped define the industry's cutting edge by creating films that were gloriously old-fashioned. The kind of movies he specialized in — sweeping period dramas based on tony literature — were the kind of movies Hollywood had all but abandoned by the mid-'90s. Yet Minghella's success with such movies (particularly 1996's The English Patient) made Miramax an Oscar factory and helped effect a shift in power from the major studios to the art-house distributors.

Minghella directed only six features (a seventh film, a feature-length TV pilot for a BBC series based on Alexander McCall Smith's novel The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, was recently completed), but almost all of them made a big splash. All of them were unusually literate, including the romantic comedies that were his first two films: Truly Madly Deeply (which posited that, if the dead came back, they'd spend their time watching classic movies) and Mr. Wonderful (in which blue collar New Yorker Matt Dillon learns to appreciate ex-wife Annabella Sciorra's yearning for a more literary, academic life). For his third film, however, he shifted away from these small-scale romances for a sprawling epic based on Michael Ondaatje's seemingly unadaptable novel The English Patient. The film was a huge gamble for Miramax, with its $27 million budget (big money for an indie film in those days) and relative lack of star power (Kristin Scott who?), but it paid off with a worldwide gross of $232 million and nine Oscars (out of 12 nominations), including Best Picture and Best Director for Minghella.

Jeff Healey: 1966-2008

It was a rare type of eye cancer that robbed guitarist Jeff Healey of his eyesight when he was only one year old, and a cancer that spread to his lungs would eventually take his life on March 2, but the prodigiously talented blues and jazz guitarist managed to fit an impressive amount into his 41 years of life.

Healey was best known to film fans as the house band leader in the Patrick Swayze cult favorite Road House (1989), but the Toronto native found considerable success with the resulting label contract and his hit single "Angel Eyes." He released a popular cover of "My Guitar Gently Weeps," played alongside the likes of George Harrison, Stevie Ray Vaughn and B.B. King, and even nabbed a Grammy nomination for the song "Hideaway," before returning eventually to his first love: vintage jazz. He released several albums on this theme, and in addition to playing a weekly jam session in Toronto, he occasionally hosted the CBC show My Kinda Jazz, which allowed him to showcase his collection of 30,000-plus jazz records. A father of two, Healey was readying the release of Mess of Blues, his first rock-blues album in eight years. As B.B. King told EW, "Jeff’s passing is a tragic loss to the world of blues. His life was cut short. He was courageous throughout his battle with cancer, and his special talent will be greatly missed."

Remembering Christian rock maverick Larry Norman

Larry Norman, the singer/songwriter often referred to as “the father of Christian rock,” died Sunday at age 60 after years of declining health. His first two solo albums, Upon This Rock (originally released on Capitol in 1969) and Only Visiting This Planet (issued by Verve in 1972), are widely considered the first Christian rock albums of any real significance. All these decades later, they’re probably still the two best. Fans of contemporary Christian music (or CCM, as it’s come to be known) often claim that their heroes could be mainstream stars if only they didn’t sing about Jesus. Usually, that’s a lot of malarkey, but in Norman’s case, it happened to be true: A lot of his early work wouldn’t sound at all out of place between Wings and the Stones on a classic rock station, if not for his (usually) righteous lyrical concerns.  How far his influence really extended is up for debate, given the relatively few records he sold — although as unlikely an acolyte as Frank Black of the Pixies has cited him as a hero and even recorded his songs. "Larry was my door into the music business, and he was the most Christlike person I ever met," Black said in a statement Monday.

For quite a few years, the sum total of the Christian rock genre was pretty much Larry Norman. It may be difficult now — at a time when bands like Paramore find wide acceptance in both the Christian and mainstream worlds (and almost a quarter-century on from the advent of Stryper) — to remember a time when there was no such thing as CCM, and when, if any such thing did pop up, it was greeted with distrust and scorn on either side of the evangelical/pop divide. The Beatles were about to break up, yet the cutting edge of Christian music was still represented by the folksy/choral records made by Ralph Carmichael, better known as Billy Graham’s musical director. Then along came an unsmiling, almost sneering guy who, like Johnny Cash, usually dressed all in black, though, unlike Cash, he had whiteish blond hair down past his chest. And he was singing about salvation and the rapture, with humor and sass, in a voice that clearly owed a lot to Mick Jagger’s cocky intonation. In the church vs. counterculture world of the ‘60s and early ‘70s, this officially counted as cognitive dissonance, and maybe it still does.