The Routes They Made

The New York Times site has a slide show called "The Music They Made". It is a series of black-and-white photos and music snippets covering famous/important musicians who passed away in 2009.

I've entered most (but not all—see below) of the musicians and songs mentioned into the Music Routes database.

So, if it's your thing, you can connect dead people to other dead people.  Or, if you're a recorded musician yourself, you can connect yourself to your favorite-recently deceased musician.

Some of them, like Jack Rose, were problematic because they are mostly solo performers.  I was able to find a handful of collaborations that Rose did, but nothing with anyone that would hook him into the greater mass of musicians out there, even by a long chain of Rose-played-with-X-who-recorded-with-Y-who-sang-on-Z type stuff.  (Help?)

Others were problematic because the relevant credits are elusive. For example, it's well-established that Bobby Graham was the drummer on the Kinks single "You Really Got Me".  It's less clear whether it was him or someone else on "All Day And All Of The Night".  (All Day And All Of The Night is also the title of an apparently authoritative account of what The Kinks did and when they did it.  Perhaps someone owns the book and can tell me what it says about the recording of "All Day And All Of The Night"?)

In the case of Estelle Bennett, the best account I could find of the recording of The Ronettes' "Be My Baby" seems to indicate that she probably wasn't on it.  According to the article, the only musicians who were definitely absolutely positively on the recording are drummer Hal Blaine and singer Veronica Bennett (later and more widely known as Ronnie Spector).

Anyway, have fun with it, send me some session/discography data I need to add, send me your data for your own sessions if you're a musician, and have a totally killer (figuratively speaking) New Year.