and found myself drifting back to a time in the late 1950s when a gathering of young African women and men, people who I knew to be my parents and related relatives, would begin to play such "grown-up" music before telling me to go to bed.
Little Sonny Warner (b. October 30, 1930, Falls Church, Virginia – d. April 12, 2007, Falls Church, Virginia) was an American blues singer.
Born Haywood S. Warner, Warner was born on October 30,1930 in Falls Church, Virginia. In the early 1950s, Warner sang as a backing vocalist for Van Walls on the Atlantic Records releases "After Midnight" and "Open the Door". His career received a boost in 1957, when he filled in for Lloyd Price at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem.
Warner's biggest hit was saxophonist Big Jay McNeely's "There's Something On Your Mind", which became a gold record for Checker Records in 1959. He performed with James Brown, Etta James and B. B. King. In his later years, Warner often performed at concerts and festivals in Falls Church.
Little Sonny Warner died in his hometown of Falls Church, Virginia, on April 12, 2007.
War-Dyabi ibn Rabis (War Jabi) (War Jaabi) (d. 1040/1041 CC [433 AH]).Ruler of Takrur -- the first known West African kingdom to embrace Islam.According to the chronicler al-Bakri, it was War-Dyabi who first insisted that his subjects convert to Islam, demonstrating that Islam had reached western Sudan before the Almoravid conquest of Ghana in 1076/1077.After War-Dyabi’s death, his son allied with the Almoravids, and probably fought with them against Ghana.
War Jabi was the king of Tekrur in the 1030s. He converted to Islam. This conversion allowed Tekrur to justify its wars of expansion to the south.
War-Dyabe or War Jabi, also known as: War Jaabi or War-Dyabe, was the first Muslim king of Tekrur in the 1030s, and the first to proclaim Islam as a state religion in the Sudan.
War Jabi was a member of the Manna dynasty that had ruled Tekrur since the early 800s. His father Rabis may be the Rai bin Rai mentioned in Arabic sources as an ally of the Almoravids and king of the Sudan. Islam had been brought to Tekrur by Soninke merchants and spread widely.
War Jabi converted to Islam and forced his subjects to convert to Islam, introducing sharia law in the Kingdom in 1035. This greatly benefited the state economically and created greater political ties with the Muslim states of North Africa that would be important in the later conflicts with the animist state of Ghana.
War Jabi died in 433 AH (1040 or 1041 CC) and was succeeded by his son Labi.
War Jabi's enforcement of sharia law pushed the Serer people of Tekrur (landowners and "the local agricultural people"), who refused Islam in favor of their traditional religion, out of the country. That resulted in their migration to Baol and Sine.
The name "War" means "death" in the Serer language. The old Serer anti-Islamic and anti-Arab term "the spurns of War" and "the spurns of Leb" are in reference to him and his son. They are pejorative terms.
Melinda Wilson, who rescued her future husband, the Beach Boys co-founder Brian Wilson, from psychological ruin when they were dating in the 1980s, died on Tuesday. She was 77.
Mr. Wilson confirmed her death on Instagram, saying that they had been married for 28 years. No cause of death was given.
Jean Sievers, Mr. Wilson’s manager, said that Ms. Wilson had died suddenly at her home in Beverly Hills, Calif. She added that the couple has five adopted children — Dakota Rose, Daria Rose, Dash, Dylan and Delanie Rae — who all survive her and carry Mr. Wilson’s surname.
The couple’s relationship was portrayed in the 2014 biopic “Love & Mercy.” The film shows Ms. Wilson (Elizabeth Banks) meeting Mr. Wilson, played by both John Cusack and Paul Dano, in a Cadillac showroom in Los Angeles where she was working as a saleswoman.
“She said to me, ‘Music is his first love,’” Ms. Banks told ABC. “‘Nothing can replace it. It’s his being, it’s his essence, it’s his everything. So I’m settling for second, but it’s a pretty good — it’s a pretty good second.’”
The film shows Ms. Wilson helping her then boyfriend navigate a bout of mental illness in the 1980s. That effort, and their courtship, is complicated by the presence of Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti), a psychologist who had helped Mr. Wilson fight off depression and substance abuse to stage a professional comeback.
Mr. Landy, whose team of professional minders at one point lived with Mr. Wilson 24 hours a day, insinuated himself into the musician's life to the point where the therapist was at one point acting as his Mr. Wilson’s business partner, record producer and occasional songwriting partner.
In 1992, a lawsuit by Mr. Wilson’s family resulted in a court order that barred Mr. Landy from contacting Mr. Wilson. Mr. Landy died in 2006.
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John Cusack as Brian Wilson and Elizabeth Banks as Melinda Ledbetter in the 2014 film "Love & Mercy."Credit...François Duhamel
Melinda Kae Ledbetter was born on Oct. 3, 1946, in Pueblo, Colo. She grew up in Whittier, Calif., and went to college there before becoming a model, Ms. Sievers said.
She also worked as a producer on several films related to her husband’s music, including “Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road” (2021) and “Pet Sounds Live at Royce Hall” (2006). The latter title refers to “Pet Sounds,” a landmark 1966 Beach Boys album.
When the couple saw the film “Love & Mercy” for the first time, Ms. Wilson told ABC News, she did not know how tough the experience would be.
“I think I was more nervous than him when I took him to see it, and after, I said, ‘So what did you think?’” she said. “And he goes, ‘Oh, it was really a lot worse in real life.’”
Douglas Turner Ward (b. May 5, 1930, Burnside, Louisiana – d. February 20, 2021, New York City, New York) was an American playwright, actor, director, and theatrical producer. He was noted for being a founder and artistic director of the Negro Ensemble Company (NEC). He was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play in 1974 for his role in The River Niger, which he also directed.
Ward was born Roosevelt Ward Jr. in Burnside, Louisiana, on May 5, 1930. His parents, Roosevelt Ward and Dorothy (Short), were poor farmers who also owned a tailoring business. They relocated to New Orleans when Ward was eight years old, and he went to Xavier University Preparatory School. He was accepted by Wilberforce University in 1946, before transferring to the University of Michigan. He majored in politics and theater but dropped out of college at the age of 19 and relocated to New York City. There, he became friends with Lorraine Hansberry and Lonne Elder III.
Ward became a member of the Progressive Party at the end of the 1940s and aligned himself on the left of the political spectrum. He was imprisoned in New Orleans while appealing his conviction for draft evasion. After his conviction was reversed, he returned to New York and worked as a reporter for the Daily Worker. Ward also joined the Paul Mann Actors Workshop to study theater. He subsequently adopted the stage name Douglas Turner Ward, a tribute to his two role models: Frederick Douglass and Nat Turner.
As an actor, Turner made one of his first performances in The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O'Neill in 1956, at the Circle in the Square Theatre. Three years later, he made his Broadway debut in a small role in A Raisin in the Sun, alongside Sidney Poitier and Claudia McNeil. His first significant artistic achievement would be as a playwright, however.
Happy Ending/Day of Absence, a program of two one-act plays, premiered at the St. Mark's Playhouse in Manhattan on November 15, 1965. It ultimately ran for 504 performances over 15 months, enduring through the 1966 transit strike. That same year, Ward authored an opinion piece in The New York Times titled "American Theater: For Whites Only?" The piece garnered a grant from W. McNeil Lowry of the Ford Foundation. He later received his first Drama Desk Award for outstanding new playwright.
Ward was one of the founders of the Negro Ensemble Company in 1967 and served for many years as its artistic director. It notably produced The River Niger (1972), which won the Tony Award for Best Play in 1974 and was adapted as a film of the same name two years later. Ward himself acted in and directed that play, receiving a Tony nomination for Best Featured Actor in a Play. The company also produced Home (1979) by Samm-Art Williams and A Soldier's Play (1981) by Charles Fuller. The latter won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and was adapted into the film A Soldier's Story.
Ward was enshrined into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1996. He was also conferred the Martin Luther King Jr. Humanitarian Award. He published The Haitian Chronicles in March 2020, having worked on the three-play series for around four decades. He viewed the series, which focused on the Haitian Revolution, as his magnum opus and intended to have it staged by NEC alumni.
Ward married Diana Powell Ward in 1966. Together, they had two children: Elizabeth Ward–Cuprill and Douglas Powell Ward.
Ward died on February 20, 2021, at his home in Manhattan.
Douglas Turner Ward, Pioneer in Black Theater, Dies at 90
A founder of the Negro Ensemble Company in New York in the 1960s, he was outspoken about limited opportunities for fellow Black actors and directors.
Douglas Turner Ward, right, in 1971 with the director and producer Michael Schultz on the set of the play “The Sty of the Blind Pig.”Credit...Edward Hausner/The New York Times
By Nathaniel G. Nesmith
Douglas Turner Ward, an actor, playwright and director who co-founded the celebrated Negro Ensemble Company, a New York theater group that supported Black writers and actors at a time when there were few opportunities for them, died on Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 90.
The death was confirmed by his wife, Diana Ward.
Mr. Ward was establishing his own career as an actor in 1966 when he wrote an opinion article in The New York Times with the headline “American Theater: For Whites Only?”
“If any hope, outside of chance individual fortune, exists for Negro playwrights as a group — or, for that matter, Negro actors and other theater craftsman — the most immediate, pressing, practical, absolutely minimally essential active first step is the development of a permanent Negro repertory company of at least Off-Broadway size and dimension,” he wrote. “Not in the future … but now!”
The article got the attention of W. McNeil Lowry, the Ford Foundation’s vice president of humanities and the arts, who arranged a $434,000 grant to create precisely the kind of company that Mr. Ward was proposing. Thus the Negro Ensemble Company was born, in 1967, with Mr. Ward as artistic director, Robert Hooks as executive director and Gerald S. Krone as administrative director.
The company went on to produce critically acclaimed productions, among them Joseph A. Walker’s “The River Niger” (1972), which won the Tony Award for best play in 1974 and was adapted for film in 1976. Mr. Ward not only directed the play but also acted in it, earning a Tony nomination for best featured actor in a play.
Other notable productions by the company included Samm-Art Williams’s “Home” (1979) and Charles Fuller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama “A Soldier’s Play” (1981), about a Black officer investigating the murder of a Black sergeant at a Louisiana Army base during World War II, when the armed forces were segregated. The cast included Denzel Washington and Samuel L. Jackson. (It, too, was adapted for film, as “A Soldier’s Story,” in 1984.)
Frank Rich of The Times called the production, directed by Mr. Ward, “superlative.” (The play was revived last January on Broadway, starring Blair Underwood, before being forced to close because of the pandemic.)
The Negro Ensemble Company became — and continues to be — a training ground for Black actors, playwrights, directors, designers and technicians. Many of the troupe’s actors over the years went on to become stars, among them, in addition to Mr. Washington and Mr. Jackson, Angela Bassett, Louis Gossett Jr. and Phylicia Rashad.
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Mr. Ward, right, in 1967 with the ensemble company co-founder Robert Hooks. They started the troupe that year with a grant from the Ford Foundation, setting up headquarters at St. Mark’s Playhouse in the East Village.Credit...Don Hogan Charles/The New York Times
The company, and Ford’s contribution, won immediate praise after its founding. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.said the grant represented “a magnificent step toward the creation of new and greater artists in the community,” and Roy Wilkins, the executive director of the N.A.A.C.P. at the time, said the foundation had “recognized the potential in the Negro theater” and the talent of “hundreds of actors and entertainers who have struggled individually.”
The company began racking up Obie, Tony and Drama Desk awards and recording firsts. In 1975, the Times critic John J. O’Connor acknowledged the historical significance of a “superb” television production of Lonne Elder III’s play “Ceremonies in Dark Old Men,” set in 1950s Harlem. “The event marks the debut of a major Black theater organization, the Negro Ensemble Company, on American network television,” he wrote.
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Mr. Ward starred with Rosalind Cash in 1975 in the well-received ABC television movie adaptation of the play “Ceremonies in Dark Old Men.” Credit...Bert Andrews/ABC, via Getty Images
The company enabled Mr. Ward to solidify his own career as an actor and director.
“I love acting for the communal thing — you know, working with people,” he said in an interview with The Times in 1975. But directing, he added, “sort of happened to me.”
“I never had any intention of functioning as a director,” he continued, “but as the artistic director of the company, I choose the plays, and if I can’t find someone to direct them for us, I do it myself.”
One of the first plays he directed was Richard Wright and Louis Sapin’s “Daddy Goodness” (1968), about a town drunk in the rural South who falls into such a stupor that his friends think he is dead.
In an interview, Mr. Fuller said, “Doug is the only director I have worked with that could read any play and know whether its story line and characters would ‘work’ onstage.”
The Negro Ensemble Company was not immune to criticism, however. The founders were criticized early on for setting up their headquarters at the St. Mark’s Playhouse in Manhattan’s East Village rather than at a theater in Harlem, and for appointing a white administrator, Mr. Krone. (He died last year at 86.)
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Mr. Ward, front left, on opening night of a revival of “A Soldier’s Play” in New York last January. He shook hands with the play’s author, Charles Fuller. Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
Roosevelt Ward Jr. was born on May 5, 1930, in Burnside, La., to Roosevelt and Dorothy (Short) Ward, impoverished farmers who owned their own tailoring business. His family moved to New Orleans when he was 8, and he attended Xavier University Preparatory School, a historically Black Roman Catholic institution.
Mr. Ward was admitted to Wilberforce University in Ohio in 1946, then transferred to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where he studied politics and theater. He quit college at 19 and moved to New York City, where he met and befriended the playwrights Lorraine Hansberry and Mr. Elder.
In the late 1940s, Mr. Ward joined the Progressive Party and took to left-wing politics. He was arrested and convicted on charges of draft evasion and spent time in prison in New Orleans while his case was under appeal. After his conviction was overturned, he moved back to New York and became a journalist for the Communist Party newspaper The Daily Worker.
He also began studying theater, joining the Paul Mann Actors Workshop and choosing the stage name Douglas Turner Ward, in homage to two men he admired: the abolitionist Frederick Douglass and Nat Turner, who led a revolt against slavery.
One of Mr. Ward’s first acting roles was in Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh” in 1956 at Circle in the Square in Manhattan; another was as an understudy in Ms. Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” on Broadway in 1959, with Sidney Poitier and Claudia McNeil in the lead roles.
He also began developing as a playwright. In 1965, an Off-Broadway double-bill production of his satirical one-act comedies “Happy Ending” and “Day of Absence” became a hit, bringing him a Drama Desk Award for outstanding new playwright. Surviving a transit strike, the production ran for 15 months.
Mr. Ward had lead roles in many plays, including “Ceremonies in Dark Old Men,” for which he won the Drama Desk Award, and “The Brownsville Raid,” about an incident of military racial injustice in a Texas town. Clive Barnes, reviewing “Brownsville” for The Times, wrote “Ward, who, to be frank, I usually admire more as a director than an actor, has never been better.”
Among his many awards and honors, Mr. Ward received the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Humanitarian Award. In 1996, he was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame.
He continued to write into his later years. Last March, he published “The Haitian Chronicles,” a series of three plays that he had been working on since the 1970s, all centered on the Haitian Revolution, which threw off colonial rule in the early 1800s. His wife said that he had considered the project his magnum opus and that she and others were hoping to have the plays staged in New York with alumni from the Negro Ensemble Company.
In addition to Ms. Ward, whom he married in 1966, he is survived by their two children, Elizabeth Ward-Cuprill and Douglas Powell Ward, and three grandchildren.
At the Negro Ensemble Company, Mr. Ward often played matchmaker in connecting actors to roles, seeking out opportunities for people whom he knew had not been getting much work.
“Doug never saw N.E.C. as a place to feature himself,” the playwright Steve Carter, who was a production coordinator for the company, said in a phone interview for this obituary in 2017. “He was always looking for new people.”
Mr. Carter, who died last year, said Mr. Ward had been known for his willingness to step into any role in which he was needed. He recalled in particular a 1972 production of “A Ballet Behind the Bridge,” by the Trinidadian playwright Lennox Brown. With the actor Gilbert Lewis unable to appear one evening, Mr. Ward was hastily summoned to fill in.
“Doug went on with script in hand,” Mr. Carter said. Then Mr. Ward actually injured his hand on the set and began bleeding profusely, but he refused to go to the hospital until he had finished the show.
“He would always do what was necessary for N.E.C.,” Mr. Carter said.
