Dr. John, Legend of New Orleans, Dead At 77
Over a career stretching back to the 1950s, Malcom John Rebennack came to be a living symbol of the city of New Orleans and its bottomless musical character.
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 discovered, or at least disseminated, late last year, in fact: in his fantastical 1994 autobiography "Under the Hoodoo Moon," Dr. John had declared his birth date as "just before Thanksgiving 1940." But in for the published in November 2018, author John Wirt unearthed a birth announcement from the same paper 77 years earlier: Mac, as he was colloquially known, was actually was a tribute. (Armstrong's real birthday was misrecorded for decades, too.)
