Deaths
- January 4 – Phil Lynott, bassist/singer and co-founder of Thin Lizzy, 36 (heart failure & pneumonia)
- January 6 – Joe Farrell, jazz saxophonist, 48 (bone cancer)
- January 8 – Pierre Fournier, cellist, 79
- February 2 – Francisco Mignone, composer, 88
- February 14 – Edmund Rubbra, composer, 84
- February 15 – Galliano Masini, operatic tenor, 90
- March 4
- Richard Manuel (The Band), 42 (suicide)
- Howard Greenfield, songwriter, 49 (AIDS)
- March 11 – Sonny Terry, blues musician, 74
- March 21 – Raymond Burke, jazz clarinetist, 81
- March 22 – Mark Dinning, US singer, 52 (heart attack)
- March 30 – James Cagney, US actor, singer and dancer, 86
- March 31 – O'Kelly Isley of the Isley Brothers, 48 (heart attack)
- April 1 – Donald Grobe, operatic tenor, 56
- April 3 – Peter Pears, opera singer and partner of Benjamin Britten, 75
- April 8 – Yukiko Okada, singer, 18 (suicide)
- April 13 – Dorothy Ashby, jazz harpist and composer, 53 (cancer)
- April 19
- Dag Wirén, composer, 80
- Estelle Yancey, blues singer, 90
- June 3 – Anna Neagle, actress, singer and dancer, 81
- June 13 – Benny Goodman, bandleader, 77
- June 14 – Alan Jay Lerner, lyricist, 67
- June 16 – Maurice Duruflé, composer, 84
- June 17 – Kate Smith, singer, 79
- June 29 - Dusolina Giannini, operatic soprano, 83
- July 3 – Rudy Vallee, singer, 84
- July 18 – Don Wilkerson, saxophonist
- July 31 – Teddy Wilson, jazz pianist, 73
- September 27 – Cliff Burton (Metallica), 24 (tour bus accident)
- September 28 – Robert Helpmann, dancer and choreographer, 77
- October 16 – Arthur Grumiaux, violinist, 65
- November 1 – Sippie Wallace, blues singer, 88
- November 3 – Eddie Davis, saxophonist, 64
- November 6 - Elisabeth Grümmer, operatic soprano, 75
- November 7 – Tracy Pew, bass guitarist, 28 (brain hemorrhage)
- November 13 – Rudolf Schock, operatic tenor, 71
- November 18 – Lajos Bárdos, composer and conductor, 87
- November 22 – Scatman Crothers, singer, dancer and musician, 76
- December 1 – Horace Heidt, pianist and bandleader, 85
- December 10 – Kate Wolf, folk singer and songwriter, 44 (leukemia)
- date unknown – Boris Gutnikov, violinist
Read more about this topic: 1986 In Music
Famous quotes containing the word deaths:
“You lived too long, we have supped full with heroes,
they waste their deaths on us.”
—C.D. Andrews (1913–1992)
“As deaths have accumulated I have begun to think of life and death as a set of balance scales. When one is young, the scale is heavily tipped toward the living. With the first death, the first consciousness of death, the counter scale begins to fall. Death by death, the scales shift weight until what was unthinkable becomes merely a matter of gravity and the fall into death becomes an easy step.”
—Alison Hawthorne Deming (b. 1946)
“This is the 184th Demonstration.
...
What we do is not beautiful
hurts no one makes no one desperate
we do not break the panes of safety glass
stretching between people on the street
and the deaths they hire.”
—Marge Piercy (b. 1936)