Deaths
- January 3 – Jack Oakie, 74, actor in many musical films of the 1940s
- January 23
- Terry Kath, 31, Chicago guitarist and vocalist (suicide)
- Vic Ames, 52, Ames Brothers
- January 31 – Gregory Herbert, Blood, Sweat & Tears saxophonist
- February 7 - Dimitrie Cuclin, 82, composer and musicologist
- March 4 – Joe Marsala, 71, clarinetist and songwriter
- March 11 – Claude François, 39, singer-songwriter (electrocuted)
- March 17 – Malvina Reynolds, 77, US folk/blues singer-songwriter
- March 18 – Peggy Wood, 86, actress and singer
- April 3 – Ray Noble, 74, composer and bandleader
- April 21 – Sandy Denny, 31, folk singer (Fairport Convention) (cerebral haemorrhage)
- May 1 – Aram Khachaturian, 74, composer
- May 5 – Ján Móry, 85, Slovak composer
- May 26 – Tamara Karsavina, 93, ballerina
- July 14 – Maria Grinberg, 69, pianist
- July 29 – Glen Goins, 24, Parliament Funkadelic guitarist and singer (Hodgkin's lymphoma)
- August 14 – Joe Venuti, 74, US jazz violinist
- August 24 – Louis Prima, 67, jazz musician
- September 6 – Tom Wilson, 47, producer
- September 7 – Keith Moon, 32, drummer of The Who (drug overdose)
- September 24 – Ruth Etting, 80, US "torch" singer
- October 6 – Johnny O'Keefe, 43, Australian Singer
- October 9 – Jacques Brel, 49, singer-songwriter
- October 12 – Nancy Spungen, 20, girlfriend of Sid Vicious
- October 23 – Maybelle Carter née Addington, 69, US country singer and musician, member of the Carter Family
- November 12 – Howard Swanson, 71, composer
- November 18 – Lennie Tristano, 59, jazz pianist
- December 3 - William Grant Still, 83, composer
- December 27 – Chris Bell, 27, singer-songwriter (auto accident)
Read more about this topic: 1978 In Music
Famous quotes containing the word deaths:
“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
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—Marge Piercy (b. 1936)
“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)
“You lived too long, we have supped full with heroes,
they waste their deaths on us.”
—C.D. Andrews (1913–1992)