Death and Legacy
Bunk suffered from a stroke in late 1948 and died in New Iberia the following year.
Jazz fans and historians still debate Bunk's legacy, and the extent to which his colorful reminiscences of his early career were accurate, misremembered, exaggerated, or untrue.
The majority of his recordings remain in print on CD reissues, and his playing is an important influence on many contemporary traditional jazz musicians. Johnson plays a small, but significant, role in Alan Schroeder's picture book "Satchmo's Blues." In that book, Johnson serves as a source of musical inspiration to the young Louis Armstrong.
Read more about this topic: Bunk Johnson
Famous quotes containing the words death and/or legacy:
“The dignity to be sought in death is the appreciation by others of what one has been in life,... that proceeds from a life well lived and from the acceptance of one’s own death as a necessary process of nature.... It is also the recognition that the real event taking place at the end of our life is our death, not the attempts to prevent it.”
—Sherwin B. Nuland (b. 1930)
“What is popularly called fame is nothing but an empty name and a legacy from paganism.”
—Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536)