Hey, it's Alan, and I just wanted to let you know that you can now listen to the ongoing

history of new music early and ad-free on Amazon music, included with Prime. You would think

that being a musician would be a very safe existence. Well, relatively safe. I mean, your job is to

write and perform music. And yeah, you might get into the altercation and fight, but it's not like you're going to war, right?

Yet every once in a while, we hear about a musician being murdered.

The earliest example I can find is Alessandro Stradella.

He was an Italian composer of classical music.

And back in his day, which was the mid-1600s, he was

quite the star and very influential with his six operas, 170 cantatas, and a long list of

instrumental compositions. But then, on February 25, 1682, he was found stabbed to death in a public

square in Genoa.

No one was ever convicted, although the story is that he was murdered by one of three brothers who accused Tradella of seducing their sister.

The first musician I know of who got shot was Pine Top Smith, a boogie-woogie piano player

from Chicago. In 1929, just as he was about to go, a boogie-woogie piano player from Chicago.

In 1929, just as he was about to go into a recording session, he was shot during a fight at a dance hall.

He might not have been the intended victim, but he died all the same.

And the first musician of the rock and roll era to be murdered was probably Sam Cook on December 11th,

1964. Fantastic soul singer. He took a gunshot wound to the chest when Bertha Franklin,

the manager of the Hacienda Motel in South Central Los Angeles, said he attacked her. She said it

was in self-defense, but even today,

there are a lot of questions about the case.

How many other rock musicians have been murdered since then?

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