Which musicians are in the ’27 Club’?
The so-called ’27 Club’ is one of the strangest phenomena in pop culture. Maybe it speaks to our morbid fascination with those tragically taken from the world far too soon, our need to glorify the dead in order to preserve their legacy, or simply a more general fixation with death.
In any case, the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse are given pride of place in an exclusive club, to which only notable people who’ve passed away at the age of 27 gain access. There are members of the 27 Club who weren’t famous musicians, such as war poet Rupert Brooke, King Ghazi of Iraq and Star Trek actor Anton Yelchin. But over three-quarters of its membership are popular music artists.
This statistic reflects a number of things. First of all, the idea of a so-called “club” of artists dead at 27 was first applied specifically to musicians alone. In fact, Kurt Cobain’s mother, Wendy Cobain O’Connor, is said to have coined the term by accident following the suicide of the Nirvana singer when she told her local newspaper, The Daily World, “Now he’s gone and joined that stupid club”.
Secondly, because their primary focus is deceased musicians, those who have an obsessive interest in revering the dead haven’t necessarily looked into every instance of an artist who died at 27 outside the world of music. There could be more historical examples of visual artists, writers, and filmmakers who fall into this category, but they haven’t been marked out accordingly.
Lastly, the sheer number of 27-year-old rock stars who have kicked the bucket demonstrates that the rock and roll lifestyle led by many musicians really does take its toll. We see a noticeable increase in the late 1960s and into the 1970s, coinciding with the proliferation of hard drugs and bohemian living among musicians who emerged during that time.
Between 1969 and 1973, Rolling Stones founder Brian Jones, Canned Heat bandleader Alan ‘Blind Owl’ Wilson, Hendrix, Joplin, Doors singer Morrison and the Grateful Dead’s Ron ‘Pigpen’ McKernan all died under circumstances directly caused by drugs or alcohol abuse. But while these tragedies represent the height of rock and roll excess, they weren’t the beginning of the 27 Club.
So, who started the club?
Almost a decade before the tragedies which befell several of psychedelic rock’s foremost pioneers, there was a cluster of deaths at 27 among trailblazers of R&B and soul in the late 1950s. R&B songwriter Jesse Belvin, celebrated for his 1954 doo-wop composition ‘Earth Angel’, was killed in a car crash under suspicious circumstances in 1960. Within the next four years, Drifters lead singer Rudy Lewis and gospel singer Joe Henderson both died at the same age.
Yet it’s blues singer and songwriter who lived decades before these deaths that’s widely considered the first member of the 27 Club. Not least because of the mystery surrounding how he died. Robert Johnson died on August 16th, 1938, with no official cause of death recorded. He left behind recordings of just 29 songs from a nine-month period near the end of his life, but these have gone on to be some of the most influential recordings in the history of modern music.
Still, even Johnson wasn’t the very first 27 Club member, chronologically speaking. Brazilian pianist and composer Alexandre Levy, who was one of the leading lights in a movement to combine Brazilian folk music with the European classical tradition, died in his 28th year on January 17th, 1892. His cause of death remains unknown. But his life’s work is a cause for celebration, particularly given its influence on modern forms of Brazilian samba and milonga, which helped create the genres of bossa nova, tropicalismo and música popular brasileira.
If historical records extended even further back than they do, we’d likely find other inspirational musicians who died at this regrettably early age. For now, though, the list of names in the club is more than long enough as it is. And surely time is better spent enjoying the music of a lifetime than emphasising a seemingly random number associated with a death.
The full list of musicians in the 27 Club:
- Dave Alexander
- Chris Austin
- Alexander Bashlachev
- Jean-Michel Basquiat
- Chris Bell
- Jesse Belvin
- Nicole Bogner
- D. Boon
- Rodrigo Bueno
- Cecilia
- Amar Singh Chamkila
- Louis Chauvin
- Arlester “Dyke” Christian
- Kurt Cobain
- Pamela Courson
- Jack Dakin
- Zenon De Fleur
- Pete de Freitas
- Finbarr Donnelly
- Roger Lee Durham
- Richey Edwards
- Valentín Elizalde
- Andrés Escobar
- Fat Pat
- Thomas Fekete
- Julián Figueroa
- Orish Grinstead
- Malcolm Hale
- Pete Ham
- Leslie Harvey
- Joe Henderson
- Jimi Hendrix
- Nat Jaffe
- Robert Johnson
- Brian Jones
- Kim Jong-hyun
- Janis Joplin
- Kami
- Murda Killa
- Helmut Köllen
- Kris Leonard
- Alexandre Levy
- Rudy Lewis
- Tomas Lowe
- Sean Patrick McCabe
- Ron “Pigpen” McKernan
- MohBad
- Damien “Damo” Morris
- Jim Morrison
- Bryan Ottoson
- André Paiement
- Kristen Pfaff
- Dickie Pride
- River Reeves
- Fredo Santana
- María Serrano Serrano
- Shot
- Stretch
- Freaky Tah
- Gary Thain
- Richard Turner
- Dimitar Voev
- Walkie
- Jeremy Ward
- Alan “Blind Owl” Wilson
- Amy Winehouse
- Wallace “Wally” Yohn
- Yung Trappa
Mia Zapata
