On November 8, 1983 pianist James Carroll Booker III was wheeled into New Orleans' Charity Hospital waiting room, where he died while awaiting medical attention. Rumors have spread through the years of a cocaine overdose, but there is no mention in the autopsy of this drug in his system; it seems that after years of brutal abuse, his body simply gave out.

It's hard to believe that Booker has been dead for I2 1/2 years. While more popular now than in 1983, h...