Saturday obits

Jerry Ragovoy, song writer extraordinaire.

Mr. Ragovoy’s songs had a wrenching emotional quality that perfectly matched Joplin’s no-hold’s-barred approach to the blues. “Piece of My Heart,” a Berns collaboration originally recorded in 1967 by Erma Franklin, Aretha Franklin’s older sister, became the standout single from the 1968 album “Cheap Thrills,” which Joplin recorded with Big Brother & the Holding Company.

Joplin recorded “Try (Just a Little Harder),” a collaboration between Mr. Ragovoy and Chip Taylor, on her first solo album, “I Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues Again Mama!” Her last album, “Pearl,” included three Ragovoy songs: “My Baby,” “Get It While You Can” and “Cry Baby.” But she died, in October 1970, before she could record a song that Mr. Ragovoy, with Jenny Dean, wrote specifically for her, “I’m Gonna Rock My Way to Heaven.”

Travis Bean, the machinist whose guitars blew Jerry away.

From 1974 to 1979 Mr. Bean and his partners made unadorned electric guitars and basses that had an uncanny ability to sustain notes and a richness of tone that some likened to that of a piano or harp. The instruments — 3,650 in several models were made — have been used in virtually every genre of popular music.

But the guitar’s legend owes most to the rock star who owned four of them, Jerry Garcia, the leader of the Grateful Dead. A man who identified himself only as Paul on one of the many blogs that discussed Mr. Bean’s death told of being in a guitar store in Palo Alto, Calif., in the 1970s when Mr. Garcia came in. A clerk asked him to check out a newly arrived Travis Bean guitar.

“Jeez, another weird guitar,” Mr. Garcia marveled, proceeding to dig into his pocket for checks he had never cashed from past gigs to pay for the purchase.