John Houghtaling, an inventor whose best-known product shook postwar America, or at least those Americans who stayed overnight in midprice motels, died on Wednesday at his home in Fort Pierce, Fla. Mr. Houghtaling, the inventor of the Magic Fingers Vibrating Bed, was 92.

The cause was complications of a recent fall, his son Paul said.

Developed in 1958 in Mr. Houghtaling’s basement, Magic Fingers was a ubiquitous presence in the roadside America of the 1960s and ’70s. Installed on millions of beds in hotels and motels across the country, it featured a mechanical vibrator attached to the box spring, and a coin meter attached to the vibrator. Activated, “Magic Fingers quickly carries you into the land of tingling relaxation and ease,” as a label on the device proclaimed.

Operation was simple. The weary traveler dropped a quarter into the meter, and the mattress surged to life. Fifteen minutes later, when the shaking stopped, the user could either drop off to sleep or pay for another tremulous round.

“While the vibrators offer a pleasing sensation similar to weightlessness, no special medical or therapeutic value is claimed,” The New York Times reported in 1963. “It is said, though, that they are of aid in getting to sleep.”

Combining the thrill of a carnival ride with the pleasure of what could be accomplished, sleeping or waking, on a motel bed, Magic Fingers has insinuated itself into the consciousness of a great many Americans over 40. It has cropped up in a spate of movies, television shows and popular songs, including “This Hotel Room,” by Steve Goodman, in which Jimmy Buffett sang: “Put in a quarter / Turn out the light / Magic Fingers makes you feel all right.”

John Joseph Houghtaling was born on Nov. 14, 1916, in Kansas City, Mo. (The family name is pronounced HUFF-tay-ling.) After high school, he held a series of jobs, among them hotel bellman, cookware salesman and a salesman of a remote-control lawnmower.

The earliest vibrating beds predated the Industrial Revolution and were powered by household servants. Then came steam power, and after that, electricity. Mr. Houghtaling’s great innovation was to separate the motor from the bed.

In the late 1950s, Mr. Houghtaling was working as a salesman for a vibrating-bed company. Its product, which combined motor and mattress in one integrated unit, was expensive and unwieldy. What was more, as he said in interviews afterward, it broke down frequently.

Tinkering in the basement of his home in Glen Rock, N.J., Mr. Houghtaling tested 300 motors before hitting on one that was light, unobtrusive and made the bed tingle at just the right frequency. At the company’s height in the mid- to late 1970s, Paul Houghtaling said, more than a million Magic Fingers devices were in use in hotels, motels and private homes in the United States and Europe.

Mr. Houghtaling’s first marriage, to Ruth Donovan, ended in divorce; his second wife, Rita Breier, died before him. He is survived by four sons, John, Mark, Paul and Chris, and a daughter, Alison Lincoln, all from his first marriage; and four grandchildren. Most of Mr. Houghtaling’s children have Magic Fingers in their homes, Paul Houghtaling said in an interview on Friday.

By the early 1980s, Magic Fingers had begun to fall out of favor with hotel owners. By the standards of late-20th-century in-room entertainment, the device seemed quaint. There was also the matter of guests breaking into the coin meters and stealing the quarters, something they did often.

Mr. Houghtaling retired in the 1980s, after selling the rights to the Magic Fingers name. Today, the device is marketed by its current owners for home use.

The Magic Fingers Vibrating Bed can still be found in a handful of steadfast motels, mostly in the American West. There, the faithful check in and take to their beds, rolls of quarters in hand.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Ali Akbar Khan, the foremost virtuoso of the lutelike sarod, whose dazzling technique and gift for melodic invention, often on display in concert with his brother-in-law Ravi Shankar, helped popularize North Indian classical music in the West, died on Thursday at his home in San Anselmo, Calif. He was 87.

The cause was kidney failure, said a spokesman for the Ali Akbar College of Music.

Mr. Khan, who was named a national treasure by the Indian government in 1989, carried on the musical traditions of his father, Allauddin Khan, whose ashram in East Bengal produced some of India’s most celebrated musicians, notably Mr. Shankar, the flutist Pannalal Ghosh and the sitarist Nikhil Banerjee.

Unlike his father, a volatile and uneven performer, Mr. Khan maintained an austere demeanor onstage while coaxing passages of extraordinary intensity from his sarod, an instrument with 25 strings, 10 plucked with a piece of coconut shell while the remainder resonate sympathetically.

“He was not as flashy as Ravi Shankar, but he had the ability to play a single note, or a simple passage of notes, and draw out such amazing depth,” said John Schaefer, the host of “New Sounds” and “Soundcheck” on WNYC-FM in New York. “That’s why he was able to get a world of emotion and color out of ‘Malasri,’ which is often called a three-note raga. That, for me, stands as the calling card of the genius of Ali Khan.”

The violinist Yehudi Menuhin, who brought Mr. Khan to the United States in 1955, called him “an absolute genius” and “the greatest musician in the world.”

In 1971, Mr. Khan performed at Madison Square Garden with Mr. Shankar, Alla Rakha and Kamala Chakravarty on a bill with Bob Dylan,Eric Clapton and other rock stars at the Concert for Bangladesh, a benefit organized by George Harrison and Mr. Shankar. The album and film of the two performances gave added exposure to Mr. Khan and North Indian music.

Mr. Khan, whose name is often preceded by the honorific Ustad, or master, was born in Shibpur, a small village in Bengal (now Bangladesh). He grew up in Maihar, where his father was the principal musician in the court of the maharajah. He began vocal training at 3 and, after studying the surbahar, sitar and tabla, focused on the sarod.

His father was a stern, sometimes brutal taskmaster, rousing his young son at dawn for several hours of practice before breakfast and continuing well into the evening of what were often 18-hour days. Allauddin Khan had elevated the status of instrumental music, previously regarded as inferior to vocal performance, by synthesizing various regional styles into a modern concert style. His son absorbed his encyclopedic knowledge of North Indian music and eventually outstripped him as an instrumentalist.

Mr. Khan’s younger sister, Annapurna Devi, who later married Mr. Shankar, developed into an equally accomplished master of the surbahar, but custom prevented her from performing in public.

At 13, Mr. Khan performed for a large audience for the first time, at a music conference in the holy city of Allahabad. By his early 20s he was music director of All-India Radio in Lucknow, broadcasting as a solo artist and composing for the radio’s orchestra.

“My father’s main purpose was to hear me play while he was living in Maihar, because I was always being broadcast,” Mr. Khan told Peter Lavezzoli, the author of “The Dawn of Indian Music in the West.” “If I played anything wrong, he would come the next day to Lucknow, straight from the train station, tell me to get my sarod and listen to me play and correct me.”

For part of a series of 78s that he recorded in Lucknow for HMV in 1945, he composed and performed the three-minute Raga Chandranandan (“Moonstruck”), a blend of four evening ragas, which became a national hit and a signature piece for Mr. Khan. He later recorded a 22-minute version for the album “Master Musician of India” on the Connoisseur label.

After a few years Mr. Khan left Lucknow to become the court musician for the maharajah of Jodhpur. He performed, often for hours at a time; gave lessons; and composed for the court orchestra. The post vanished after the maharajah died in a plane crash in 1948, and before long the chaos surrounding independence and partition put an end to the court system, which was already in decline.

Defying his father, Mr. Khan moved to Bombay and began writing scores for films, including Chetan Anand’s “Aandhiyan” (1952), Satyajit Ray’s “Devi” (1960) and Tapan Sinha’s “Hungry Stones” (1960). His father, a friend of the director of “Hungry Stones,” went to see the film and said: “My goodness, who composed the music? He is great.” On being informed that it was his son, the elder Khan sent a telegram of forgiveness.

By this time the younger Khan had grown frustrated with the limitations of film work and was eager to return to classical music, though he later composed the scores for “The Householder” (1963), the first Ismail Merchant-James Ivory feature film, and Bernardo Bertolucci’s “Little Buddha” (1993). His collaboration with Ray, in particular, had been less than satisfactory. “Ray was not a connoisseur of Indian classical music,” he told The Times of India in 2008.

Intent on exposing Westerners to Asian music, Menuhin brought Mr. Khan to New York in 1955 for a performance at the Museum of Modern Art, where Mr. Khan made what is believed to be the first long-playing record of Indian classical music in the United States, “Music of India: Morning and Evening Ragas,” for Angel. He scored another first when he performed on Alistair Cooke’s television program “Omnibus.”

Western interest in Indian music soared after Harrison took up the sitar and Mr. Shankar began touring Europe and the United States. In 1967 Mr. Khan, who had founded a music school in Calcutta in 1956, started the Ali Akbar College of Music, now in San Rafael, Calif., with a satellite school in Basel, Switzerland. “Two or three generations of really fine Indian players — meaning performers of Indian classical music — have come out of that school,” Mr. Schaefer said.

Mr. Khan is survived by his wife, Mary; seven sons, including Aashish, a renowned sarod player; and four daughters. In 1989 he was awarded the Padma Vibhushan, India’s second-highest civilian honor, and in 1991 he became the first Indian musician to receive aMacArthur Foundation “genius grant.”

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Frank Davis and his Louisiana Jazz Band were booked to play at the Rice Hotel in Houston in 1925. The banjo player never showed. For Huey Long, who shined shoes outside the hotel and occasionally got onstage to announce the bands, this was the unmistakable sound of opportunity knocking. Putting down his ukulele, he ran out to a music store, got a banjo on credit and stepped into the breach.

And so began an 80-year career in jazz and popular music. For the rest of the century Mr. Long, who took up the guitar in 1933, performed with an extensive list of greats in a journey that began with Dixieland, moved into swing and jumped forward to bebop. Along the way, he spent nine months in 1945 as a guitarist and singer with the Ink Spots, the enormously popular and influential vocal quartet that paved the way for rhythm and blues and rock ’n’ roll.

He died on Wednesday in Houston, the last surviving Ink Spot from the days when the group still had some of its original members. He was 105.

The death was confirmed by his daughter, Anita Long.

On the extended timeline of Mr. Long’s career, his tenure with the Ink Spots takes up no more than a couple of inches, but he joined the group in its heyday. In early 1945, while playing with his own trio at the Three Deuces on 52nd Street in Manhattan, he was approached by Bill Kenny, one of the earliest Ink Spots and the group’s signature voice. Kenny wanted him to replace their guitarist, Bernie Mackey, who was filling in for Charlie Fuqua, an original member who was doing military service.

In late March Mr. Long, providing guitar accompaniment and vocal support, appeared as an Ink Spot at Detroit’s Paradise Theater. He also recorded several songs with the group, including “I’m Gonna Turn Off the Teardrops,” “I’ll Lose a Friend Tomorrow,” “The Sweetest Dream” and “Just for Me.”

When Mr. Fuqua reappeared unexpectedly in October, Mr. Long was suddenly an ex-Ink Spot. But his career rolled on.

Mr. Long was born in Sealy, Tex., a farm town about 20 miles west of Houston. His brother Sam played ragtime piano, and Huey picked up the chords on his ukulele. After he finished his adventure with the Louisiana Jazz Band, a visiting aunt took him back to Chicago, intent on getting him some music lessons and starting him out in nightclubs.

In 1933 he switched to guitar to perform with Texas Guinan’s Cuban Orchestra at the World’s Fair in Chicago. The city was a hotbed of jazz, and Mr. Long, who developed a deft hand at constructing chordal solos, found himself in demand as a studio musician. In 1935 and 1936 he recorded sessions for Decca Records with the pianist Richard M. Jones’s Jazz Wizards and the pianist Lil Armstrong and Her Swing Orchestra, including her signature tune, “Just for a Thrill.” He went on to perform and do arrangements for the trumpeter Zilner Randolph’s W.P.A. Concert and Swing Band.

It was a colorful period. “If you were an entertainer in Chicago, you worked for the gangsters,” he told The Journal of Longevity in 2006. “After midnight they would close a club to the public for a party. Generous and friendly, they threw large bills on the stage as some sort of status symbol. When they left, you counted it, and it was always more than enough.”

Fletcher Henderson hired Mr. Long to play with his orchestra at the Grand Terrace Cafe and later took him to New York, where the simmering bebop movement propelled Mr. Long into a new phase. He joined the pianist Earl Hines’s orchestra and performed with emerging stars like Billy Eckstine, Sarah Vaughan, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie before forming his own trio and then taking a detour with the Ink Spots.

After playing with the saxophonist Eddie (Lockjaw) Davis’s Be-Boppers, he formed a new trio of his own and entertained American troops in Korea and Japan as part of a U.S.O. tour.

Mr. Long briefly attended Los Angeles City College in pursuit of a teaching certificate but grew homesick and returned to New York. The Ink Spots, in the meantime, had broken up, spawning a host of groups using the name, some with no connection to the original group. In the early 1960s Mr. Long formed his own version of the Ink Spots and performed with them in California for two years before returning to New York, where he set up a teaching studio in an apartment in the CBS Building. The studio developed into a small school, which he moved to Broadway and 52nd Street.

In 1996 Mr. Long returned to Houston, where in 2007 his daughter started the Ink Spots Museum across the street from his apartment. In addition to his daughter, Anita Long of Houston, he is survived by two sons, Rene and Shiloh, both of San Jose, Calif.; and seven grandchildren.

At his death Mr. Long was compiling what his daughter described as a musical dictionary, a compilation of the chord melodies he developed over the years. It helped tune out unwelcome developments in popular music.

“Music is defined as sound vibrations that are picked up by the ear,” he told The Journal of Longevity, diplomatically. “The music of today has sound and vibrations — heavy on the rhythm.”

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

When Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band performed at the Izod Center in the New Jersey Meadowlands on May 21, there was one musician conspicuously absent: Max Weinberg, the group’s drummer for more than three decades.

As Mr. Springsteen tore into his opening number, “Badlands,” Mr. Weinberg was on another stage 3,000 miles away, pounding his drum kit through a dress rehearsal of “The Tonight Show With Conan O’Brien,” in advance of its debut last Monday on NBC. The following night Mr. Weinberg boarded a red eye for the East Coast so he could rejoin his E Street band mates, however temporarily, for the second show of that New Jersey stand, which fell on a rare night off from his new duties.

For Mr. Weinberg and the seven other East Coast musicians who have relocated to California along with Mr. O’Brien — including all the founding members of the Max Weinberg 7, the house band on Mr. O’Brien’s “Late Night” for 16 years — the turnover in hosts (and bands) on “Tonight” has proved to be both exhilarating and disruptive.

No one has had to make a more prominent transition than Mr. Weinberg, who was replaced that first night in New Jersey by his son, Jay, 18, who is also substituting for his father on at least the first seven dates that Mr. Springsteen is playing in Europe, on a leg of the tour that began last Saturday in the Netherlands. While Mr. O’Brien and NBC had previously permitted Mr. Weinberg to take leaves of absence from “Late Night” for as many as six months to tour with Mr. Springsteen, the opening weeks of “Tonight” were ultimately deemed too important for him to miss.

Which is not to say that Mr. Weinberg, 58, is complaining.

“I can’t tell you what a thrill it is to be the bandleader on ‘The Tonight Show,’ “ Mr. Weinberg said last Thursday night, speaking by phone from Universal Studios in Los Angeles following yet another dress rehearsal. “I have this sort of dual-sided musical personality, and an ability to just go where the music takes me.”

“When I play with Bruce, I grow my hair long,” he added. “And as soon as I am back on TV, I cut it off.”

For longtime viewers of “Late Night,” the presence of Mr. Weinberg — along with other familiar faces like the trombone player Richie Rosenberg, better known as La Bamba, and Jimmy Vivino, the guitarist — is like having the same band play one’s bar mitzvah and wedding. Even the original “Late Night” theme has made the trip to Mr. O’Brien’s new time zone and time slot.

Renamed Max Weinberg & the Tonight Show Band (the better to accommodate an eighth member, the percussionist James Wormworth), the ensemble ranges from rock to soul to Broadway to the blues. During Monday night’s program, the band played something quasi-Middle-Eastern as Will Ferrell was carried onstage by attendants as if he were a pharaoh, and later accompanied him on the Jackson 5 hit “Never Can Say Goodbye.” (The joke was that Mr. O’Brien’s first show might be his last.)

But the band’s most profound influences (and deepest roots) are in and around the overheated, beer-splattered clubs of the Jersey shore: Mr. Rosenberg and Mark Pender, the trumpet player, are longtime members of Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes; Mr. Vivino and his older brother Jerry, the “Tonight” saxophonist, were, as children, part of a family dance team that played the Atlantic City Boardwalk; and Mr. Weinberg, who grew up in Newark and South Orange, still lives primarily on a farm in Monmouth County.

“You pretty much have to be from New Jersey or Philly to be in the band,” said Jimmy Vivino, the first musician Mr. Weinberg phoned in 1993, after a chance meeting with Mr. O’Brien on a Manhattan street corner set in motion the chain of events that led to his getting the “Late Night” bandleader’s gig.

Apropos of each band member’s one or two degrees of separation from Mr. Springsteen, Mr. Weinberg reached Mr. Vivino on that fateful day at the Santa Monica home of Clarence Clemons, Mr. Springsteen’s longtime saxophonist.

Mr. Vivino is among the Tonight Show Band musicians who has upended his life to accommodate his new, higher-profile gig. For now, at least, his 8-year-old son will remain at home, in Rockland County, New York, so that he can continue to attend the same school.

“I can’t disrupt his life at this point,” Mr. Vivino said, speaking from Los Angeles. “It’s too early in the game.”

Mr. Vivino intends to travel to and from the West Coast regularly. One night last month, for example, he arrived home long enough to give his boy a kiss, and then drove more than an hour to Woodstock. He did so to keep a semiregular gig playing guitar at one of the occasional “Midnight Rambles” staged by Levon Helm, the former drummer for the Band, in his barn.

By contrast, Mr. Rosenberg — long known to “Late Night” viewers for his spooky singing on the show’s “In the Year 2000” bits (now updated to 3000) — is relocating to the West Coast with his entire family, which includes five children whose ages range from 6 to 20.

“It’s a huge transition for us,” he said. And not just personally.

“If Bruce” — as in Mr. Springsteen — “were to call us to record some horns or what not, we’ll try our best,” Mr. Rosenberg said the other day, by phone from California. “But this is the No. 1 priority right here.”

Mr. Rosenberg said he would continue to appear as time permitted alongside Southside Johnny Lyon, including on some projects “outside of the Juke world.”

And what of Mr. Weinberg, who already had a home in Southern California?

He said that before he set his sights on becoming a rock drummer, he had dreamed of being the “Tonight Show” drummer. For pointers, he said he’d recently been in contact with Doc Severinsen, the trumpeter who led Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show” orchestra and who now lives in Mexico.

Mr. Weinberg said he planned to reunite with the E Street Band onstage in Europe from July 27 until Aug. 2, when he said he was planning his first leave from “Tonight.”

Asked if he felt even the slightest rivalry with his son — whose pounding, arm-swinging style had already emerged as a fan favorite as his role grew before that New Jersey show — the elder Mr. Weinberg said no.

“It’s total pure love and pride,” he said. “It’s indescribable.”

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Sam Butera, whose tenor saxophone provided a raucous counterpoint to Louis Prima’s frenzied “jump, jive and wail” vocals for two decades and who was later a successful bandleader in his own right, died on Wednesday in Las Vegas. He was 81.

The cause was pneumonia, his daughter Cheryl told The Associated Press.

Singing and clowning over a driving shuffle beat, Prima and his wife, the singer Keely Smith, became one of Las Vegas’s biggest attractions in the 1950s with a crowd-pleasing mixture of jazz, rhythm and blues, and pure showmanship. Mr. Butera’s high-energy saxophone soloswere an essential element of Prima’s success, as were the many arrangements that Mr. Butera wrote for the band.

Sam Butera was born in New Orleans on Aug. 17, 1927. His father, Joseph, was an amateur musician who made his living as a butcher and encouraged young Sam’s interest in music.

Mr. Butera began studying saxophone when he was 7 and became a professional musician at 14, playing in a strip club on Bourbon Street. At 19 he won a talent contest sponsored by Look magazine, which led to an appearance with other winners from around the country atCarnegie Hall.

After working with the big bands of Ray McKinley, Tommy Dorsey and others, he formed his own group and began a four-year residency at the 500 Club in New Orleans. He was hired by Prima, a fellow New Orleans native, in December 1954 and put together a band, the Witnesses, to back Prima at the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas.

Mr. Butera and the Witnesses continued to work with Prima, in Las Vegas and later in New Orleans, until Prima fell into a coma after undergoing brain surgery in 1975. He died in 1978.

In the late 1970s, Mr. Butera stepped into the spotlight. Doing as much singing as playing, he led a band that performed songs from the Prima repertory and frequently accompanied Ms. Smith, who had divorced Prima in 1961. He retired in 2004.

Mr. Butera’s survivors include his wife, Vera; two daughters, Cheryl and Diane; two sons, Sam Jr. and Nick; eight grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.

Among Mr. Butera’s best-known arrangements was the medley of “Just a Gigolo” and “I Ain’t Got Nobody” that was a hit for the Prima-Smith team in 1956. To Mr. Butera’s chagrin, it became an even bigger hit for the rock singer David Lee Roth three decades later.

“He copied my arrangement note for note, and I didn’t get a dime for it,” Mr. Butera told The New York Times in 1997. “But there wasn’t an act in Atlantic City or Las Vegas that would do that song, out of respect for me.”

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

CHICAGO (AP) -- Koko Taylor, a sharecropper's daughter whose regal bearing and powerful voice earned her the sobriquet "Queen of the Blues," has died after complications from surgery. She was 80.

Taylor died Wednesday at Northwestern Memorial Hospital about two weeks after having surgery for a gastrointestinal bleed, said Marc Lipkin, director of publicity for her record label, Alligator Records, which made the announcement.

The break for Tennessee-born Taylor came in 1962, when arranger/composer Willie Dixon, impressed by her voice, got her a Chess recording contract and produced several singles (and two albums) for her, including the million-selling 1965 hit, "Wang Dang Doodle," which she called silly, but which launched her recording career.

From Chicago blues clubs, Taylor took her raucous, gritty, good-time blues on the road to blues and jazz festivals around the nation, and into Europe. After the Chess label folded, she signed with Alligator Records.

In most years, she performed at least 100 concerts a year.

"Blues is my life," Taylor once said. "It's a true feeling that comes from the heart, not something that just comes out of my mouth. Blues is what I love, and blues is what I always do."

Taylor appeared on national television numerous times, and was the subject of a PBS documentary and had a small part in director David Lynch's "Wild at Heart."

In the course of her more than 40-year career, Taylor was nominated seven times for Grammy awards and won in 1984.

Born Cora Walton just outside Memphis, Tenn., Taylor said her dream to become a blues singer was nurtured in the cotton fields outside her family's sharecropper shack.

"I used to listen to the radio, and when I was about 18 years old, B.B. King was a disc jockey and he had a radio program, 15 minutes a day, over in West Memphis, Arkansas and he would play the blues," she said in a 1990 interview. "I would hear different records and things by Muddy Waters, Bessie Smith, Memphis Minnie, Sonnyboy Williams and all these people, you know, which I just loved."

Although her father encouraged her to sing only gospel music, Cora and her siblings would sneak out back with their homemade instruments and play the blues. With one brother accompanying on a guitar made out of bailing wire and nails and one brother on a fife made out of a corncob, she began on the path to blues woman.

Orphaned at 11, Koko -- a nickname she earned because of an early love of chocolate -- at age 18 moved to Chicago with her soon-to-be-husband, the late Robert "Pops" Taylor, in search for work.

Setting up house on the South Side, Koko found work as a cleaning woman for a wealthy family living in the city's northern suburbs. At night and on weekends, she and her husband frequented Chicago's clubs, where many the artists heard on the radio performed.

"I started going to these local clubs, me and my husband, and everybody got to know us," Taylor said. "And then the guys would start letting me sit in, you know, come up on the bandstand and do a tune."

In addition to performing, she operated a Chicago nightclub, which closed in November 2001 because her daughter, club manager Joyce Threatt, developed severe asthma and could no longer manage a smoky nightclub.

The video clip below was ripped from The American Folks Blues Festival series of DVDs produced by Reelin' In The Years Productions.  If you like this clip, you'll enjoy each of the wonderful volumes from this set. For more info go to:

REELIN' IN THE YEARS PRODUCTIONS - DVDs 

“It has been a long time since any of us boys have seen a woman, so we are writing to you in hopes that you’ll help us out of our situation,” Cpl. Frank J. Gizych lamented in a letter posted from the fog-shrouded Aleutian Islands. “Since we know that it’s impossible to see a woman in the flesh, we would appreciate it very much if you could send us a photo of yourself.”

It was July 1944, and America was at war. From bases and battlefields in Europe and on Pacific islands, soldiers, sailors and airmen were sending streams of letters to their favorite actresses in Hollywood, asking for pinup photos and commenting on life on the front lines.

Almost all of that mail, which studios usually answered with a glossy shot showing the star in a saucy pose, has been lost. But the actressDonna Reed, later famous for her roles as Mary Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life” and the middle-class housewife Donna Stone on “The Donna Reed Show” and who won an Oscar for “From Here to Eternity,” saved some of the correspondence. After nearly 65 years in a shoebox inside an old trunk long stored in the garage of her home in Beverly Hills, Calif., the letters have at last been read and made public by the actress’s children. Ms. Reed died in 1986 at age 64.

“Mom never mentioned them,” said Mary Owen, 52, the youngest of the four. She added, “I had no idea she was such an important symbol to these guys.”

The United States military encouraged the pinup phenomenon as a way to maintain the morale of soldiers far from home. Most of the leading pinups were established stars known for their sex appeal, in particular Betty Grable, blond hair piled high, poured into a swimsuit and photographed from behind, her face turned toward the camera with a smile. There were others: images of Rita Hayworth, Ann Sheridan, Hedy Lamarr and Dorothy Lamour also adorned lockers, barracks walls and the noses of military aircraft.

But “Donna Reed probably came closer than any other actress to being the archetypal sweetheart, wife and mother,” said Jay Fultz, author of the 1998 biography “In Search of Donna Reed.” Since she was also slightly younger, newly graduated from ingénue roles and therefore closer in age to the average fighting man, they often wrote to her as if to a sister or the girl next door, confiding moments of homesickness, loneliness, privation and anxiety.

All told, Ms. Reed held on to 341 letters, some typed but many written in the kind of elegant Palmer method cursive script rarely seen today. Taken as a whole, the correspondence offers a candid glimpse of a vanished era, a time when six hard-bitten Marine sergeants could write that “we think you’re swell” and mean it in something other than an ironic sense.

“The boys in our outfit,” Sgt. William F. Love wrote on Aug. 18, 1944, from the jungles of New Guinea “think you are a typical American girl, someone who we would like to come home to!!!!!” On March 28, 1944, Sgt. John C. Dale of Tennessee, a tail gunner on a B-17, told Ms. Reed, then 23, that he wanted her “to be the girl back home that I am fighting for.”

Cpl. Bob Bowie wrote of how seeing Ms. Reed in “The Human Comedy” made him long to be back home in Los Angeles and wishing “I could see my Mom.” He added: “I don’t know how it affected the other fellows, we never discuss our feelings with one another.”

The letters have been cataloged by Ms. Owen. She lives in New York City and worked at Bear Stearns until after its collapse last year. In subsequent months, she opened the shoebox and began to explore the letters to her mother, some of which were accompanied by doodles, cartoons or photographs of the writers.

Reading them “made me feel really proud,” said Ms. Owen, who made the letters available to The New York Times. “At home, she tried to be a mom and not a celebrity, so she didn’t really talk much about her film career or her part in the war effort.”

Ms. Reed, originally named Donnabelle Mullenger, was born and raised on a farm near Denison, Iowa. A disproportionate number of the letters she saved were written by servicemen from her home state, including one who knew her growing up.

“Sometimes I wish I was back there with the old gang, able to go the usual rounds of the week,” Gordon Clausen wrote from the U.S.S. Simpson on April 8, 1945. “Occasionally I will sit on the fantail and look at the moon, wondering how many of our old friends were doing the same.”

Hindsight makes some of the letters exceptionally poignant. Writing from North Africa on “April 12, 1943, I think,” Lt. Norman P. Klinker, a 24-year-old serving in the Army’s 91st Field Artillery Battalion, tried to convey some of the peculiar emotions and atmosphere of combat.

“One thing I promise you — life on the battlefield is a wee bit different from the ‘movie’ version,” he wrote. It is “tough and bloody and dirty,” he explained, “quite an interesting and a heartless life at one and the same time,” but without “that grim and worried feeling so rampant in war pictures.”

On Jan. 6, 1944, Lieutenant Klinker was killed in action in Italy, United States government records show, during his unit’s assault on Mount Porchia, between Naples and Rome. An official history of the battle indicates that his unit was part of a task force “organized at the end of the year for the purpose of taking the ‘suicidal’ objective.” It met with “fanatical resistance” and “artillery and mortar fire of such devastating accuracy that the troops were forced to withdraw.”

Even those letter-writers who survived the war have, for the most part, died. But a small number of her correspondents are alive and can vividly remember their contacts with her.

At 84, Edward Skvarna is retired and living in Covina, Calif. But in 1943, he was fresh out of high school in a mill town near Pittsburgh, newly enlisted in the Army Air Forces and training in Kansas to be a right gunner on a B-29 when he met Ms. Reed at a U.S.O. canteen and asked her to dance.

“I had never danced with a celebrity before, so I felt delighted, privileged even, to meet her,” Mr. Skvarna recalled in a telephone interview this month. “But I really felt she was like a girl from back home. She was from a smaller community, and we were more or less the same age, so I felt she was the kind of person I could talk to.”

Sent to Asia, Mr. Skvarna kept up a sporadic correspondence with her as he flew reconnaissance missions. On May 7, 1945, based in the Marianas, he wrote of receiving a letter of hers that made him “jump with joy” and of a visit he made to a rajah’s palace in India; he also sent photographs of himself and asked for a snapshot of her in return.

“It’s amazing to me that she kept so many of those letters,” Mr. Skvarna said. “It tells you something about the caliber of person she was.”

Gauging the impact that the letters had on Ms. Reed is difficult. “I knew she had feelings about her country and participating as a concerned citizen,” Ms. Owen said. But, she added, her mother did not talk about the letters. Ms. Reed lamented to a female pen pal in 1942 that “my effort to win the war hasn’t amounted to much” and “I wish I could find more to do.”

Later in life, however, Ms. Reed became an ardent antiwar campaigner, serving during the Vietnam era as co-chairwoman of a 285,000-member group called Another Mother for Peace and working for Senator Eugene McCarthy in the 1968 presidential race. In his biography, Mr. Fultz quotes her as saying that “she looked forward to a time when ‘19-year-old boys will no longer be taken away to fight in old men’s battles.’ ”

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Late into their set at the Warner Theater here on a recent Wednesday night, Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer, the members of the comedy music groups Spinal Tap and the Folksmen, put down their guitars and offered to take questions from the audience. “Especially questions that don’t involve the number 11,” Mr. Shearer announced.

Concertgoers began raising their hands and asking the three performers about characters they had portrayed in films and television shows. Was Mr. McKean, who long ago played the goofy greaser Lenny on “Laverne & Shirley,” still friendly with Squiggy? Was that Mr. Guest’s actual motor home that he drove when he played the outdoorsman Harlan Pepper in “Best in Show”?

In a cadaverous deadpan, Mr. Guest replied: “You understand that I was playing a character in a movie. When you see a cowboy in a film, you know that’s not his gun. Or his horse.” Having been collectively zinged, the crowd laughed and cheered in approval.

The purpose of their costume- and character-free tour, which the trio has called “Unwigged & Unplugged” and which comes to the Beacon Theater in Manhattan on Tuesday and Wednesday, was in part to illustrate that Mr. McKean, Mr. Shearer and Mr. Guest are different from their comic alter egos. They are not the folk-music fogies of “A Mighty Wind” or the small-town theater geeks of “Waiting For Guffman.” And they most certainly are not the heavy-metal doofuses they played in the 1984 pseudo-documentary “This is Spinal Tap” and two decades of concerts.

As Mr. Guest said in an interview earlier that day, “You would do a show, and it’s loud, and it’s a thing, and then you’d go to a grown-up restaurant in real clothes. And that’s a necessity, because we aren’t those other people.” The fake bands they have created, which have now lasted far longer than anyone expected, have provided periodic opportunities to play music they wouldn’t normally perform and to pretend to be people they would never be. But the latest of their rare tours underscores that beneath the fright wigs and the stuffed leather trousers they are performers with increasingly divergent lives and careers.

“It’s astonishing to me that they even know one another,” said John Michael Higgins, who has acted with the three in several of Mr. Guest’s films. “But I see them communicate through music. They’ve done it for so long that they don’t need to speak too much. They just pick up their guitars and feel their way around tunes together.”

As Mr. McKean and Mr. Guest, who are both 61, tall and a bit stouter than in their “Spinal Tap” heyday, ambled around Georgetown with Mr. Shearer, who is 65 with slightly stooped posture, it was clear what still united them.

They are inveterate jokers, verbally dexterous and constantly commenting on everything around them, whether they are looking at a sign for a local tuxedo shop (“Do they sell flesh tuxedos?” Mr. McKean asked, referencing the Spinal Tap song “Big Bottom”) or reflecting on their audience at the previous night’s show in Baltimore. (Mr. McKean: “They were insane.” Mr. Guest: “Actually, clinically insane.” Mr. Shearer: “There was this one guy dressed as Napoleon.”)

Among their favorite inside jokes is imitating Larry King as he adds entries to the list of stray observations he maintains on Twitter. (In a throaty, mock-King accent, Mr. McKean declared: “If there’s a better invention than the pulley, I haven’t heard of it.”)

PHOTO by Brandan Hoffman for the NYTimes.  Above, Christopher Guest, Harry Shearer and Michael McKean.

Below, in costume: Harry Shearer, Christopher Guest, Michael McKean.

It was music as much as comedy that first brought them together. As acting students at New York University in the late 1960s Mr. McKean, the son of a record company executive, and Mr. Guest, the son of a British baron and diplomat, bonded over the Gibson ES-335 TD guitars they both owned and their mutual adoration of the blues-rock band the Electric Flag. In 1970 Mr. McKean joined Mr. Shearer, a former child actor, in the Los Angeles radio comedy troupe the Credibility Gap while Mr. Guest worked for the National Lampoon.

In 1979 they were united on “The T.V. Show,” a failed sketch-comedy pilot for ABC that featured the first appearance of Spinal Tap. Five years later that satirical rock band was propelled to cult stardom by “This is Spinal Tap,” the comedy directed by Rob Reiner that is perhaps best remembered for its eminently quotable dialogue. (“You can’t really dust for vomit”; “It’s such a fine line between stupid and clever.”)

Today the band members’ careers seldom intersect: Mr. Shearer is a longtime star of “The Simpsons” and the host of the topical radio satire “Le Show,” as well as an advocate for the restoration of New Orleans, where he lives half the year; Mr. McKean has recently appeared on Broadway in “The Homecoming” and may return in the fall in the Tracy Letts play “Superior Donuts”; and Mr. Guest is now the director of his own ersatz documentaries (plus the occasional commercial for Healthy Choice meals).

Though they consider themselves friends, the three men said that they infrequently spend time together outside their work. “We’ll have dinner occasionally,” Mr. Shearer said, “and Michael will come over, and we’ll just play or something. But we’re radically different people.”

“We don’t go playing golf with Chris, for example,” Mr. McKean added. “And he doesn’t go playing golf with us. It’s win-win.”

But on a handful of occasions they have reunited in the guise of Spinal Tap — on short tours in 1992 and 2001, and at a Live Earth concert in 2007 — sometimes opening for themselves as the Folksmen, the fictional folk band from “A Mighty Wind.” (Audiences didn’t always get the joke. At a 2001 Spinal Tap show at the Beacon Theater some fans vocally objected to an unannounced appearance by the Folksmen. In the crowd Mr. Guest’s son, Tom, then 5 years old, asked when the “old guys” were getting off the stage and the “loud guys” were coming on.)

In 2005, when the Museum of Modern Art held a retrospective of Mr. Guest’s work, Mr. Shearer and Mr. McKean joined him in performance as themselves, setting aside the costumes and the fake British accents of Spinal Tap, and discovered that they enjoyed the freedom.

While the move might be liberating for them, it has also made them vulnerable to fans who misconstrue their un-self-conscious clowning for personal openness. As Mr. Guest was walking to lunch at a Georgetown restaurant, he noticed a man who was preparing to take his photograph. In retaliation Mr. Guest unholstered an iPhone and began taking pictures of his startled admirer, directing him as if at a photo shoot. (“Just stand there like a regular guy. Look up. Up!”) He then darted into the restaurant before he could be photographed in kind.

When people who do not usually spend this much time together are made to travel the country in a cramped tour bus, they are bound to butt heads. Without quite explaining the details of their dispute, Mr. Shearer acknowledged that he and Mr. McKean have had “a running debate on a subject that shall not be mentioned here.”

Mr. McKean replied, “Harry’s life is about 85 percent debate. We just step into them.”

Despite the occasional conflicts the friction among the three men makes them a tighter and more responsive performing group, said Jane Lynch, who frequently appears in Mr. Guest’s comedies.

“You can just tell this is 30 years of friendship, of probably being at each other’s throats just like Spinal Tap,” she said in a telephone interview. “And now they’ve mellowed into their late middle age and they just accept each other. They definitely have that wizened chemistry between them.”

There is another Spinal Tap album on the way (called “Back from the Dead,” to be released on June 16), but the “Unwigged & Unplugged” tour allows its members to push beyond the boundaries of that group.

The live show features jazz and acoustic arrangements of Spinal Tap songs; dramatic readings of lines that NBC censors wanted to cut from a television broadcast of “This is Spinal Tap”; clips of Mr. Shearer, at the age of 9, acting in the biblical epic “The Robe”; and appearances from the comedians’ spouses: Annette O’Toole, Mr. McKean’s wife, sings onstage, and the hands of Jamie Lee Curtis, Mr. Guest’s wife, appear in a video that accompanies the song “Stonehenge.”

Mr. Guest, who does not readily admit to being excited about things, confessed: “I’m having a ball doing this. It’s just us. It really represents everything we do.”

Asked if there was any incongruity inherent in a group of balding men in their 60s still pretending to be wildly coiffed rock stars, Mr. McKean reflected on a fateful appearance he made at a 1979 RV show with David L. Lander, his partner in their Lenny-and-Squiggy days.

At one point “the guy who ran the show pulled us aside and told us: The motto of this world is, ‘Boogie till you puke,’ ” Mr. McKean said. “I thought those were pretty good words to live by.”

Mr. Guest nodded as if he recognized the credo. “Didn’t Bertrand Russell have that on his coat of arms?” he asked.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Buddy Montgomery, a jazz pianist and vibraphonist best known for his work with the guitarist Wes Montgomery, his older brother, died on May 14 at his home in Palmdale, Calif. He was 79.

The cause was a heart attack, said his granddaughter Mykah Montgomery.

Mr. Montgomery and another brother, the bassist Monk Montgomery, were members of Wes Montgomery’s quartet on and off during the 1960s. They first worked with him when he was critically acclaimed but little known outside the jazz world and toured with him again after he made a series of lushly orchestrated albums that cracked the pop charts, although they did not play on those records.

Both Buddy and Monk Montgomery had considerable success before then as members of the Mastersounds, a West Coast quartet that specialized in a quiet, gently swinging brand of modern jazz; Buddy played vibraphone with the group. It made several well-received albums for the Pacific Jazz Label between 1957 and 1961.

After Wes Montgomery’s death in 1968, Buddy became active as a jazz educator and advocate. He founded organizations in Milwaukee, where he lived from 1969 to 1982, and Oakland, Calif., where he lived for most of the 1980s, that offered jazz classes and presented free concerts. (Monk Montgomery, who went on to found the Las Vegas Jazz Society, died in 1982.)

Mr. Montgomery also continued to perform, primarily as a pianist, and led a trio at the Parker Meridien Hotel in New York from 1989 to 1993 before moving back to California.

Buddy Montgomery was born Charles Montgomery on Jan. 30, 1930, in Indianapolis. He began his musical career there before touring as a pianist with the blues singer Big Joe Turner. In 1955, after serving in the Army, he teamed with his brothers and two other Indianapolis musicians to form the Montgomery Johnson Quintet.

PHOTO: Associated Press, via Monterey County Herald. Charles "Buddy" Montgomery plays vibes with the Benny Barth Trio during the Monterey Jazz Festival in 2007.

Over the years Mr. Montgomery recorded several albums as a leader. He also performed or recorded with the singer Marlena Shaw, the saxophonist David (Fathead) Newman and others.

Mr. Montgomery’s first marriage, to Lois Ann Smith, ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, Ann; a sister, Ervena Floyd; two children, David and Charla Montgomery; four grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

LOS ANGELES — Barack Obama was standing on a riser inside a warehouse here, delivering an inspirational speech about the blessings of freedom, when his left index finger began to twitch uncontrollably, unnerving his aides.

The nation’s 44th president was in obvious distress. At least it looked like him. But with silicone skin and a tangled nest of wires for veins, this Obama was a 21st-century reproduction.

More specifically, it was an audio-animatronic representation of the president, as imagined by the Walt Disney Company, and assembled with the direct involvement of the White House staff — and of Mr. Obama himself. The president supplied not just his measurements, but he also recorded that speech (which was initially drafted by a Disney writer) — and yet another recitation of the oath of office, this one in Disney high-definition sound.

In that Hollywood building here, the life-size, three-dimensional figure was being put through its final tune-up, its chin rising and hands gesturing in response to technicians, in preparation for shipment to the Hall of Presidents exhibit at Disney World in Orlando, Fla.

Disney officials declined to say how much it cost to build an Obama. They have cloaked the project with a blanket of secrecy befitting the Secret Service, permitting this reporter to be the only journalist thus far to view the figure up close but allowing only a Disney photographer to take its picture.

Mr. Obama has seen renderings of the figure, telling a Disney employee, Pamela Fisher, “that we had made him better-looking than he was.”

Mr. Obama is not the first president to send his voice, or inseam, to Disney World; George W. Bush and Bill Clinton were also given speaking roles in the exhibit during their terms and assisted Disney’s “imagineers” in the creation of their likenesses. But the Obama figure is assuredly the most lifelike of them all.

The public is to get its first glimpse of “Robobama,” as it is known among some handlers, on July 4. The unveiling will be in a Disney World theater, alongside animatronic figures of every other president. As in the past, the program will end with each president nodding or turning toward the audience during a roll call, as if Mount Rushmore had suddenly come alive.

“Young children watch this, and you want them to feel a sense of identification with the president,” said Doris Kearns Goodwin, a presidential historian, who was recruited by Disney two years ago to write a Hollywood-style treatment about the presidents, which became the basis for a 20-minute documentary made for the exhibit. “This makes the president someone not so far removed from them.”

The exhibit opened in the early 1970s and has resulted in countless middle school term papers about the presidents. It has been closed since Election Day as it receives the biggest face-lift in its history.

The company has much riding on the exhibit, with visitors’ spending at Disney World having dipped sharply in the midst of the economic downturn.

The exhibit will open with the new film, narrated by the actor Morgan Freeman. At a certain point, the Abraham Lincoln figure will rise and speak to the audience, as it always has, but now it will deliver the Gettysburg Address in its entirety.

“And this is the first time George Washington will have a speaking role,” said Kathy Rogers, a senior show producer for Walt Disney Imagineering, the unit that oversees the creative side of the theme parks.

But the emotional high point is intended to be the introduction of the Obama figure, who will yet again be heard taking the oath.

Mr. Obama recorded this version on March 4 in the White House Map Room — the same room where he retook the oath after a minor flub on Inauguration Day — to accommodate the Disney World theater’s new sound system. At that time, Mr. Obama also read aloud a short speech to be delivered by the figure, one that ultimately passed through the computer of Jon Favreau, a presidential speechwriter.

“That speech took a village,” said Ms. Fisher, the senior Disney writer on the project who along with Ms. Rogers traveled to Washington in March to guide the president through his role.

The Obama figure’s closest forefather is not Lincoln but a modern-day Capt. Jack Sparrow. Assisted by Johnny Depp, who played the captain in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies, Disney recently installed an animatronic version of the Sparrow character in the Orlando theme park.

The Obama figure is the result of attention to minute details by Disney sculptors, animators, engineers and even anatomists who pored over presidential photographs and video of him and then drew on the latest advances in robotic technology.

Thus the audio-animatronic Obama purses its lips to pronounce its b’s and p’s in a way frighteningly evocative of the real one, and raises its hands, open-palmed, while shrugging its shoulders, in a way that can only be described as Obamaesque. Even the president’s wedding ring, with its braided design, has been recreated.

After their work was done with the president, Ms. Fisher and Ms. Rogers said they were given a special tour of the White House.

For Ms. Fisher, there was a sense of déjà vu. She had traveled to the White House on Disney’s behalf in 2001 to capture the voice of Mr. Bush. After he had finished his “take,” she said, he stiffened his arms and “started acting like he was an animatronic figure.”

“He’s got a sense of humor,” she added.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

NEW YORK CITY --  The New Orleans pianist Allen Toussaint hinted at the scope of his musical lore in a whimsical solo montage halfway through his early set at the Village Vanguard on Tuesday night. Fragments of old New Orleans songs (like “Big Chief”), classical pieces, boogie-woogie, “The Sound of Music” and other tunes interrupted one another and gradually mingled, giving barrelhouse flourishes to a Chopin prelude. After a few more segues Mr. Toussaint called Elvis Costello out of the audience to sing “Ascension Day,” a song from the 2006 album they made together, “The River in Reverse.”

No matter what the source, the rendition was poised and light-fingered, without an unconsidered note. And somehow New Orleans was in every phrase, with hints of swing, of humor, of sly sensuality.

In Mr. Toussaint’s long career as songwriter, arranger and producer he has honed a piano style that’s supportive and allusive; a little trill or tremolo sums up all the splashy joys of New Orleans patriarchs like Professor Longhair and James Booker, and a syncopated chord under right-hand octaves summons gospel. Mr. Toussaint has the two-fisted, rippling vocabulary of the city’s piano legacy, but he uses it in dapper ways.

He’s at the Village Vanguard through Sunday primarily as an instrumentalist; he sang only two songs in the set. Mr. Toussaint is following through on his new album, “The Bright Mississippi” (Nonesuch). It applies the Toussaint touch to old songs like “St. James Infirmary” (which was sung on Tuesday night by the album’s producer, Joe Henry), “Just a Closer Walk With Thee” and Duke Ellington’s “Solitude.”

His band echoes a New Orleans trad-jazz lineup — clarinet (Don Byron), trumpet (Christian Scott), acoustic guitar (Marc Ribot), bass (David Piltch) and drums (Jay Bellerose) — and reaches back without being fussy about it. When Mr. Toussaint played and sang his own “Southern Nights,” he turned it into a blend of gospel and Orientalism, with harplike glissandos. But for most of the set blues, slow-drag beats, parade struts and New Orleans-ized tangos and hymns were the foundations, with a touch of rhythm and blues. And melody always took precedence.

Mr. Scott, who has been a sideman on hip-hop albums, reached back to old New Orleans, playing the tunes with puckish pauses and smears; Mr. Byron, sometimes switching to tenor saxophone from his usual clarinet, had the scurrying, ornamental role, sometimes hinting at modernist harmony in his runs. Mr. Ribot’s guitar solos were spiky, down-home epigrams. And Mr. Piltch and Mr. Bellerose savored the vintage New Orleans beats, with rustling cymbals and ballooning snare-drum rolls.

It wasn’t a re-creation of old New Orleans music but a reverie on a New Orleans heritage: a lifetime of memories refined by a genteel sensibility that finds the elegance in the blues.

MAGNOLIA, Ark. — Charlaine Harris was sitting in the small dining nook of her suburban cedar-and-stone home one afternoon last week when she took the call from her editor in New York. After she hung up, she yanked both fists down and let out a triumphant, “Yes!”

Ms. Harris, the author of the Sookie Stackhouse vampire mystery romance novels, had just heard that the latest book in the series, “Dead and Gone,” would make its debut on the New York Times hardcover fiction best-seller list this Sunday in the No. 1 spot. It was a first for Ms. Harris, who has published 26 novels in nearly three decades and sold the original book in the Sookie series, “Dead Until Dark,” for just $5,000 nine years ago.

When her husband, Harold Schulz, arrived home from work later, he stepped into Ms. Harris’s office in a converted mother-in-law apartment next to the house. “No. 1, huh?” he calmly noted with a smile.

But with their daughter Julia’s high school graduation looming this week, he wanted to know whether all six acres of the lawn on their property had been mowed, and when certain family members would be arriving.

It was the kind of juggle that might be familiar to Sookie, the telepathic human barmaid who narrates the novels and lives in the fictional small town of Bon Temps, La., amid an ever-expanding cast of vampires, shape-shifters, fairies and witches.

The formula of small-town life regularly disrupted by the supernatural world — and some mind-blowing sex with vampires — has propelled Ms. Harris through nine Sookie novels. For her latest three-book contract, of which “Dead and Gone” is the second, Ms. Harris was paid a seven-figure advance.

The books have also spawned “True Blood,” the HBO adaptation created by Alan Ball, the maestro of “Six Feet Under.” The first season of the series, which roughly followed “Dead Until Dark,” concluded last fall as the cable network’s most popular show since “The Sopranos” and “Sex and the City.” The new season, based on the second novel in the series, “Living Dead in Dallas,” begins on June 14.

PHOTO:Anna Paquin and Stephen Moyer in “True Blood” on HBO, based on Ms. Harris’s “Dead Until Dark.”

This heady brew of success has allowed Ms. Harris, 57, some luxuries: earlier this year she hired her longtime best friend as her personal assistant. She bought a diamond ring. And this year, because of Julia’s graduation, she could afford the ultimate indulgence: she refused to go on a book tour.

“It was just a huge relief that I finally hit on the right character and the right publisher,” said Ms. Harris, who had previously written two mystery series that never quite took off. Or, as she put it more succinctly, with a cackle that evoked a paranormal creature: “I had this real neener-neener-neener moment.”

Born and raised in Tunica, Miss., the daughter of a schoolteacher and a homemaker turned librarian, Ms. Harris, an avid reader of mysteries, always wanted to be an author. She published two stand-alone mysteries in the early 1980s, and a few years later began the Aurora Teagarden mysteries, featuring a Southern librarian turned amateur sleuth. Despite promising reviews, sales were modest.

In the mid-1990s she plunged into a more violent and sexually explicit story line about Lily Bard, a cleaning woman who investigates murders. Ms. Harris believed she had hit her stride, but sales did not meet her expectations.

So she decided to try something new. She had always wanted to write about vampires. From the outset, she wanted to set the story in the prosaic trailer-park and strip-mall landscape of northern Louisiana, to distinguish it from the gothic opulence of Anne Rice’s New Orleans.

Nominally a murder mystery, “Dead Until Dark” was filled with inventive details, like the synthetic blood that allows vampires to live openly among humans, and a vampire bar called Fangtasia, where humans who like to have sex with the undead hang out.

Despite her track record, it took two years to find a home for Sookie. Although writers like Laurell K. Hamilton had staked a niche in the paranormal genre, it was not the booming category that Stephenie Meyer has made it today.

Finally, Ace Books, a science fiction and fantasy imprint of Penguin Group USA, bought the manuscript in 2000. “The voice is terrific,” said Ginjer Buchanan, editor in chief of Ace. “And I liked the setting. I think it’s an interesting and different milieu, and she portrays it in a way that’s fresh and understandable, but not stereotypical.”

Driving last week along a tree-lined country road dotted by an occasional horse farm or a row of abandoned chicken coops, Ms. Harris said it was how she imagined the road to Sookie’s house. Ideas for characters come from all over the place.

“Every trip to Wal-Mart is an inspiration,” she said. But don’t try to find a model for Merlotte’s, the bar and restaurant where Sookie works. Magnolia, in southern Arkansas near the Louisiana border, is the seat of a dry county.

Ms. Harris gave Sookie the power to read the most unpleasant thoughts of others as a way of reflecting on the veneer of courtesy that permeates small-town Southern living.

“I think that must be the worst thing, not to have that buffer zone between how people really think and feel and how they present themselves to you,” Ms. Harris said. “That’s one of the reasons I love living here, because people are so polite.” For Sookie, consorting with vampires comes as a relief because she cannot actually read their thoughts.

Ms. Harris works most mornings in her office, a cozy room with a lumpy purple loveseat and a shelf of knickknacks sent by fans. Like many a commercial writer, Ms. Harris wishes the literary establishment would pay more attention. “I think there is a place for what I do,” she said. “And I think it’s honorable.”

With their message of accepting diversity, Ms. Harris said she wrote the Sookie novels in part as “a metaphor for gays in America.” But, she added: “I am not a crusader. If you need a good adventure or a vacation from your problems, then I am your woman.”

It was that escapist side that attracted Mr. Ball of “Six Feet Under” when he discovered “Dead Until Dark” in a Barnes & Noble four years ago. He went on to buy all the remaining books in the series. “I just went through them like popcorn,” he said.

For “True Blood” Mr. Ball added scenes shot from the point of view of other characters; gave Tara, a high school friend of Sookie’s, a more prominent role and converted her from white to African-American; and amped the sex scenes way up.

Ms. Harris, who rarely outlines a plot, knows how the series will end. Don’t ask: she’s not telling. In the meantime she’s always ready for inspiration. “I think about the books while I am showering or doing the dishes,” she said. “Then all of a sudden I’ll think, ‘What if?’ ”

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Even in the best of times Sony Holland had to hustle.

Living in San Francisco, she got singing gigs wherever she could find them: concerts, corporate conventions, wine country gatherings, weddings, hotels or on the city streets. Now because of the economic downturn the company bookings have dried up, along with some of her regular bar engagements.

But Ms. Holland, 45, said she feels liberated, able to focus on the kind of music that she loves. Rather than serving up the usual Gershwin and Porter tunes typically requested at corporate events, she can sing Wainwright and Dylan.

This singer’s story is just one of hundreds that poured into The New York Times Web site in response to a request asking artists to share how the economy is affecting their lives and work. Perhaps most striking about the comments was the considerable number who were defiantly upbeat despite grim circumstances. Many artists echoed Ms. Holland, testifying that the recession had strengthened their commitment to their work or allowed them to concentrate on their art — since the time spent on side jobs had diminished — or had even been a source of creative inspiration.

Liz Fallon, 30, a visual artist in Portland, Me., started selling her paintings and drawings to private collectors about 10 years ago, when she was still in college. She has not sold an original work in almost a year. But in the Portland area, Ms. Fallon said, there seems to be a kind of artistic renaissance under way as various groups, like photography cooperatives and drawing collectives, form to connect creative professionals with one another.

“As for myself, freed from the constraints of creating for a specific buyer,” Ms. Fallon wrote, “I’ve experienced my own surge in creativity and have been producing a great deal more than I used to. While it would be nice to still be getting paid for my work, the need to be more resourceful is having a beneficial effect on the arts community around me.”

In a follow-up interview Ms. Fallon said she supports herself working as a customer-service representative for a direct-marketing firm, and that the lack of commissions has enabled her to pursue new projects, like illustrations of classic children’s literature.

“Nobody wants me to do anything, so I’m just doing what I want,” she said.

There was a determination to many of the messages, a conviction to push through this rough patch and make the most of it. “It is making me want to pursue my career as an artist more forcefully than ever,” wrote Cadine Navarro, an artist in New York and Amsterdam. “I feel that artists are well equipped to deal creatively with such situations and with a bit of persistence and optimism, can turn this recession into a point of strength.”

Ms. Navarro added that she hoped the economic pressure would weed out “market-oriented art that is being churned out by the bulk. Onward!”

This sifting process, Ms. Navarro said in a later telephone call, has tested her own level of dedication. “It’s making me want to work harder,” she said, “to be spending more time with it and understand it’s not an easy road and, yeah, I still believe in it.”

There were many far more despairing responses. “It is absolutely horrible,” wrote Jamie Janos, a photographer in Cleveland. “My assignments are at the lowest frequency they have ever been, budget cuts, layoffs and job losses are killing all of us freelancers.”

Stephanie Sturton, 24, of Detroit said that she is more than $75,000 in debt for school loans; cannot find a part-time job, paying internship or full-time position anywhere in the arts and is currently working as a contractor for her alma mater and teaching after-school art classes.

“The economy is so bad right now here in Detroit, Mich., that people are not buying art, they cannot afford it,” she wrote. “Therefore I am not making any money with my art. I am teaching pottery to mostly Detroit public schools which are closing.”

“I am a painter,” she added. “I do not even work with clay.”

In a subsequent conversation Ms. Sturton said she has gone back to school at a community college to take business classes and steer herself toward a career change. “It seems everyone wants interns who don’t get paid or volunteers,” she said. “As much as I would love to volunteer, I need to pay my bills.”

Karl Allen, 29, the former technical director of Performance Space 122, a performance space in Manhattan, said a reduction in Off Off Broadway productions has meant that sets turn over less frequently, which means less work for technical theater staff in New York. “Those load-ins and strikes were the lifeblood of many people I know, and I was thinking that I would have plenty of opportunity to tap into it as needed,” Mr. Allen wrote. “But now, because of the decreased opportunity for work amongst the already (and always) struggling downtown theaters, I find myself applying for unemployment.”

Mr. Allen later added that he has been kept afloat by odd jobs, doing some custom carpentry and apartment renovation for friends of friends. But he is rethinking the future. “It’s brought up a lot of questions about what I’m doing and whether I want to keep doing it,” he said. “I’m not really qualified to do much of anything else. I’d have to go back to school. I don’t see the possibility of making a steady income in the near future. I don’t think I can sustain it.

“I love it. The only thing that makes me sad is that I can’t make a living right now.”

Still, many of the dispatches from the arts world were infused with fortitude and resolve, as well as a sense of release. “I’m proud that I’ve been able to live frugally and make work,” wrote Alexander Conner, 22, a recent college graduate living in Philadelphia. He is an artist who works as a curator at Adaptation, a small arts exhibition organization. “I don’t have the ability to make everything I would like, nor do I have the ability to create works as complex as I might want due to financial constraints. However this time gives me the chance to refine my practice.

“I apply for grants, exhibitions and public arts programming, and I’m happy to wait. Nothing worth having doesn’t take hard work and time to attain.”

Elaborating over the phone, Mr. Conner said he earns his living working at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the telemarketing department and as an admissions assistant in the student center. “I get to check in school groups, get them ready for their tour guides, watch them talk about what they’ve seen,” he said. “It’s lovely.”

Mr. Conner shares an apartment with another artist. (His rent share is $475 a month.) Since he likes to cook, Mr. Conner shops for groceries at the local Italian market and makes most of his meals — he even bakes his own bread — which allows him to live on $12,000 a year. “From an early age my parents taught me to live within my means,” he said.

Lance Horne, 31, a composer-lyricist and performer in New York who recently wrote for the one-night-only “24 Hour Musicals,” said he appreciated having more time to give to charitable causes. He flew to Los Angeles to play piano at the Glaad Media Awards and wrote a song about gay marriage for the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles. “I have more time to create,” he wrote. “I walked through Central Park twice this week and emerged with songs ready to go.”

Mr. Horne, who also teaches voice, piano and composition, said in a subsequent interview that his private students have dropped by at least half, but that his spirits remain high. “It’s just changing around what I expect from the work,” he said. “It’s not paying the bills the way it did in the past, but there is more joy in it.”

He also said he believed the public was craving art in a new way, that “they really have more time to see and feel things.”

Diane Leon-Ferdico, 63, an abstract painter who lives in Elmhurst, Queens, pays the bills working as an administrator in the Hebrew and Judaic studies department at New York University. She said artists should have a backup plan but should not give up on their art. “I’ve done it all my life and still have had a good balanced life,” she wrote. “This too shall pass. Artists must continue to create no matter what happens around them.”

Ms. Leon-Ferdico later added that she is sometimes frustrated by spending so much time far removed from her art work. But then she looks on the walls of her office at her pictures of Alicante, Spain, where she has had an apartment since 1970. Her day job makes it possible for her to afford spending five weeks on the water every summer. “The light is incredible there,” she said. “And the colors — mostly oranges and blues, reds.”

Libby Gilpatric, 68, wrote that her art is what allows her to weather times like these. “Anxiety is there, but the act of painting relieves that more than not painting,” she said.

“Along with the gallery owners, I remain hopeful that the tide will turn,” Ms. Gilpatric added. “The buyers will come, just as the leaves will sprout, the roses bud, the waves roll in every few minutes, every seventh one greater than the others.”

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company