Kool & the Gang's Charles Smith dead at 57

Posted:
Jun 22, 2006

Kool & the Gang co-founder and lead guitarist Claydes Charles Smith died Tuesday in Maplewood, New Jersey after a long illness. He was 57.

Publicist David Brokaw said Thursday that he did not know the cause of death.

Smith co-wrote the hit tune "Celebration," which was heard in Ron Millionaire, a 2004 episode of Disney's Kim Possible. The tune was also in the 1995 live-action film Nick of Time.

Known as Charles Smith, he wrote hits "Joanna" and "Take My Heart," and was a co-writer of "Jungle Boogie" (heard in the 1994 movie Pulp Fiction) and "Hollywood Swinging."

"We've lost a member of our family, as well as an infinitely creative and gifted artist who was with the band from the very beginning," band manager Tia Sinclair said in a statement.

Smith was born in Jersey City on September 6, 1948. In the early 1960s, his father introduced him to jazz guitar.

Originally based in jazz in the 1960s, Kool & the Gang blended jazz, funk, R&B and pop to become a 1970s supergroup. Although it fell from popularity, the group enjoyed renewed success in the 1980s.

In the late 1980s, Smith joined a group of New Jersey jazz musicians, including Ronald Bell (later Khalis Bayyan), Robert Kool Bell, George Brown, Dennis Thomas and Robert Spike Mickens, who became a new version of Kool & the Gang. Lead singer James JT Taylor would later join the group.

Illness forced Smith to stop touring with Kool & the Gang in January this year.

Charles Smith is survived by his six children, Claydes A. Smith, Justin Smith, Aaron Corbin, August Williams, Uranus Guray and Tyteen Humes, and by nine grandchildren.