Today's show is all about why. My husband, my partner of 47 years, Francis Davis, died after a long illness on Monday, April 14. You may know about Francis from his writing about jazz and popular culture or from the time he was a jazz critic on FRESH AIR when it was a local show and in the early da
seven books and received a Guggenheim fellowship. He founded and ran The Village Voice annual jazz critics poll, which, after several years, moved to NPR Music and is now on artsfuse.org, where it's run by Tom Hull, who will be continuing the poll, which he renamed the Annual Francis Davis Jazz Poll.
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. There's more I want to tell you about my husband, Francis Davis. He died Monday, April 14, after eight months in home hospice, doing his best to maintain his strength despite his enemies, COPD and Parkinson's. Francis wrote about jazz and other forms of music and popular cu