This week’s passages

David Clayton-Thomas, 84, a homeless Toronto runaway who learned guitar in prison and went on to become the lead singer of the gritty, blues-inspired band Blood, Sweat & Tears, whose songs like “Spinning Wheel” and covers like “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy” neared the top of the Billboard charts, died Wednesday in Toronto. The cause was not available.

Clayton-Thomas joined Blood, Sweat & Tears in 1968, shortly after it formed, and quickly became an indelible part of the group and crucial to its popularity. A self-taught, charismatic frontman with a burly physique and a snarling, bluesy tenor, he stood out in a nine-member ensemble filled with jazz- and conservatory-trained musicians.

Alan Greenspan, 100, who in nearly two decades as chair of the Federal Reserve nurtured a long run of prosperity, navigated crises and was a powerful and polarizing force in shaping market-friendly policies, died Monday. His death was announced by his wife, Andrea Mitchell, the chief Washington, D.C., correspondent for NBC News. “Alan passed away at our home this morning at the age of 100 from complications of Parkinson’s disease,” she said in a statement.

The preeminent economic policymaker of his time and arguably the most recognizable economist of any era, Greenspan led the central bank under four presidents of both parties from 1987 to 2006. Much of his tenure coincided with a streak of affluence in which he stood as the embodiment of a triumphant, post-Cold War strain of American capitalism: optimistic, faithful in the power of markets to improve living standards, captivated by the power of technology and averse to regulation.

But the ideological stamp he put on policymaking came to be associated as well with the destructive consequences of forces that emerged on his watch, including deregulation of banking and Wall Street, the loss of American jobs to free trade and persistent concerns about bubbles in stock and housing prices.

Jill Smokler, 48, a mother of three who started the blog Scary Mommy as a diversion from bedtime battles and toddler tantrums, only to build it into a juggernaut that drew millions of readers to its warts-and-all look at what she called “the imperfect side of parenting,” died on Monday at her home in Pikesville, Md., near Baltimore. The cause was glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer.

Smokler “built her life’s work on a single, radical idea,” her brother Mark Epstein said in a statement. “That you could love your children more than anything in the world and still say, out loud, that the job” is grindingly difficult. In addition to her blog, which she started in 2008, Smokler wrote three books, including the bestsellers “Confessions of a Scary Mommy” (2012) and “Motherhood Comes Naturally (And Other Vicious Lies)” (2013).

Clive Davis, 94, the music executive who rose from a midlevel legal position at Columbia Records to become one of the industry’s most powerful and longest-reigning dons, guiding the careers of Whitney Houston, Aretha Franklin, Barry Manilow and dozens of other stars, died Monday at his home in New York City’s Manhattan borough. Davis had recently been hospitalized with respiratory problems.

One of the few nonperformers in music to become a household name, Davis maintained a visible role as a starmaker for half a century. In the late 1960s, he propelled a reluctant Columbia headlong into the rock era with acts such as Janis Joplin and Blood, Sweat & Tears. He also encouraged jazz trumpeter Miles Davis to connect with the Woodstock generation.

James Burrows, 85, the genre-shaping master of the television situation comedy who was a creator of “Cheers” and directed more than 1,000 episodes of that show and other TV classics like “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “The Bob Newhart Show,” “Taxi,” “Frasier,” “Friends” and “The Big Bang Theory,” died June 19. No further information was available.

Burrows earned a reputation as the “Steven Spielberg of sitcoms,” winning 11 Emmy Awards and receiving 47 nominations in a career that spanned five decades. With a unique flair for the multicamera sitcom, Burrows won audiences by focusing on the laughs. “When I direct a television show, I try to reach that sweet spot where the best script meets the best performance and the best chemistry between performers,” Burrows wrote in his 2022 autobiography, “Directed by James Burrows,” written with Eddy Friedfeld. “Hitting that exact moment, where these factors land in combination, results in the sweetest and most enduring laugh.”

Tay Keith, 29, the hip-hop producer behind hits by Drake, Travis Scott and Beyoncé, has died. Nashville news station WSMV reported that police found Keith, born Brytavious Chambers, dead in his apartment on June 18. While no cause of death was given, police said that “no foul play is suspected.”

Keith first found fame producing for rapper BlocBoy JB when they were teenagers. Their collaborations caught Drake’s attention, and Keith produced the duo’s collaborative 2018 hit “Look Alive,” which hit No. 5 on the Hot 100. He further rocketed to stardom for his work on Scott’s chart-topping 2018 hit “Sicko Mode.”

Oliver Tree, 32, the eccentric American musician known for viral stunts, alt-pop tracks like “Alien Boy” and “Life Goes On,” and his unconventional style, died in a helicopter crash in Rio de Janeiro on June 14.

His official Instagram account announced that “His legacy will live on through his foundation/endowment named ‘Dr. Oliver Tree’s Extremely Epic Grant For Baby Geniuses’ coming soon. This is something that Oliver had put together before his passing, written in his will. We will make sure his wish comes to fruition so that more joy, love and art can be spread into the world, that was his final wish.”

Margaret Kerry, 97, who through months of graceful and poignant pantomime inspired the portrayal of the Peter Pan fairy Tinker Bell that the world knows best, died on June 11 at her home in Wilmington, N.C. The cause was lung cancer.

Tinker Bell’s origins lie in “Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up” (1904), a play by the British writer J.M. Barrie later expanded into a novel, “Peter and Wendy” (1911). With Kerry’s help, Disney’s original animated film adaptation, “Peter Pan” (1953), produced a version of Tinker Bell that became definitive. In the movie, the fairy communicates only through movement and expression; she does not speak.

Shirley Lord, 93, an English-born journalist whose early success on Fleet Street in London led to prominent jobs at Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue and Helena Rubinstein, along with a sideline as the bestselling author of steamy novels, and whose high-dose vivacity and 1987 marriage to A.M. Rosenthal, the former executive editor of The New York Times, made her a society fixture and tabloid target, died June 10 in Manhattan.

James Bradley, 72, who turned his curiosity about his father’s time in the Navy during the Battle of Iwo Jima — and the long-held but ultimately mistaken belief that he was in the iconic photograph of six servicemen raising the American flag on Mount Suribachi — into the bestselling book “Flags of Our Fathers” (2000), died June 5.

Norma Yaeger, 96, who became a rare female stockbroker in the early 1960s and went on to found two securities firms in the overwhelmingly male financial world, died June 3 in Los Angeles.

“She helped open doors for other women,” said Janice Traflet, a Bucknell University professor of accounting and financial management who has studied the history of women in finance. In 1967, another Wall Street pioneer, Muriel Siebert, made headlines by becoming the first woman to acquire a seat on the New York Stock Exchange.