Passages

Cassandra Wilson, 70, a Grammy Award-winning jazz singer and songwriter rooted in the blues tradition of her native Mississippi who became one of the most distinctive voices of her generation, died Wednesday in Jackson, Miss.

One of the major jazz acts of the 1980s and ’90s — she opened for Miles Davis and toured with Wynton Marsalis — Wilson was a top-selling recording artist who preferred to call herself a musician, as opposed to being categorized solely as a jazz singer.

With a low and smoky voice, she brought suave romance to standards from the Great American Songbook, but she also embraced covers of artists including Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Neil Young and Mississippi bluesman Robert Johnson.

She wrote the words and music for original compositions on albums like “Blue Light ’Til Dawn” (1993) and “New Moon Daughter” (1995), the second of which received a Grammy for best jazz vocal performance and sold more than 400,000 copies. A typical set by Wilson moved from familiar show tunes to Mitchell to Muddy Waters to Hank Williams to Antonio Carlos Jobim to Bob Marley to her own imaginative compositions. She inspired subsequent generations of artists, including singer-songwriters India.Arie, Norah Jones and Jhelisa Anderson.

Gloria Steinem, 92, the feminist crusader who galvanized the modern women’s movement, helping millions of women develop a sense of self-worth and gain a measure of equality at home, at work and in society at large, died Wednesday at her home in New York City. Her death was announced in a post on social media, which did not give a cause.

For more than half a century, she personified the women’s movement and became its most enduring symbol; her tinted aviator glasses and curtain of streaked-blond hair parted in the center made her one of the most recognizable women in the world. She read voraciously, graduated from college with honors and believed fiercely that women should be able to live whatever life they chose.

Her feminist awakening didn’t come until her mid-30s, when, as a journalist in 1969, she attended a “speak out” of women discussing their illegal abortions. Charismatic, articulate, media savvy, deeply empathetic and a workaholic, she evolved into a political and cultural force.

She led protests and consciousness-raising sessions, wrote essays and delivered speeches, delved into political organizing, helped establish rape crisis centers and shelters for battered women, founded numerous groups that promoted women and had the Midas touch when it came to raising money for their causes.

And she and a cadre of feminists had the audacity to start a publication that flew in the face of traditional women’s magazines, examining topics like abortion, domestic violence and equal pay for equal work. The first glossy national periodical to be created, owned and run entirely by women, Ms. magazine, founded in 1971, sought to capture and channel a rising sense of female empowerment and eradicate the sexist assumptions that permeated the culture. “When we started, there was not even a term for sexual harassment,” Steinem often said. “It was just called life.”

Wendell Berry, 92, Kentucky farmer who plowed his fields behind Belgian draft horses and wrote lyrical poems, novels and essays — mostly in pencil and without electric light — that explored his elegiac visions of the life and death of agrarian America, died Monday at his home in Port Royal, Ky.

Berry wrote more than 50 volumes of poetry, fiction and argument that championed small family farms, the environment, local foods and interdependent communities, and railed against chemicals, most technologies, agribusiness and distant government.

King Harald V of Norway, 89, whose 35-year reign opened an ancient monarchy to a contentious cast of family connections, including a draper’s daughter; a celebrity shaman; and Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier; died Aug. 28 in Oslo, Norway. The death, in a hospital, was announced by the Royal Court. The king had been receiving treatment for a bacterial infection of his blood.

George W. Cave, 97, a CIA agent who after more than 20 years of covert operations in the Middle East and Pakistan was called out of retirement to help free U.S. hostages held in Lebanon, in a crucial piece of the scandal known as the Iran-Contra affair, died Aug. 14 in Olney, Md.