Singer and songwriter. Jim Morrison was born as James Douglas Morrison on December 8, 1943 in Melbourne, Florida. His mother, Clara Clarke Morrison, was a homemaker, and his father, George Stephen Morrison, was a naval aviator who rose to the rank of Real Admiral. George Morrison was the commander of United States naval forces aboard the flagship USS Bon Homme Richard during the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Incident that helped ignite the Vietnam War. Admiral Morrison was also a skilled pianist who enjoyed performing for friends at parties. Morrison's younger brother Andy remembered, "There was always a big crowd around the piano with my dad playing popular songs that he could pick up by ear."

During his early years, Jim Morrison was a dutiful and highly intelligent child, excelling at school and taking a particular interest in reading, writing and drawing. He underwent a traumatic but formative experience around the age of five when driving with his family through the New Mexico desert. A truck packed with Indian workers had crashed, leaving dead and mutilated bodies of the victims strewn across the highway. "All I saw was funny red paint and people lying around, but I knew something was happening, because I could dig the vibrations of the people around me," Morrison recalled. "And all of a sudden I realized that they didn't know what was happening any more than I did. That was the first time I tasted fear." Although his family members have since suggested that Morrison greatly exaggerated the incident, it nevertheless made a deep impression on him that he described years later in the lyrics of his song "Peace Frog": "Indians scattered on dawn's highway bleeding/ Ghosts crowd the young child's fragile eggshell mind."

Morrison moved frequently as a child due to his father's naval service, first from Florida to California and then to Alexandria, Virginia, where he attended George Washington High School. As a high school student, Morrison began to rebel against his father's strict discipline, discovering alcohol and women and bristling at all forms of authority. "One time he told the teacher he was having a brain tumor removed and walked out of class," his sister recalled. Nevertheless, Morrison remained a voracious reader, an avid diarist and a decent student. When he graduated from high school in 1961, he asked his parents for the complete works of Nietzsche as a graduation present – a testament to both his bookishness and his rebelliousness.

Upon graduating from high school, Morrison returned to his birth state of Florida to attend Florida State University in Tallahassee. After making the Dean's List his freshman year, Morrison decided to transfer to the University of California at Los Angeles to study film. Because film was a relatively new academic discipline, there were no established authorities, something that greatly appealed to the freewheeling Morrison. "There are no experts, so, theoretically, any student knows almost as much as any professor," he explained about his interest in film. In addition to studying film, he also developed an increasing interest in poetry at UCLA, devouring the Romantic poetry of William Blake and the contemporary Beat poetry of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac as well as composing his own. Nevertheless, Morrison quickly lost interest in his film studies and would have dropped out of school altogether if not for his fear of being drafted into the Vietnam War. He graduated from UCLA in 1965 only because, in his own words, "I didn't want to go into the army, and I didn't want to work – and that's the damned truth."Elektra Records signed the Doors in 1966, and in January 1967 the band released its self-titled debut album. The Doors' first single, "Break on Through (To the Other Side)," achieved only modest success and it was their second single, "Light My Fire," which catapulted the band to the forefront of the rock and roll world, reaching No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 Singles Chart in June. The Doors, and Morrison especially, became infamous later that year when they performed the song live on The Ed Sullivan Show. Because of its obvious drug reference, Morrison had agreed not to sing the lyric "girl we couldn't get much higher" on the air, but when the cameras rolled he went ahead and sang it anyway – cementing his status as rock and roll's new rebel hero. "Light My Fire" remains The Doors' most popular song, featuring prominently on virtually every major list of the greatest rock songs ever recorded.

Combining Morrison's darkly poetic lyrics and outlandish stage presence with the band's unique and eclectic brand of psychedelic rock music, The Doors released a flurry of hit albums and songs over the next several years. In December 1967, they released their sophomore album, Strange Days, which featured the smash hit "Love Me Two Times" as well as "People are Strange" and "When the Music's Over." Months later, in 1968, they released a third album, Waiting for the Sun, highlighted by "Hello, I Love You," "Love Street" and "Five to One." They went on to record three more popular and groundbreaking albums over the next three years: The Soft Parade (1969), Morrison Hotel (1970) and L.A. Woman (1971).

Throughout the band's brief tenure atop the music world, Morrison's private life and public persona were both spiraling rapidly out of control. His alcoholism and drug addictions worsened, leading to violent and profane onstage outbursts that provoked the ire of cops and club owners across the country.

Morrison spent nearly the entirety of his adult life with a woman named Pamela Courson, and although he briefly married a music journalist named Patricia Kennealy in a Celtic Pagan ceremony in 1970, he left everything to Courson in his will and she was deemed his common law wife after his death. Throughout his relationships to Courson and Kennealy, however, Morrison remained an infamous womanizer. His drug use, violent temper and infidelity all culminated in disaster in New Haven, Connecticut on the night of December 9, 1967. Morrison was high, drunk and carrying on with a young woman backstage before a show when he was confronted by police and sprayed with mace. He then stormed onstage and delivered a profanity-laced tirade that sparked a riot and led to his arrest on obscenity charges.

In an attempt to get his life back in order, Morrison took time off from The Doors in the spring of 1971 and moved to Paris with Courson. However, he continued to be plagued by drugs and depression. On July 3, 1971, Courson found Morrison dead in the bathtub of their apartment, apparently of heart failure. Since the French officials found no evidence of foul play, no autopsy was performed, which has in turn led to endless speculation and conspiracy theorizing about his death. In 2007, a Paris club owner named Sam Bernett published a book claiming that Morrison died of a heroin overdose at his nightclub and was later carried back to his apartment and placed in the bathtub to cover up the real reason for his death. Jim Morrison was buried at the famous Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris, and his grave has since become one of the city's top tourist destinations. He was only 27 years old at the time of his death.

Jim Morrison remains one of the most legendary and mysterious rock and roll stars of all time. He was a gifted lyricist whose poetic odes to rebellion, set to the music of The Doors, inspired a generation of disaffected youth who found in his words an eloquent articulation of their own hopes and frustrations. His tragic early death at the hands of drugs and depression likely deprived the world of much more in the way of beautiful music and poetry. Morrison's goal as a lyricist and singer was to open the minds of those who listened to his words, to encourage them to leave behind the familiar in search of the new. As Morrison put it, paraphrasing Aldous Huxley who was himself paraphrasing William Blake, "There are things known, and there are things unknown, and in between are The Doors."

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Louis Thomas Watts, commonly known as Kid Thomas (20 June 1934 - 5 April 1970) was an American rock and roll and blues musician.

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Mary Ann Ganser (4 February 1948–14 March 1970).

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Raymond Berry Oakley III (April 4, 1948 – November 11, 1972), was an American bassist and one of the founding members of The Allman Brothers Band.

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Daniel Ray Whitten (May 8, 1943 – November 18, 1972) was an American musician and songwriter best known for his work with Neil Young and Crazy Horse, and for the song "I Don't Want To Talk About It", a hit for Rita Coolidge, Rod Stewart and Everything but the Girl.

Gram Parsons (November 5, 1946 – September 19, 1973) was an American singer, songwriter, guitarist and pianist. Parsons is best known for his work within the country genre; he also mixed blues, folk, and rock to create what he called "Cosmic American Music".

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Keith William Relf (22 March 1943 – 14 May 1976) was a musician best known as the lead singer and harmonica player of The Yardbirds. After the Yardbirds broke up Relf formed the acoustic duo Together, with fellow Yardbird Jim McCarty, followed by Renaissance, which also featured his sister, singer Jane Relf, then hard rock group Armageddon. Relf also produced tracks for artists such as folk-rock band Hunter Muskett, the acoustic world music group Amber, psychedelic band Saturnalia and blues-rock band Medicine Head, with whom he played bass guitar.

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Al Jackson, Jr. (November 27, 1935 – October 1, 1975) was a drummer, producer, and songwriter. He is best known as a founding member of Booker T. & the M.G.'s, a group of session musicians who worked for Stax Records and produced their own instrumentals. Jackson was called "The Human Timekeeper" for his drumming ability.

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Gary Mervin Thain (15 May 1948 – 8 December 1975) was a rock bassist, best known for his work with British band, Uriah Heep.

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Peter Laughner (August 22, 1952 – June 22, 1977) was an American guitarist, songwriter and singer. A native of Bay Village, Ohio, Laughner remains a rather little known figure; nonetheless, Richie Unterberger described him as "probably the single biggest catalyst in the birth of Cleveland's alternative rock scene in the mid 1970s."

Paul Francis Kossoff (14 September 1950 – 19 March 1976) was an English rock guitarist best known as a member of the band Free.

Sherman Garnes February 26, 1977

Timothy Charles "Tim" Buckley III (February 14, 1947 – June 29, 1975) was an American singer and musician. His music and style changed considerably through the years; his first album (1966) was mostly folk oriented, but over time his music incorporated jazz, psychedelia, funk, soul, avant-garde and an evolving "voice as instrument," sound.

Thomas Richard "Tommy" Bolin (August 1, 1951 – December 4, 1976) was an American-born guitarist who played with Zephyr (from 1969 to 1971), The James Gang (from 1973 through 1974), and Deep Purple (from 1975 to 1976); in addition to maintaining a notable solo career.

William Powell (January 20, 1942 – May 26, 1977)

Terry Alan Kath (January 31, 1946 – January 23, 1978), born in Chicago, Illinois, was an American musician and songwriter. He was the original guitarist and founding member of the rock band Chicago. He died in early 1978, eight days before his 32nd birthday, from an unintentionally self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Keith John Moon (23 August 1946 – 7 September 1978) was an English musician, best known for being the drummer of the English rock group The Who. He was well known for his unique drumming style, and gained notoriety for his eccentric and often self-destructive behaviour. In 2011, Moon was voted the second greatest drummer in history in Rolling Stone's '"The Best Drummers of All Time'" readers' poll. His drumming skills continue to attract praise from critics and musicians alike, 35 years after his death.

Cassie LaRue Gaines (January 9, 1948 – October 20, 1977) was an American singer, best known for her work with Southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd. Gaines was an original cast member of a school play called Hairspray (musical), which would become a Broadway musical a few years later. Shortly after the play was performed, JoJo Billingsley was sent to her from Ronnie Van Zant to invite Cassie to joing Lynyrd Skynyrd as a backup singer.

Christopher Branford "Chris" Bell (January 12, 1951 – December 27, 1978) was an American singer, songwriter and guitarist born in Memphis, Tennessee. Along with Alex Chilton, he led the power pop band Big Star, which recorded albums during the early 1970s. Bell left the group after Big Star's first album, #1 Record (1972), failed to find commercial success. Bell recorded as a solo artist for the remainder of the 1970s; two of these influential solo recordings, "I Am the Cosmos" and "You and Your Sister", were released on a 1978 single on Car Records. These two songs became popular among collectors of Big Star-related items, and were later included on Bell's posthumously released 1992 solo album I Am the Cosmos.

Donny Edward Hathaway (October 1, 1945 – January 13, 1979) was an American Jazz, Blues, Soul & Gospel singer-songwriter and musician. Hathaway contracted with Atlantic Records in 1969 and with his first single for the Atco label, "The Ghetto, Part I" in early 1970, Rolling Stone magazine "marked him as a major new force in soul music."

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Sid Vicious, born John Simon Ritchie (10 May 1957 – 2 February 1979), was an English bass guitarist and vocalist most famous as a member of the influential punk group, the Sex Pistols. Vicious joined the Sex Pistols in early 1977 to replace Glen Matlock, who had fallen out of favor with the rest of the group. Due to intravenous drug use, Vicious was hospitalized with hepatitis during the recording of the Sex Pistols' debut album "Never Mind the Bollocks". Accordingly, Vicious' bass is only partially featured on one song from Never Mind the Bollocks. Vicious would later appear as a lead vocalist, performing three cover songs, on the soundtrack to "The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle", a largely fictionalized documentary about the Sex Pistols produced by the group's former manager Malcolm McLaren and director Julien Temple

Steven Earl Gaines (September 14, 1949 – October 20, 1977) was an American musician. He is most well known as a guitarist and songwriter for southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd, and is the younger brother of Cassie Gaines, who was also a member of the band.

Marc Bolan ( born Mark Feld; 30 September 1947 – 16 September 1977) was an English singer-songwriter, guitarist and poet. He is best known as the frontman of glam rock group T. Rex.

ames 'Jimmy' McCulloch (4 June 1953 – 27 September 1979) was a Scottish musician and songwriter best known for playing lead guitar in Paul McCartney's Wings from 1974 to 1977. McCulloch was a member of the Glasgow psychedelic band One in a Million (formerly known as The Jaygars), Thunderclap Newman, and Stone the Crows.

Dorsey Burnette (December 28, 1932 – August 19, 1979) was an early rockabilly singer. With his younger brother, Johnny Burnette, and a friend named Paul Burlison, he was a founder member of The Rock and Roll Trio. He is also the father of country musician and Fleetwood Mac member Billy Burnette.

John Glascock (2 May 1951 – 17 November 1979) was the bass guitarist, backing vocalist, and occasional lead vocalist for the progressive rock band Carmen. He was also the bass guitarist and backing vocalist for the progressive rock band Jethro Tull from December 1975 until August 1979. He died in 1979, at the age of 28, as a result of a genetic heart valve defect, which was worsened by an infection caused by an abscessed tooth.

Lowell Thomas George (April 13, 1945 – June 29, 1979) was an American singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer, who was the main guitarist and songwriter for the rock band Little Feat.

Minnie Julia Riperton (November 8, 1947 – July 12, 1979) was an American singer-songwriter best known for her 1975 single "Lovin' You". She was married to songwriter and music producer Richard Rudolph from 1972 until her death in the summer of 1979. They had two children: music engineer Marc Rudolph and actress/comedienne Maya Rudolph.

Van Allen Clinton McCoy (January 6, 1940 – July 6, 1979) professionally known as Van McCoy. was an accomplished musician, record producer, arranger, songwriter, and orchestra conductor. He is known best for his 1975 internationally successful song "The Hustle". He has approximately 700 song copyrights to his credit, and is also noted for producing songs for such recording artists as Gladys Knight and the Pips, The Stylistics, Aretha Franklin, Brenda & The Tabulations, David Ruffin, Peaches & Herb, and Stacy Lattisaw.