Firefly Music Festival requires vaccine or negative COVID-19 test

By The Associated Press
September 19, 2021 | 3:31 PM

DOVER, Del. — Attendees of an annual music festival in Delaware will need to show proof they’ve been fully vaccinated or a negative COVID-19 test.

The Firefly Music Festival will feature headliner Billie Eilish and Lizzo. It is begin Thursday at The Woodlands of Dover International Speedway, and will run through Sunday.

The Delaware State News reports that state health officials hope the prevention measures put in place will stop the festival from becoming a superspreader event.

The festival began in 2012, but was canceled last year because of the pandemic. The precautions come as Delaware is experiencing a surge in COVID-19 case rates spurred by the delta variant.

The state is averaging 466.6 new COVID-19 cases per day over the last week.

David Clayton-Thomas, powerhouse lead singer of Blood, Sweat & Tears, dies at 84

By The Associated Press
June 25, 2026 | 3:00 PM

NEW YORK (AP) — David Clayton-Thomas, the lead singer of Blood, Sweat & Tears, whose husky, high-strung tenor on “Spinning Wheel,” “And When I Die” and other hits helped make the so-called brass rock band among the most popular acts of the late 1960s, has died at age 84. Spokesperson Eric Alper said that Clayton-Thomas died “peacefully” Wednesday at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto. Alper did not cite a specific cause. Clayton-Thomas was a onetime street fighter and petty thief from Canada who briefly became a rock superstar, the front man of a nine-member group that sold millions of records and won two Grammys for “Blood, Sweat & Tears,” which beat out the Beatles' “Abbey Road” for best album of 1969. Calling out amid a jazzy parade of horns, keyboards and percussion, Clayton-Thomas’ urgent shout was a signature voice of the era, preaching love on the Motown cover “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy,” a lasting legacy on Laura Nyro’s “And When I Die” and a cool head on his own “Spinning Wheel.” Meanwhile, Blood, Sweat & Tears helped inspire a wave of horn-led bands, among them Chicago, the Electric Flag and Ten Wheel Drive. “A lot of the guys (in Blood, Sweat & Tears) would play a Broadway show matinee, then go up to Harlem and play Latin music or R&B and funk at night, or come down to the Village and play pure jazz the next night,” Clayton-Thomas told bestclassicbands.com in 2023. “I was just a blues player: give me three chords and I’ve got a song.”

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