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PASSINGS: Marva Wright, Margaret Moth, Jack Hirshberg

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Marva Wright

Louisiana blues singer

Marva Wright, 62, who sang traditional jazz and gospel but was better known for sultry, sometimes bawdy blues songs, died Tuesday in New Orleans of complications from two strokes she suffered last year, said Adam Shipley, her manager.

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“She truly was and will remain the blues queen of New Orleans,” Shipley told the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

Among her best-known songs were “Heartbreakin’ Woman” and “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean.”

Wright’s first album, “Heartbreakin’ Woman” in 1991, was named blues album of the year by the Louisiana Music Critics Assn. She frequently performed in Europe and at blues festivals across the country. With her band, the BMWs, she drew large crowds at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.

Wright, who was born March 20, 1948, in New Orleans, didn’t start singing professionally until 1987. Gospel great Mahalia Jackson had grown up with Wright’s mother and was a longtime family friend and musical influence.

Margaret Moth

Photojournalist for CNN

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Margaret Moth, 59, a CNN photojournalist who survived a near-fatal gunshot wound to the face while filming in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the wars there in the early 1990s, died Sunday in Rochester, Minn., where she was in hospice care for colon cancer.

Moth, a camerawoman, was seriously wounded by sniper fire that hit a CNN van in July 1992 in Sarajevo. After several reconstructive surgeries, she returned to the war-torn country two years later, according to a documentary on her life.

Born Margaret Wilson in Gisborne, New Zealand, she later changed her name to Margaret Gipsy Moth.

She said in the September 2009 CNN documentary, “Fearless: the Margaret Moth Story,” that she wanted to have her own name, not the one people are given because of their fathers.

She said she got her first camera when she was 8. She came to the U.S. and worked for KHOU in Houston for about seven years before starting with CNN in 1990.

Moth also covered the Israeli invasion of the West Bank in 2002, the rioting that followed Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984 and other conflicts around the world, including several in the Middle East, according to CNN.

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When militiamen opened fire on protesters in Tbilisi, Georgia, CNN said, she stood her ground and kept her camera running.

Jack Hirshberg, a longtime Hollywood publicist whose career started with Paramount Pictures in 1940, died March 7 at his home in Laguna Niguel after a short illness, said family spokesman Spooky Stevens. He was 92.

During his long career, Hirshberg worked on films including “White Christmas” and “All the President’s Men.”

His books included “A Portrait of All the President’s Men” in 1976.

-- times staff and wire reports

news.obits@latimes.com

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