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Wolfgang Spahr, Longtime Billboard Correspondent for Germany, Dies

Wolfgang Spahr, a longtime Billboard reporter for Germany, is dead. Read his obituary here.

Spahr was well known in the German music industry for running a newsletter, in addition to writing for Billboard, and perhaps even better known for being a true character, a gregarious figure who seemed to know, and joke around with, most of the people he covered. The song was an instant hit, and it aged into a classic — covered by numerous artists, used in a commercial with the name of the cream substitute Rama and remembered by millions of German music fans. May’s stories about a cowboy and an Apache chief became part of German pop culture, made into movies and TV shows – think Little House on the Prairie with the popularity of the X-Men comics – and the festival attracts hundreds of thousands of fans a year.

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