Chris Cornell

Cornell attended Christ the King, a Catholic elementary school, where he performed for the first time in front of a crowd, singing the 1960s anti-war song "One Tin Soldier".

When he was in seventh grade, his mother pulled him and his sister out of Catholic school for fear they were about to be expelled for being too inquisitive.

Christopher John Cornell ( Boyle; July 20, 1964 – May 18, 2017) was an American musician best known as the lead vocalist, rhythm guitarist, and primary lyricist for the rock bands Soundgarden and Audioslave.

He also had a solo career and contributed to numerous movie soundtracks.

Cornell was the founder and frontman of Temple of the Dog, a one-off tribute band dedicated to his late friend, musician Andrew Wood.

Several music journalists, fan polls and fellow musicians have regarded Cornell as one of the greatest rock singers of all time.

Cornell was born Christopher John Boyle on July 20, 1964, in Seattle, Washington, where he was raised.

His parents are Edward F. Boyle, a pharmacist of Irish Catholic descent, and Karen Boyle (née Cornell), an accountant of Jewish background and self-proclaimed psychic.

Cornell was one of six children; he had two older brothers and three younger sisters.

He and his siblings adopted his mother's maiden name, Cornell, following their parents' divorce when they were teenagers.

In the early 1980s, Cornell was a member of a Seattle-based cover band called The Shemps, which featured bassist Hiro Yamamoto.

After Yamamoto left The Shemps, the band recruited guitarist Kim Thayil.

Cornell and Yamamoto stayed in contact, and after The Shemps broke up, the pair started jamming together, eventually bringing Thayil in to join them.

Soundgarden was formed in 1984 by Cornell, Thayil, and Yamamoto, with Cornell originally on drums and vocals.

In 1985, they enlisted Scott Sundquist to take over as drummer so that Cornell could concentrate on vocals.

Soundgarden's first recordings were three songs that appeared on a compilation for C/Z Records called Deep Six.

In 1986, Sundquist, who by that point had a wife and a child, decided to leave the band and spend time with his family.

Cornell is considered one of the key figures of the 1990s grunge movement.

He is well known for his extensive catalog as a songwriter, his nearly four-octave vocal range, and his powerful vocal belting technique.

He recalled the episode in a 1994 interview with Request magazine: "With a religion like that, it's not designed for anyone to question. Being young people who have a natural curiosity and half a brain, you're going to start finding inconsistencies, which there are tons of in organized religion. We both sort of made it clear in classroom situations that we didn't get it. 'Explain this to me.' And they couldn't, so we started creating a lot of problems."

Cornell subsequently attended Shorewood High School, where he later dropped out.

Cornell traced his musical influences back to Little Richard via The Beatles.

He spent a two-year period between the ages of nine and eleven solidly listening to The Beatles after finding a large collection of Beatles records abandoned in the basement of a neighbor's house.

Cornell described himself at this age as a loner; he was able to deal with his anxiety around other people through rock music.

During his teenage years, he spiraled into severe depression, dropped out of school, and almost never left the house.

At the age of 12, Cornell had access to alcohol and marijuana; he used them daily by 13, stopped for a year, but relapsed at age 15 for another year until he turned to music.

At 14, he had a bad PCP experience and later had panic disorder and agoraphobia.

Cornell took piano and guitar lessons as a child.

He credited his mother for saving his life when she bought him a snare drum, the instrument he first adopted on his path to becoming a rock musician.

Before he was a successful musician, Cornell worked as a busboy, as a dishwasher, as a fish monger at a seafood wholesaler, and as a sous-chef at Ray's Boathouse in Seattle.

Cornell released four solo studio albums, Euphoria Morning (1999), Carry On (2007), Scream (2009), and Higher Truth (2015); the live album Songbook (2011); and two compilations, The Roads We Choose (2007) and Chris Cornell (2018), the latter released posthumously.

He received a Golden Globe Award nomination for his song "The Keeper", which appeared in the 2011 film Machine Gun Preacher, and co-wrote and performed "You Know My Name", the theme song to the 2006 James Bond film Casino Royale.

His last solo release before his death was the charity single "The Promise", written for the ending credits for the 2016 film of the same name.

Across his entire catalog, Cornell sold 14.8 million albums, 8.8 million digital songs, and 300 million on-demand audio streams in the U.S. alone, as well as over 30 million records worldwide.

He was nominated for 18 Grammy Awards, winning three.

Cornell was ranked No. 4 on the list of "Heavy Metal's All-Time Top 100 Vocalists" by Hit Parader, No. 9 on the list of "Best Lead Singers of All Time" by Rolling Stone, No. 80 on the list of the "200 Greatest Singers of All Time" by Rolling Stone, and No. 12 on MTV's "22 Greatest Voices in Music".

He was voted "Rock's Greatest Singer" by readers of Guitar World.

Cornell struggled with depression for most of his life.

He was found dead in his Detroit hotel room in the early hours of May 18, 2017, after performing at a Soundgarden concert an hour earlier at the Fox Theatre.

His death was ruled a suicide by hanging.