A private funeral for rap legend Heavy D will be held at a historic black Baptist church in a northern suburb of New York City.
Grace Baptist Church of Mount Vernon announced on Friday that the funeral for Heavy D had been scheduled for November 18.
The New York-born rapper died at a Los Angeles hospital last Tuesday after collapsing outside his home. He was 44.
New York Daily News reported that there would be a private viewing on November 17 at Grace Baptist Church from noon to 7pm.
A wake would immediately follow, ending at 8pm, the church official said.
The next day, family and friends will gather at an invitation-only funeral service at the century-old church.
Sean (Diddy) Combs, Mary J. Blige and the Wayans brothers are among the celebrities invited to attend the private service on Friday, TMZ.com reported.
Dwight Arrington Myer, aka Heavy D of Heavy D and the Boyz, which had hits with Now That We Found Love, Who’s the Man and Somebody for Me, was one of the genre’s top stars in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Grace Baptist Church’s website says its congregation was founded by five black women in 1888.
The New York Daily News reported that investigators completed an autopsy on Wednesday morning, but declined to give a preliminary cause of death until toxicology tests had been completed; the tests could take six weeks.
“He was taking medication, so we want to see what the levels were,” Winter said.
The Westchester County-bred musician weighed 156kg at the time of his death, Winter said.
“He had a touch of pneumonia, maybe from travelling. He just got back from England,” cousin Ruddy Phillips, 50, told The News after speaking with the entertainer’s dad.
Obituaries this week reported that Heavy D also worked alongside many of the music industry’s top stars, including Michael Jackson, on his song Jam, and blues guitarist BB King, on the track Keep it Coming.
The Washington Post interviewed hip-hop historian Joan Morgan. She said: “He was a consummate performer. Here’s a guy who could dance and sing and rap and also had this real commitment to make music that his parents could listen to and he would not be embarrassed.
“At at time when hip-hop got increasingly more violent and increasingly more misogynistic, he really appreciated black women and black beauty.”
After a successful musical career, he transitioned smoothly to the executive suites of Uptown Records in the mid-1990s and later Universal Music.
He was the first rapper to head a major music label, Morgan said, and he paved the way for performers-turned-label-executives such as Jay-Z, Kanye West and Lil Wayne.
At Uptown, Heavy D helped nurture the budding career of rhythm-and-blues singer Mary J Blige and hired an auspicious intern, Sean “Diddy” Combs, now an entrepreneur and record mogul. – Sapa-AP, Washington Post and New York Daily News