Thomas "Pae-dog" McEvoy

Thomas "Pae-dog" McEvoy (December 19, 1947 - November 30, 1987) was a fringe member of Funkadelic and one of the most influential jazz horn players of the 1980s. Born in Islington, Alabama, he graduated from the Juilliard School of Music with honors and taught jazz horn for several years until he received the call from renegade P-Funk member Fuzzy Haskins, asking him to lend his distinctive horn stylings to the 1981 album Connections & Disconnections.

This was to be McEvoy's only appearance on a Funkadelic record, as he fell out with Haskins after a dispute over the relative merits of "P-Funk" and McEvoy's own "Pae-Funk", and also over McEvoy's stated intent to get a funk band to play rock music. He died in 1987 from AIDS after contracting HIV from his long-term girlfriend. In addition to his MusicAL career he left behind him an impressive body of work as an author (under the nom de plume Virginia Van Der Veer Hamilton), including a history of Alabama and a well received treatise on reincarnation.