BBC News: Mama Cass 'didn't choke to death on a ham sandwich', daughter says

This is an attempt to right a rock wrong. One of the most famous musical myths is simply not true. 

The daughter of Mama Cass Elliot from folk vocal group Mamas and the Papas, Owen Elliot-Kugell, has a clear message to share about her mother's cause of death: "There was a ham sandwich, but she didn't eat it and she didn't choke on it. So enough with the jokes."

And there have been a lot of jokes, for almost half a century, including by Mike Myers as Austin Powers. 

In the 1997 film, the time-switching special agent is writing a list of friends he knows in London and then scoring them out when he remembers they have died. After naming Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin he mournfully sighs: "Mama Cass. Deceased. Ham sandwich."

Cass Elliot (Mama was a nickname which she preferred not to use later in her career) sang on some of the mid-60s most memorable singles, including California Dreamin', Monday Monday and Dream a Little Dream. Her powerful voice was a crucial element of the harmonies that made the Mamas and the Papas so loved.

By 1974, she had gone solo and had just completed a two-week run at the London Palladium, when she died at the age of 32 in the Mayfair flat she had borrowed from her fellow American singer Harry Nilsson. The autopsy stated her cause of death as a heart attack and that there were no drugs in her system. 

Her only child, Owen, was seven at the time and back at home in the US when she was told the news. 

Now, ahead of the 50th anniversary of her mother's death on 29 July, she has written a memoir My Mama, Cass, both as a tribute and as a way of correcting the sandwich-based inaccuracy.

"It's beyond frustrating, almost immeasurable," she says down the line from LA, explaining how it has been, having to live with the ham sandwich legend for 50 years. 

"Even as a little girl, when I was hanging out with my friends at school, they didn't know who my mom was, but I would go home to have playdates with some of these kids and it was kind of frequent that one of their parents would make a comment to me like, 'Hey, did your mom really die choking on a ham sandwich?'

"It bothered me because it was such a horrible story, and I knew that it wasn't true. And it just felt so cruel to have a rumour like that perpetuated. It tortured me."