The mayor of a small town in Tennessee that hosts the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival died Monday of Covid-19, officials said.
Manchester Mayor Lonnie Norman was hospitalized earlier this month before dying “after a valiant fight against COVID-19,” the city said in a Facebook post Monday.
In August, Norman was elected to his third term as mayor of Manchester, a town with a population of nearly 10,000 people in Coffee County, according to WPLN.
Manchester is home to the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival, which typically brings in more than 80,000 concertgoers annually. The music fest was initially postponed this year before ultimately being cancelled altogether due to the pandemic.
“The incredible, Mayor Lonnie Norman, of our hometown Manchester, TN has been hospitalized due to COVID-19,” the festival wrote on Twitter on Saturday. “The Bonnaroo family sends him all the love and hopes for a quick and speedy recovery.”
He was the city’s first Black mayor when he served in 1991, WPLN reported. Vice Mayor Marilyn Howard has taken over mayoral duties in the interim.
Coffee County reported its highest seven-day average of Covid-19 cases in the past week, according to the Tennessee Department of Health. The county has logged a total of 1,557 cases and 17 deaths since the start of the pandemic.