Gail Zappa

Died: October 7, 2015.

Gail Zappa, who has died aged 70, was the widow of the rock music legend Frank Zappa and developed and protected his legacy for many years. She released nearly 40 albums of his music after his death and fought anyone who she thought was breaching his copyright; she was also an advocate for musicians' rights generally and famously took on iTunes and Steve Jobs.

Born Adelaide Gail Sloatman, she married Frank Zappa at the age of 22. He was four years older than hre and was already well known for his experimental, avant-garde rock music – he and his band-mates in Mothers of Invention had just released their first album Freak Out!

They fell in love quickly (Frank Zappa said it took just a couple of minutes) and were married in 1967. The following year, they bought a house in Los Angeles which became the headquarters for the family business and still was on Gail Zappa's death. It was from the house that she ran the Zappa Family Trust.

Gail Zappa was born in Philadelphia, the daughter of a nuclear physicist with the United States Navy. In 1959, when she was still a teenager, her father was posted to Britain and she began to work as a model in London. By the 1960s, she was at the heart of the swinging city and modelled for a number of leading photographers including David Bailey.

After dropping out of school, she worked for a time as a secretary in the London offices of the US Office of Naval Research and Development before returning to New York and enrolling in the Fashion Institute of Technology. She then hitchhiked across America and in Los Angeles encountered the producer Ken Fowley with whom she recorded as Bunny and Bear.

She met Zappa when she was working at the Whiskey A Go Go nighclub on Sunset Boulevard and was said to have been unimpressed with him at first. However, the pair bonded on their second meeting and within a year they were married.

As they got to know each other, Gail was put through an early test by Frank, although she did not know it: he played her his record collection and gauged her reaction. "I didn't know it was a test," she said. "and he never told me that I passed."

Zappa then became closely involved with managing her husband's career and after his death from pancreatic cancer in 1993, this often involved lawsuits with record companies she thought were using Frank's music without the proper permission.

Before his death, Frank Zappa had actually asked his wife to sell his recordings and get out of the music business altogether, but Gail defied his request. She created the Zappa Family Trust in 2002 to manage his intellectual property and between 1994 and 2015 released many albums of previously unheard material. Shortly before her death, she released Dance Me This which she said was Zappa's 100th, and final, album.

Gail Zappa also became infamous for her confrontations with whoever crossed the line, as she saw it. She denounced cover bands who played her husband's music without permission and in 2008 unsuccessfully sued Zappanale, a German music festival, for using the family name and her husband's signature facial hair as its logo.

She also once wrote Steve Jobs a letter full of four-letter words complaining about iTunes and she did it, she said, to protect the integrity of her husband's work.

"My job is to make sure that Frank Zappa has the last word in terms of anybody's idea of who he is," she said. "And his actual last word is his music."

The couple had four children, who became famous for their unusual names, particularly their daughter Moon Unit. It is said that the name came about as Zappa was about to leave for a European tour. He told his wife "You can name it Moon or Motorhead." She said she added Unit because, with the birth of their eldest daughter, they all became a family unit.

In a statement, her family paid tribute to Zappa. It said: "Gail was a doe-eyed, barefooted trailblazer, giving equal value to her domestic and professional responsibilities as matriarch of the family and overseer of all Zappa enterprises.

"Gail passionately advocated to establish clear definitions of intellectual property and copyright laws on behalf of not just her husband, but all artists."

Away from music, Zappa campaigned for the Democrats and was a friend of Tipper Gore, the wife of the former vice president Al Gore. In the 1980s, the two women disagreed over Mrs Gore's organisation Parents Music Resource Centre, which campaigned for warning labels on records that contained violent and sexually explicit lyrics. Zappa described that plan an ill-conceived piece of nonsense that violated the First Amendment.

Gail Zappa is survived by her children Moon Unit, Dweezil, Ahmet and Diva.