Bobby Whitlock obituary

The Guardian

2 days ago

In a career that found him collaborating with some of the most illustrious musicians of his era, including George Harrison, the Rolling Stones, Sam & Dave, Booker T & the MGs, Dr John and Stephen Stills, it was his work with Eric Clapton that rubber-stamped Bobby Whitlock's place in rock'n'roll history. In particular, he will be remembered for his writing and playing contributions to the album Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs (1970), often considered Clapton's finest achievement.
Clapton first came across Whitlock, a keyboard player and singer, who has died of cancer aged 77, when he was a member of the rock-soul act Delaney & Bonnie and Friends (formed by the married couple Bonnie and Delaney Bramlett). Clapton liked them so much that he recruited them as the opening act for his band Blind Faith on their sole tour in 1969, and they would also appear on Clapton's first solo album, Eric Clapton (1970). The live album On Tour with Eric Clapton (1970) cracked the US Top 30 and was Delaney & Bonnie's most successful release.
Whitlock quit the Delaney & Bonnie band after recording their album To Bonnie from Delaney (1970), and hooked up with Clapton in England. Along with two further Delaney & Bonnie alumni, the bassist Carl Radle and the drummer Jim Gordon, the foursome became Derek and the Dominos, a name designed to give Clapton a measure of anonymity after his 'supergroup' excesses with Cream and Blind Faith. As Whitlock put it to the Best Classic Bands website: 'He wanted to be Derek, not Eric. He wasn't ready to step into his role as a solo artist at that time.'
The Layla double album (recorded at Criteria studios in Miami) was a pivotal release in Clapton's history. It reached only No 16 on the US chart and did not chart at all in Britain, but its reputation grew steadily over succeeding decades. It was a momentous feat for Whitlock too, since he co-wrote six of the album's songs with Clapton, including Bell Bottom Blues, Anyday, Tell the Truth and Why Does Love Got to Be So Sad?, and played acoustic guitar and sang on his solo composition Thorn Tree in the Garden.
This was a feverishly creative period, since the Dominos band came together while all four members were simultaneously involved in recording Harrison's triple album All Things Must Pass, his first solo effort since the demise of the Beatles. When Harrison took a break from the sessions, he invited the foursome to use the studio, which enabled the Dominos to record their first single, Tell the Truth, with Roll It Over (another Clapton/Whitlock composition) for the B side. Intriguingly, while Clapton was inspired to write Layla's title song by his infatuation with Harrison's wife, Pattie Boyd, Whitlock dated Pattie's sister, Paula, while he was in Britain. Whitlock later sold his rights to royalties from Derek and the Dominos, but Clapton and his management helped him to get them back.
Bobby was born in Memphis, Tennessee, to James Whitlock and his wife, Ruby, and grew up in the city's Millington district. James was a Baptist preacher renowned for his fiery oratory, traces of which could be discerned in his son's singing. Bobby also first played the piano in his father's church. As a teenager, Bobby could frequently be found at Memphis's renowned Stax Records, where he got to know many of the local artists, including Booker T & the MGs, Albert King and Sam & Dave. He added handclaps to Sam & Dave's 1968 classic I Thank You. 'It was a great time and town for music then, especially soul music,' he recalled. 'It was loose and all about music everywhere that you turned.'
As a professional musician Whitlock cut his teeth playing keyboards in the local bands the Short Cuts and the Counts, and Stax planned to record an album with him on its subsidiary label, Hip Records, making him the first white artist signed to Stax. However, Whitlock felt that they were trying to turn him into a lightweight pop artist – 'It turned out to be bubblegum garbage music that they recorded with me' – so he was delighted to be recruited by the Bramletts instead. He travelled to Los Angeles to join them, and as he recalled it: 'We started Delaney & Bonnie and Friends, just Delaney and Bonnie and myself.'
Whitlock asserted that Derek and the Dominos were 'the very best band on the planet … We were better than anybody,' but their progress was cut short by a surfeit of drugs and alcohol. The rock critic Robert Palmer described how he visited the Layla recording sessions in Miami and found that 'there was a lot of dope around, especially heroin, and when I showed up, everyone was just spread out on the carpet, nodded out.'
The Dominos split in 1971 after an abortive attempt to record a second album, though all the band members as well as the Bramletts and Harrison appeared on Whitlock's debut solo album, Bobby Whitlock (1972). Reflecting on the Dominos in the Houston Press, Whitlock commented that 'I am very happy that the one studio record was the 'one' and that was it. It never will have anything other than itself to be compared to.'
He would release three more solo albums during the 70s, while his other musical activities included adding vocals to Dr John's album The Sun, Moon & Herbs (1971) and an appearance on the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street (1972). For the latter, Whitlock claimed he had co-written the track I Just Want to See His Face, but was not given a songwriting credit. In 1973 he played organ on Down the Road, the second album by Stephen Stills's band Manassas, but found himself deprived of a songwriting credit for the track City Junkies, which was based on a jam between Whitlock and the drummer Dallas Taylor.
During the 80s and 90s, Whitlock largely retired from music and retreated to a farm in Mississippi. He made a musical comeback in 1999 with the album It's About Time. On Christmas Eve 2005 he married CoCo Carmel, a musician who had been married to Delaney Bramlett from 1987 to 2000, and the pair of them recorded several albums and made regular live appearances. From 2006 to 2021 they lived in Austin, then moved to Ozona, Texas. In recent years he became a keen painter, and frequently had his work displayed in galleries.
In 2010 he published a memoir, Bobby Whitlock: A Rock'n'Roll Autobiography, co-authored with Marc Roberty and with a foreword by Clapton. In May 2024 he was awarded a brass note on the Beale Street Walk of Fame in Memphis, an event he commemorated with a new song, Walking on Beale Street.
He is survived by CoCo, his children Ashley, Beau and Tim, and his sister, Debbie.
Robert Stanley Whitlock, musician, singer and songwriter, born 18 March 1948; died 10 August 2025