{"id":135751,"date":"2025-08-11T01:32:11","date_gmt":"2025-08-11T01:32:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/135751\/"},"modified":"2025-08-11T01:32:11","modified_gmt":"2025-08-11T01:32:11","slug":"derek-and-the-dominos-keyboard-player-bobby-whitlock-dead-at-77","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/135751\/","title":{"rendered":"Derek And The Dominos keyboard player Bobby Whitlock dead at 77"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bobby Whitlock, the keyboard player and guitarist who performed with Derek And The Dominos, Eric Clapton<\/a> and George Harrison<\/a>, has died at the age of 77.<\/p>\n

Whitlock\u2019s death was confirmed in a statement from his manager: \u201cWith profound sadness, the family of Bobby Whitlock announces his passing at 1.20am on August 10 after a brief illness. He passed in his home in Texas, surrounded by family.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Whitlock was born in Memphis in 1948 and cut his teeth at the city\u2019s Stax Studios, watching sessions by the studio\u2019s fabled house band. In 1967, he became the first white artist to be signed to the Stax label.<\/p>\n

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After playing with local soul bands Short Cuts and The Count, he joined husband and wife duo Delaney & Bonnie, playing on the albums Home and Accept No Substitute, both released in 1969.<\/p>\n

Via Delaney & Bonnie, Whitlock came into the orbit of Eric Clapton, appearing on the former Cream<\/a> and Blind Faith<\/a> guitarist\u2019s self-titled 1970 debut solo album. The same year, Whitlock also played on George Harrison\u2019s All Things Must Pass<\/a> album.<\/p>\n

But it was as a member of Derek And The Dominos alongside Clapton, guitaits Duane Allman, bassist Carl Radle and drummer Jim Gordon that Whitlock scored his biggest success. The band\u2019s 1970 debut album, Layla And Other Assorted Love Songs<\/a>, was home to the hit single Layla<\/a>.. Whitlock wrote or co-wrote six of the double album\u2019s 14 songs, including Bell Bottom Blues<\/a> and<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom the side of the stage, I took mental notes of their performance\u2026 it was their keyboard player Bobby Whitlock that I watched like a hawk,\u201d said Elton John, whose band opened for Derek And The Dominos on their US tour, later said of Whitlock, who also made an uncredited contribution to the Rolling Stones\u2019 Exile On Main Street<\/a> album.<\/p>\n

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Whitlock released four solo albums throughout the 1970s, Bobby Whitlock (1972), Raw Velvet (1972), One Of A Kind (1975) and Rock Your Sox Off (1976), but he largely stepped back from the music industry during the 80s and 90s, releasing just one single, the Maggie Bell duet Put Angels Around You, in 1983 and making a handful of session appearances.<\/p>\n

He returned in 1999 with the album It\u2019s About Time., and went on to release a string of studio and live albums with his wife, CoCo Carmel.<\/p>\n

In 2024, Whitlock was inducted into the Beale Street Walk of Fame in Memphis.<\/p>\n

Speaking to Classic Rock just before his induction, he said: “I’m from Memphis. I got my (musical) bones there. I was born there and Don Nix heard me in a band and brought Duck Dunn to hear me, and then everything started to unfold for me. I was turned on to the whole of Stax; I could go and come as I pleased, so I got to hear all the greats perform and did hand claps with Isaac Hayes and David Porter on Sam & Dave’s I Thank You. That was my breaking in.<\/p>\n

Recalling his time recording Layla And Other Assorted Love Songs, he said: “When we started, Eric and I were in the other part of this big sound stage room, standing in the back of it, and (executive producer) Tom Dowd, who I knew from Stax, walked up and he had two papers; ‘Here’s your charts, fellas’ \u2013 he called us fellas,. And then he went walking back into the studio. I told Eric, ‘You’re gonna have to go talk to this man. We don’t have charts, y’know? I don’t read no charts and I don’t do no numbers.’ He said, ‘I don’t know him; you go talk to him and tell him to stay back there in the control room.<\/p>\n

“And I did. I said, ‘Hey man, I gotta tell ya we won’t be needing any charts. We don’t do numbers and we want you to stay behind the control panel back there and we’ll stay out here.’ And it all worked out. He respected what we were doing. He knew we were a unit, so he just stayed there and punched ‘record’ the whole time and it was a rompin’ rock’n’roll ride.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bobby Whitlock, the keyboard player and guitarist who performed with Derek And The Dominos, Eric Clapton and George…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":135752,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[171,975,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-135751","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-music","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115007556848656730","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135751","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=135751"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135751\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/135752"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=135751"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=135751"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=135751"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}