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Welcome to the behind the Song Podcast, taking you deeper into classic rock's most timeless tunes.

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Here's your host, Janda Bell, Bottom Nouge.

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You Made Me Cry, I'm Janda. And in this bonus episode of the behind the Song podcast, let's take a look back at the incredible life and career of the late Bobby Whitlock, who passed away on August 10, 2025. Whitlock's contributions in the early 70s to three major albums, some of the most remarkable albums ever made in the history of rock, cannot be overlooked. And so let's get into what Bobby Whitlock did for those albums. Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs by Derek and the Dominoes, All Things Must Pass by George Harrison, both released within weeks of each other in November of 1970, and exile on Main street by the Rolling stones, released in 1972. Bobby Whitlock was a character. You can pull up any of the videos that he made with his wife, the multi talented Coco Carmel, on YouTube and hear and see how unique he was as a storyteller. He was gifted with the colorful, meandering way that men from the south of a certain age have Whitlock was 77 when he passed. When it comes to telling their tales, tangents galore, often hilarious, and above all charming and real. And he was the real deal. A musician born out of poverty in Memphis, Tennessee, the son of an abusive preacher and the first white artist to be signed to Stax Records hip label in the late 60s after recording with them as a session musician while he was still a teenager by the way, with the likes of Booker T and the MGs and SAM and Dave. Bobby Whitlock was a soul man, an R and B man at heart and in his playing, a Memphis Southerner far away from anything to do with country music in Nashville. It's one of the things that made him so valuable as a player later when he would connect and perform with Eric Clapton and George Harrison, white British artists who loved that soulful Memphis piano and organ playing and the incredible singing the that Whitlock could do naturally. Now being signed as a teenager to the hip imprint with Stax didn't yield him a debut album because he left the label before releasing anything, because they wanted him to put out what he called trite bubblegum pop records to try to bank on the British Invasion sound, which he had absolutely no interest in doing. His path changed when he was introduced to Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett Bradley by Donald Duck Dunn, one of his mentors. When Dunn brought them to see Whitlock play with his band. One night in Memphis, Delaney and Bonnie, famed and pivotal husband and wife singer songwriters, scooped Whitlock up to join their act, and off he went to California to perform in a soul review they were putting together in Los Angeles. That led to Delaney and Bonnie touring as Delaney and Vonnie and Friends, which led to holding the opening slot for Blind Faith, where Whitlock's path crossed with Eric Clapton. By Clapton's own account, Delaney and Bonnie and friends were blowing Blind Faith off the stage every single night. A live act that electrified audiences. No wonder, because the band included, at times Jim Gordon and Jim Keltner on drums, Bobby Keys and Jim Price on horns and Carl Radle on bass. Now, some of these names will come up later. Clapton himself joined the band midway through the tour to play lead guitar for Delaney and Bonnie, interested in getting closer to what they were doing than what Blind Faith was doing musically. You can trace so many connections to this time with Delaney and Bonnie and Friends, a group that other musicians loved to watch and wanted to be a part of, or at least poach Players from Leon Russell, John Lennon, George Harrison, Clapton. Everybody wanted these guys. After Blind Faith's one and done tour, Whitlock ended up going to live with Clapton in England, and in fact he appears on Clapton's self titled album, was released in 1970. And during this time with Clapton, Whitlock got hired on the sessions for George Harrison's All Things Must Pass album as a keyboard player. And it's his piano playing that you hear on the song Beware of Darkness, which incidentally is used in the opening credits of the horror film Weapons, which was playing in theaters at the time of Whitlock's passing. While the sessions for All Things Must Pass were happening in the summer of 1960, 1970, Derek and the Dominoes was formed. Clapton, Whitlock and two of their old friends from Delaney and Bonnie's outfit, Carl Radle and Jim Gordon, formed the band and headed to Miami to record their epic one and done album, Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs at Criteria Studios. They were joined by Duane Allman and Dave Mason on some of the song sessions there. I have to note here that Whitlock at that time was dating Paula Boyd, sister of Patti Boyd, George Harrison's wife and the subject of the Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs album, because Eric Clapton was famously in love with his friend George Harrison's wife and in fact would soon marry her himself. So Whitlock was quite in the thick of all that, personally and musically, recording with both Harrison on All Things Must Pass and Clapton on the Dominoes album with what he called subliminal messages going back and forth to one another on the songs on each album between Clapton and Harrison setting each other free. On the issue of Pattie Boyd, Whitlock didn't write or co write any of the songs on All Things Must Pass, but he sure did on the Derek and the Dominoes album. Several songs, including why Does Love Got to Be so Sad, I Looked Away, Keep On Growing Any Day, Tell the Truth, Thorn Tree in the Garden and Bell Bottom Blues. Thorn Tree in the Garden was a song Whitlock wrote about his dog, by the way, after it was given away by his landlord before he took off on tour, a story he hilariously told on his YouTube channel. The song Bell Bottom Blues was the subject of some confusion because Whitlock claimed that he finished the song after Clapton started it, but he was not initially given a co writing credit due to what was said to be a clerical error. In 2015, Clapton formally acknowledged this as fact, and since then Whitlock had been named as co writer of the song, which yielded him the royalties he was owed for writing it. For the most part, much of Whitlock's income for years after the early 70s came from royalties from his performances on Harrison's All Things Must Pass. Now you would think that with all those co writes on the Layla album, Whitlock would have been pretty set financially, but that was not the case. Whitlock released solo albums that did okay in the 70s, and then he went on a hiatus from the music business, living on a farm. He went through divorce, he had two kids. He also had addiction issues dating back to his Derek and the Dominoes days and personal issues. And so needing to make ends meet while not working as a musician, he he sold off those royalties in order to survive. But Clapton eventually came to the rescue. Just before the 40th anniversary of the Layla album, he put his attorneys on the case with the publishing companies who controlled those royalties and bought back Whitlock's rights, restoring his income from the songs he had written or co written. Whitlock said that Clapton just did that out of the blue. One more very interesting and important note about Bobby Whitlock in the 70s, his path also entwined with the Rolling Stones. When he was in London MAKING his second solo album, Raw Velvet, in 1972, he ended up making a contribution to the Rolling Stones Exile on Main street album that came about because he was working with Jimmy Miller, who was also producing Exile as the story goes they were all at Olympic Studios in London. Keith Richards was nowhere around, and Mick Jagger, always fascinated by stories from Southern America, asked Whitlock to tell him about his dad being a preacher, which then led to asking him if he could play with a gospel feel. The result was an impromptu jam session that was recorded with Whitlock cranking the vibrato on the electric piano, Mick Taylor on bass and Charlie Watts on drums while Jagger sang the song I Just Want to See His Face. The song is credited to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, but Whitlock maintained until his passing that he was the piano player on that song. Bobby Whitlock's path was a winding road, and that included his love life. In the late 90s, as he was getting back into creating and releasing his own music, he met Coco Carmel, a musician and studio engineer who was married to none other than his old bandmate Delaney Bramlett. Bramlett was long divorced from Bonnie, the two having split up soon after those heady days in the early 70s. Carmel's musicality is pretty wide ranging. She plays a mean saxophone as well as flute, bass and guitar, and she sings and writes songs. She released several albums with Bramlett during their marriage and and the list of artists she's worked with includes Dr. John and Jon Bon Jovi. Carmel and Bramlett divorced in 2001, at which time she and Whitlock began to make and release music together, and they eventually got married in 2005. So Whitlock was certainly no stranger to love triangles, from George Harrison and Eric Clapton and Pattie Boyd to this newer intrigue between his ex bandmates X and himself. Love was a complicated interweaving of associates. Bobby Whitlock's life ended much happier than it began. He rose up out of his dirt poor upbringing to be a player on the world stage, taking a huge part in three albums that are included in Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest of All Time list. He enjoyed wild highs and deep lows and came out of it all with his sense of humor firmly intact. Married to the love of his life, he was surrounded by his family when he passed after a brief illness at his home in Texas. Of the core members of Derek and the Dominoes, only Eric Clapton remains. Clapton posted condolences on that day to Whitlock's family, and if you'd like to get the story of Whitlock's very interesting life straight from the horse's mouth, I would encourage you to read his own accounting of it. Released in 2010, called Bobby A Rock and Roll Autobiography Eric Clapton wrote the foreword for that book, and in it he mentions Whitlock's staggering talent, making a note that even Mick Jagger wanted him in the Rolling Stones. He also mentions his resilience and the absence of bitterness toward people who took advantage of him. And that's something to aspire to in a world that's often so unkind. To keep that spiritual tenderness is really no small task. On that note, I'll end with a few lyrics from the last verse of Thorn Tree in the Garden, a song Bobby Whitlock wrote for his beloved dog who was cruelly given away by his landlord and who he would never see again. It goes like this and if I never see her face again I never hold her hand and if she's in somebody's arms I know I'll understand But I'll miss that girl But I'll miss that girl so what other players who were not necessarily the stars of the show or of the band made a huge impact like Bobby Whitlock did? Something to think about. Until next time, I'm Janda and this has been behind the song. If you like it, please do subscribe on the way. Much more classic rock and roll.