Delaney Bramlett
Delaney Bramlett was a singer, guitarist, songwriter and producer from Mississippi who led Delaney & Bonnie & Friends with his wife, Bonnie Bramlett, from the late 1960s until 1972. Their touring band drew in Eric Clapton, George Harrison, Leon Russell, Dave Mason and Duane Allman; he produced Clapton’s first solo album and co-wrote its “Let It Rain,” and his songs include “Superstar” and “Never Ending Song of Love.”
He was born in Pontotoc, Mississippi, on 1 July 1939. After service in the US Navy he moved to Los Angeles in 1959 to make a career in music, writing songs and playing sessions, and in 1964 he joined the Shindogs, the house band on the television show Shindig!, which also featured Leon Russell.
In 1967 he met the session singer Bonnie Lynn O’Farrell; they married a year later and, with Russell’s help, formed Delaney & Bonnie & Friends. Their first album, Home, came out on Stax in 1969, followed the same year by Accept No Substitute on Elektra. George Harrison briefly signed them to Apple, until Elektra objected, and Bramlett showed him how to play slide guitar. The duo opened for Blind Faith on its 1969 American tour, and Clapton, that band’s guitarist, took to playing in their backing group and then joined it outright when Blind Faith broke up.
Clapton helped bring them to Atco, which released Delaney & Bonnie & Friends On Tour with Eric Clapton in 1970, with Harrison and Mason also aboard; it became the most commercially successful record of their career. Bramlett produced Clapton’s first solo album, Eric Clapton (1970), co-writing “Let It Rain” with him, and Clapton credited him with persuading him that he could sing. When Clapton returned to Britain he took most of the band with him, and they became Derek and the Dominos. The Bramletts carried on with new players, among them Duane and Gregg Allman, and made To Bonnie from Delaney (1970) and the mostly acoustic Motel Shot (1971). “Never Ending Song of Love” reached No. 13 on Billboard’s Hot 100 in the summer of 1971.
Atco turned down the couple’s next album, which Columbia released in 1972 as D&B Together, their last as a duo. Afterward Bramlett worked as a producer, for artists including Etta James, the Staple Singers and Elvin Bishop, and made occasional records of his own. His songs had long lives: “Superstar,” written with Leon Russell, was recorded by the Carpenters, Bette Midler, Luther Vandross and Sonic Youth, and “Never Ending Song of Love” by more than a hundred artists, among them Ray Charles, George Jones, Tammy Wynette, Patty Loveless and Dwight Yoakam. His last album, A New Kind of Blues, came out on Magnolia Gold Records in 2008, after a six-year gap. He died in Los Angeles on 27 December 2008, aged 69.
