Death had a busy day on Monday.We lost a honky tonk angel, a bassist in the shadow of Motown and the man who powered heavy metal -not on guitar but on an organ. Not cool, right?
Kitty Wells was the first country superstar (and the third person to be inducted into the country music hall of fame) after hitting it big with "God Didn't Make Honky Tonk Angels" in 1952, five years before Patsy Cline broke through. Cline was always too big an iconoclast, too much an individual to represent her genre. Wells did a better job. A very good twanger in her own rights,s he didn't over shadowed country, she blended in. Kitty was 92.
Motown bassist Bobby Babbitt blended in as well, it took that movie "Standing In The Shadow Of Motown" to get him out of it. But once you figured out who he was, you heard him everywhere from del Shannon to Edwin Starr, as well as countless Motown songs. As Sue Whitall noted in the Detroit news: "It was Babbitt's bass providing the funky bottom on Stevie Wonder's "Signed, Sealed, Delivered," the Temptations' "Ball of Confusion," "Inner City Blues" by Marvin Gaye, among many others.". He was 74 years old.
The difference between Deep Purple and hundreds of other Heavy Metal pretenders was Jon Lords pumping keyboards. Take a listen to the staggering power behind "Highway Star". All those death metal and hard metal, UK guys like Iron Maiden, owe a debt to Deep Purple. Often immediate, not replicated, Jon Lord was 71 years old.