Bobby Whitlock, the Memphis-born keyboardist and singer-songwriter who with Eric Clapton helped found Derek and the Dominos, the supergroup behind the landmark song “Layla,” and who also played, along with Mr. Clapton, on George Harrison’s 1970 tour de force triple album, “All Things Must Pass,” died on Sunday at his home in Ozona, Texas. He was 77.
His death was confirmed by his manager, Carol Kaye, who said he had been in hospice care for cancer.
In the 1970s, at the peak of his career, Mr. Whitlock released four solo albums and played on celebrated records like the Rolling Stones’ “Exile on Main St.” (1972), but he was best known for his multiple career stops with Mr. Clapton.
The two first played together in Delaney & Bonnie & Friends, a rock-soul revue led by the husband and wife Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett. The act was known as much for its famous “friends” — including Duane and Gregg Allman, Leon Russell and Rita Coolidge, as well as Mr. Clapton and Mr. Harrison — as for hits like “Never Ending Song of Love,” which rose to No. 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1971.
In 1970, Mr. Whitlock and Mr. Clapton peeled off with two other contributors to that band, the bassist Carl Radle and the drummer Jim Gordon, to form Derek and the Dominos. (Duane Allman also recorded with the group)
The band was short-lived, but its only album, the two-disc “Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs” (1970), became a canonical work for Mr. Clapton, who was establishing himself as a solo artist after era-shaping runs with the Yardbirds, Cream and Blind Faith. Mr. Whitlock also played on Mr. Clapton’s first solo album, released that same year.
Mr. Whitlock was far more than a guitar master’s sideman. With Mr. Clapton, he co-wrote six of the nine original songs on the Derek and the Dominos album, including the haunting “Bell Bottom Blues,” and contributed one of his own, the wistful “Thorn Tree in the Garden.”
In his view, Derek and the Dominos should have become a rock colossus. “We were better than anybody,” Mr. Whitlock said in a 2015 interview with the site Best Classic Bands.
The group was a mix of sparkling talents and volatile personalities, and “everybody was doing entirely too much drugs and alcohol,” he added. “And then Jimmy Gordon wanted everything that Eric had — he wanted to be a big superstar and wasn’t content and happy to be just the greatest drummer on the planet and in the very best band on the planet.”
Mr. Gordon went on to occupy a special tier of rock infamy. Ultimately diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, he was convicted of murdering his mother in 1983 and died in prison 40 years later.
“Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs” received mixed reviews upon its release, but it came to be known as both a remarkable debut album and a remarkable swan song. “With the Dominos, we only did everything once,” Mr. Whitlock said in a 2017 interview with the author Frank Mastropolo. “We only did one small tour of England, we did one studio album, we did one U.S. tour. Everything was once.”
Robert Stanley Whitlock was born on March 18, 1948. His mother was 15 when she became pregnant with him, he noted in “Bobby Whitlock: A Rock ’n’ Roll Autobiography” (2011, with Marc Roberty), and his father was a firebrand Southern Baptist preacher who beat him regularly with a six-foot leather strap.
As a teenager in the mid-1960s, Bobby preferred soul and R&B to the Beatles and spent his free time hanging around the studios of Stax Records, where he befriended the likes of Otis Redding, Isaac Hayes and the Staple Singers.
His first instrument was guitar, but when a friend’s soul group, the Short Cuts (later the Counts), needed an organist, Mr. Whitlock — a quick study — bluffed his way into the job. He later went solo and signed with Hip, a Stax subsidiary, but he happily pivoted in 1968, when the Bramletts saw him perform on the nightclub circuit and invited him to join their band.
The idea for Derek and the Dominos was cemented when Mr. Whitlock was staying with Mr. Clapton at Hurtwood Edge, the guitarist’s sprawling country house in Surrey.
Around that time, the four original members were serving as a backing group for Mr. Harrison at the sessions for “All Things Must Pass,” the former Beatle’s ambitious first album after stepping out from the shadows of John Lennon and Paul McCartney.
On “All Things Must Pass,” Mr. Whitlock played Hammond organ on many tracks and grand piano on “Beware of Darkness,” later heard as the opening music of the 2025 horror film “Weapons.” He also sang with Mr. Harrison on the No. 1 hit “My Sweet Lord.”
In 1972, Mr. Whitlock released his first solo album, called simply “Bobby Whitlock,” a showcase of rootsy Southern rock with gospel flavorings. He later teamed with CoCo Carmel, a musician whom he married in 2005, to release multiple albums, starting with “Other Assorted Love Songs” in 2003.
In addition to his wife, Mr. Whitlock’s survivors include a daughter, Ashley Faye Brown; two sons, Beau Elijah Whitlock and Tim Whitlock Kelly; and a sister, Deborah Wade. His early marriages ended in divorce.
Although he made ample contributions to Derek and the Dominos, Mr. Whitlock did not share writing credit for the group’s most famous song: “Layla,” Mr. Clapton’s ode to his secret passion for his future wife, Pattie Boyd, who was then married to his close friend Mr. Harrison.
Nor did Mr. Whitlock play the soaring piano part in the song’s elegiac instrumental coda, which was memorably used in a climactic scene of the Martin Scorsese film “Goodfellas.” It was provided by Mr. Gordon.
“I hated it,” Mr. Whitlock told Mr. Mastropolo. “I couldn’t stand it. I resisted with the gusto of 40 hound dogs in heat.”
“In my opinion,” he explained, “the piano part taints the integrity of this beautiful heart-on-the-line, soul-exposed-for-the-world-to-see song that Eric Clapton wrote entirely by himself.”
Alex Williams is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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