(I wrote an obituary for Reuters on the wonderful Millie Kirkham Tuesday. But as usual, I wrote more than they needed. Fine with me. Here is an expanded version of the story. She was an incredible woman and a long-time neighbor.)
The woman who gave Elvis Presley what she called the
“woo-woo-woos” in “Blue Christmas” -- a song being played countless times this
holiday season -- has been silenced.
Mildred “Millie” Kirkham, 91, died Sunday in Nashville, but
she left her soaring vocal stylings on countless Nashville recordings by the
likes of Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison, Patsy Cline and George Jones.
Elvis’ original guitarist, Scotty Moore, said Tuesday
morning that he knew Kirkham well from her sessions with Elvis and the
Jordanaires.
“Anytime they needed that high voice on something, she was
always there,” said Moore, who cworked countless recording sessions with
Kirkham. “She just could do that high
voice that blended in with the Jordanaires.”
Moore , who was guitarist on the 1957 “Blue Christmas”
session – a part of Elvis’ Christmas
Album -- remembered Kirkham Tuesday as not only a fine singer, but “she was
a very nice lady.”
“Everybody loved Millie,” said A-Team session guitarist and
Country Music Hall of Fame member Harold Bradley Tuesday.
“I worked with her for a long, long time,” he said. “It’s
impossible to count the sessions we did together. She was a wonderful singer,
but she was also a wonderful person and she always was smiling and never gave
anybody any problems at all. She was a sweetheart to work with.”
Bradley said her distinctive voice “put a topping on the
recording.”
He also said that she didn’t mind sticking her neck out,
which is what she did when coming up with the “woo-woo” harmony on ‘Blue
Christmas.’
Bradley didn’t work on “Blue Christmas,” but the “woo-woo”
is an example of what he called her “unique sound.”
Gail Pollock, Moore’s companion of 40 years and a Nashville
music business veteran, said her good friend “Miss Mille didn’t want to be
remembered for being Elvis’ ‘woo-woo singer,’” but she was resigned to the fact
that she would, indeed, be remembered for that little phrase she inserted
during horseplay with Elvis and everyone else in the session.
”She was just, well, alive,” said Pollock, through her
tears. “She was the most independent thing you’ve ever seen, she did it her way
and her way only and she did it in a way that didn’t offend anybody.”
Pollock noted that Kirkham, who sang for Elvis from 1957
until 1974, performed as recently as this year.
Kirkham’s voice is an integral part of “The Nashville
Sound,” a more cosmopolitan form of country music that in large part was
fashioned by Bradley, his producer brother Owen Bradley and guitarist/producer
Chet Atkins.
“Those vocals are some of the most instantly identifiable in
country and pop music history, said Peter Cooper, a writer/editor at the
Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville.
“They are an indelible part of every song she sang on. There
is no Blue Christmas without the sound of Millie Kirkham,” he said. “She was
also there to contribute to Ferlin Husky’s ‘Gone,’ which was a remarkably
important record in helping to create what came to be known as the Nashville
Sound.”
