Chris Whitley - Death

Death

In fall 2005, Whitley canceled his tour due to health issues. His brother, Dan Whitley, commented on November 11, 2005 that Chris was "in a comfortable warm home with hospice care at his disposal". Later that week it was revealed that Whitley was terminally ill with lung cancer. He died on November 20, 2005 in Houston, Texas at the age of 45.

Whitley's death received coverage in Time, the New York Times, National Public Radio and a mention at the 2006 Grammy Awards. After his death, the musician John Mayer said, " Chris Whitley died...with him went a big part of modern American blues music. There aren't many fighters for the cause, and Chris never gave up on his mission. His somewhat prostrated place in pop culture earned him a sidebar of an obituary, but to those who knew his work, it registers as one of the most underappreciated losses in all of music."

Read more about this topic:  Chris Whitley

Famous quotes containing the word death:

    You listen to artists fighting with each other, competing to the death like gladiators, in order to see who is going to get into a show, who is going to make it, who isn’t: who is going to get a full-page ad and who is going to get a half-page. Then I think, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to go off somewhere and just do your work?”
    Howardena Pindell (b. 1943)

    We achieve “active” mastery over illness and death by delegating all responsibility for their management to physicians, and by exiling the sick and the dying to hospitals. But hospitals serve the convenience of staff not patients: we cannot be properly ill in a hospital, nor die in one decently; we can do so only among those who love and value us. The result is the institutionalized dehumanization of the ill, characteristic of our age.
    Thomas Szasz (b. 1920)

    ...here he is, fully alive, and it is hard to picture him fully dead. Death is thirty-three hours away and here we are talking about the brain size of birds and bloodhounds and hunting in the woods. You can only attend to death for so long before the life force sucks you right in again.
    Helen Prejean (b. 1940)