Amy Winehouse Dead at 27

I don't ever want to do anything mediocre. I hear the music in the charts and I don't mean to be rude, but those people have no soul. Learning from music is like eating a meal.. you have to pace yourself. You can't take everything from it all at once. I want to be different, definitely. I'm not a one trick pony. I'm at least a five-trick pony.

Sad this morning to read about the death of Amy Winehouse, just 27-years-old. Everything about her seemed so tortured sometimes. Everything we saw in the press, anyway. But her music was not tortured. It was lovely. And I’m so sad for all the might-have-beens.

I'm not religious at all. I think faith is something that gives you strength. I believe in fate and I believe that things happen for a reason but I don't think that there's a high power, necessarily. I believe in karma very much though. There are so many rude people around and they're the people that don't have any real friends. And relationships with people - with your mom, your nan, your dog.. are what you get the most happiness in life from. Apart from shoes and bags.

As I write this, the press is saying Winehouse’s death is “unexplained.” We’ll know more soon, I guess. For now, though, we have her music. And her words.

I don't think your ability to fight has anything to do with how big you are. It's to do with how much anger is in you.

The Rough Week That Was: David Carradine & KoKo Taylor

Though neither was particularly young, both were sharply talented, and so a week that takes both actor David Carradine and “Queen of the Blues” KoKo Taylor seems especially ugly.

When I heard Taylor had died, my mind went to a single song, though she performed many. Still, “Wang Dang Doodle” was somewhat anthemic in Taylor’s hands, a call to good times and living well and the sexual overtones never seemed accidental.

Born Cora Walton in 1928, Taylor was a sharecropper’s daughter from Shelby County, Tennessee. Her final public performance was just days ago at the Blues Music Awards on May 7th.

The Daily Telegraph offers up a royal obituary:

Famously capable of standing up for herself, and tolerating no nonsense from any of her male colleagues, she recently declared: "It's tough being out there doing what I'm doing in what they call a man's world." With her big, raw "blues shouter" of a voice, she took her cues from the likes of Bessie Smith, Big Mamma Thornton and Memphis Minnie, later influencing an entire generation of younger female blues artists.

We bow our heads. And listen.