I expect that we’ll start getting some good, meaty obituaries and appreciations for Earl Palmer coming in shortly–because of how close his passing came to our deadline, we have something more in-depth in mind for our November issue than we were able to get together for October–but here are some of the better Palmer obituaries so far:

The Telegraph in London provides a fairly detailed, colorful recounting of his younger days:

As a boy Earl relished the marching bands that accompanied the funerals in New Orleans. From the age of five he had a tap dancing act – accompanied by his mother on the road in Ida Cox’s Darktown Scandals Revue, he came to realise that a sudden influx of “aunts” consisted of his mother’s lesbian lovers. New Orleans was tough, and Palmer remembered seeing two women take knives to one another; meanwhile, “a top pimp wasn’t an outcast, he was a big shot”.

Pitchfork‘s obituary is pretty perfunctory, but it does link to video of the opening to New Orleans Drumming with Earl Palmer. In it, he’s playing Fats Domino’s “I’m Walkin'” with Allen Toussaint on piano, Bill Huntington on bass and Red Tyler on sax.

The Los Angeles Times‘ obituary is fairly typical, letting Palmer’s lengthy list of credits do the talking. It does, however, address the central issue in the Palmer story for New Orleanians: Why did he trade something groundbreaking here for a faceless, conventional role in Los Angeles? Backbeat, his memoir with Tony Scherman, helps address the question (and it is mandatory reading). Here’s another take:

“When you’re working in the studios, you’re playing every genre of music,” Hal Blaine, his friend and another prolific session drummer, said in an interview Saturday. “You might be playing classical music in the morning and hard rock in the afternoon and straight jazz at night. . . . That’s where they separate the men from the boys. If you’re going to be a studio musician, it’s the top of the ladder. You can’t go any higher than that in the music business.”