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She is best known for her soaring background vocal stylings
on numerous Nashville recordings by the likes of Elvis Presley,
Roy Orbison, Patsy Cline and George Jones.
"Anytime they needed that high voice on something, she was
always there," Scotty Moore, the guitarist for Presley early in
his career, said on Tuesday.
Moore, who played on the 1957 "Blue Christmas" session,
remembered Kirkham as not only a fine singer, but "a very nice
lady."
"Everybody loved Millie," said A-Team session guitarist and
Country Music Hall of Fame member Harold Bradley.
"I worked with her for a long, long time," he said. "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."
He also said that she did not mind sticking her neck out, which
is what she did when coming up with the harmony on "Blue
Christmas."
Gail Pollock, Moore's companion and a Nashville music business
veteran, said her good friend "did not 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.
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 and brother Owen Bradley as
well as guitarist and producer Chet Atkins.
"Those vocals are some of the most instantly identifiable in
country and pop music history, said Peter Cooper, a writer and
editor at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in
Nashville.
The cause of death was complications from a stroke last week,
family members said.
(Writing by Jon Herskovitz; Editing by Eric Walsh)
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