Willy de Ville - Legacy

Legacy

About his legacy, DeVille told an interviewer, "I have a theory. I know that I'll sell much more records when I'm dead. It isn't very pleasant, but I have to get used to this idea."

Jack Nitzsche said that DeVille was the best singer he had ever worked with.

Critic Robert Palmer wrote about him in 1980, "Mr. DeVille is a magnetic performer, but his macho stage presence camouflages an acute musical intelligence; his songs and arrangements are rich in ethnic rhythms and blues echoes, the most disparate stylistic references, yet they flow seamlessly and hang together solidly. He embodies (New York's) tangle of cultural contradictions while making music that's both idiomatic, in the broadest sense, and utterly original."

Critic Thom Juric about him, "His catalog is more diverse than virtually any other modern performer. The genre span of the songs he's written is staggering. From early rock and rhythm and blues styles, to Delta-styled blues, from Cajun music to New Orleans second line, from Latin-tinged folk to punky salseros, to elegant orchestral ballads—few people could write a love song like DeVille. He was the embodiment of rock and roll's romance, its theater, its style, its drama, camp, and danger."

His sometime collaborator Mark Knopfler said of DeVille, "Willy had an enormous range. The songs he wrote were original, romantic and straight from the heart."

Thom Jurek wrote about him after his death, "Willy DeVille is America's loss even if America doesn’t know it yet. The reason is simple: Like the very best rock and roll writers and performers in our history, he’s one of the very few who got it right; he understood what made a three-minute song great, and why it mattered—because it mattered to him. He lived and died with the audience in his shows, and he gave them something to remember when they left the theater, because he meant every single word of every song as he performed it. Europeans like that. In this jingoistic age of American pride, perhaps we can revisit our own true love of rock and roll by discovering Willy DeVille for the first time—or, at the very least, remember him for what he really was: an American original. The mythos and pathos in his songs, his voice, and his performances were born in these streets and cities and then given to the world who appreciated him much more than we did."

Singer Peter Wolf of the J. Geils Band said about him, "He had all the roots of music that I love and had this whole street thing of R&B — just the whole gestalt... He was just a tremendous talent; a true artist in the sense that he never compromised. He had a special vision and remained true to it."

Writing in the Wall Street Journal about the posthumous release of DeVille's Come a Little Bit Closer: The Best of Willy DeVille Live (2011), Marc Meyers declared, "There was creative heat and pain in Mr. DeVille's eerie, edgy look and sound. While his punk-roadhouse fusion sailed over the heads of many at home, his approach inspired many British pop invaders of the 1980s, including Tears for Fears, Human League and Culture Club... He was a punk eclectic with a heart of golden oldies and Joe Cocker's pipes. A seedy sophisticate, Mr. DeVille was decades ahead of his time."