James Wesley Voight — who performed and wrote as Chip Taylor — died on March 23 in his eighty-sixth year, and the tributes have continued rolling in all week. He is Angelina Jolie's uncle and Jon Voight's younger brother, facts that every major obituary has deployed in the first paragraph as though they were the point. They are not the point.

The point is that in 1965 Taylor wrote "Wild Thing" in roughly twenty minutes, the Troggs turned it into a number-one hit the following year, and Jimi Hendrix played it at Monterey in 1967 in a way that permanently altered what rock and roll guitar could sound like. Taylor also wrote "Angel of the Morning," which Merrilee Rush first recorded and Juice Newton later took to number four on the Billboard Hot 100. Two songs. The catalog of a hundred other men's careers compressed into a footnote.

What the tributes have gotten right is the texture of the man's later life: the gambling addiction that nearly consumed him, the comeback records he made in his sixties and seventies, the collaborations with Carrie Rodriguez that showed a songwriter still at full capacity. Rodriguez posted this week: "Yesterday we lost an American songwriting giant. Chip Taylor taught me so much about music, about life."

The Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival remembered him as the self-effacing figure who would show up at the Cactus Cafe and mention almost as an afterthought, "Oh yeah, and I wrote 'Wild Thing.'" For Taylor, the songs were not the monument. The writing was the life.

He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. He deserved it before they got around to it.

-- CAMILLE BEAUMONT, New York