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A Brooklynite who was equally entranced by R&B and country (claiming his favorite singer was C&W mainstay Tex Ritter), Otis Blackwell began his career with 1953's "Daddy Rollin' Stone," which has been covered repeatedly. But large-scale success as a performer eluded him. "I didn't dig it. Got more into writing," he said. When Elvis Presley recorded one of his songs, the result was 1956's epochal "Don't Be Cruel," which was simultaneously Number One on the pop, R&B and country charts. Blackwell subsequently gave Elvis "All Shook Up" and "Return to Sender," and wrote a cluster of hits for other artists, including "Great Balls of Fire" for Jerry Lee Lewis. And even though Blackwell's own singing career never took off, it's been noted that his vocals on demos of songs that Presley recorded were followed faithfully by the King. "At certain tempo, the way Elvis sang was the result of copying Otis' demos," said Blackwell's friend Doc Pomus. Oddly, Blackwell and Presley never met.
The mercurial singer-writer-producer's 25-year track record stands on its own: writing or co-writing 30 Top 20 R&B singles for himself or with the Chicago-based group Public Announcement, chart-topping assistance for Puff Daddy, Sparkle and Kelly Price; and the first song to ever debut at Number One on the Hot 100, Michael Jackson's "You Are Not Alone." His ballads fly higher than anyone else's, his sex jams started evocatively naughty (1993's "Bump N' Grind") and ended up evocatively surreal (2005's "Sex in the Kitchen" and, of course, the 30-part "Trapped in the Closet"). "My talent is more than just sexual songs," said the only man who wrote for the Notorious B.I.G. and Celine Dion. "There was a time I desperately needed for the world to know that I was no-category guy. My whole goal in life was to reach that certain success where people will say, 'Hey, that guy can do anything. He's the Evel Knievel of music. He's jumping over 15 buses!'"
If the personal is political, Loretta Lynn was Nashville's down-home feminist revolutionary. "I looked at the songbooks and thought that anyone could do that," she told American Songwriter, "so I just started writing." Lynn was also a self-taught guitarist, whose earliest songs were in keys seldom used by Nashville session pros. She always took more pride in her writing than in her perky singing, and much of the lyrical material in her 16 country chart-toppers was drawn from her difficult marriage to Oliver "Doolittle" Lynn, whose alcoholism and infidelities inspired domestic dramedies like "Don't Come Home a-Drinkin' (With Lovin' on Your Mind)." "I had to have a real reason to write a song," Lynn said. "I wrote them about true things." These included the benefits of contraception ("The Pill") and the plight of divorcees ("Rated X"), which were banned by many country stations but became huge sellers nonetheless.
They scored their first big hit with the Soul Survivors' "Expressway to Your Heart" in 1967, but by then the team of Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff had already been working together for five years, and over the following 15, they'd define the sound of Philadelphia soul and help invent disco. Gamble wrote most of their lyrics, and keyboardist Huff most of their music, but their roles were flexible, and so was their style: they wrote poignant love songs ("Me and Mrs. Jones"), rubbery political funk ("For the Love of Money"), and richly orchestrated dance music with the rhythms that became disco tropes (like the Soul Train theme "TSOP"). Gamble and Huff launched Philadelphia International Records in 1971, assembling a crew of musicians and engineers around them, and throughout the Seventies, they were near-permanent fixtures on the R&B charts, working with singers including the O'Jays, Lou Rawls and Teddy Pendergrass.
Jackson's innate musical genius could be heard on the earliest Jackson 5 chart-toppers. And he came into his own with the sterling disco pop of 1979's Off the Wall and the monumental Thriller, where he got sole writing credit on "Billie Jean," "Beat It" and "Wanna Be Startin' Something." By Bad in 1987, he was getting a writing credit on nearly every song on the record. Jackson's collaborators and co-writers marvel at the way his dance-floor classics sprang full-formed from their creator's head. That, Michael said, was the only way he could write: "If I sat down at a piano, if I sat here and played some chords. . .nothing happens." Even more remarkably, the singer imagined the full arrangements for these songs as he wrote them, working from the basic rhythmic elements all the way up to the smallest ornamentations. "He would sing us an entire string arrangement, every part," engineer Rob Hoffman recalls. "Had it all in his head; harmony and everything. Not just little eight-bar loop ideas. He would actually sing the entire arrangement into a micro-cassette recorder complete with stops and fills."
Burt Bacharach studied classical composition with French composer Darius Milhaud and was part of avant-garde icon John Cage's circle. But he chose pop music as a career and started writing songs with lyricist Hal David, who had a knack for matching wistful sentiments to Bacharach's unconventional jazz chords and constantly shifting time signatures. ("It all counts," Bacharach said. "There is no filler in a three-and-a-half-minute song.") Their first hit came in 1957, but their partnership really took off five years later, when they started working with singer Dionne Warwick. Between 1962 and 1971, Warwick charted with dozens of Bacharach/David songs like "I Say a Little Prayer," "Walk on By" and "Anyone Who Had a Heart." Their songs were hits for other artists, too: Richard Carpenter of the Carpenters, who went to Number One with "Close to You," called Bacharach "one of the most gifted composers who ever drew a breath. . .unorthodox never sounded lovelier or more clever." 2b1af7f3a8