Great Songwriters
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In 1969, Pete Townshend wrote a rock opera about a boy who goes deaf, mute, and blind after witnessing something traumatic, only to become a spiritual guide once the trauma breaks and his senses return. By the mid-1980s,...
In 1965, at the height of the British Invasion, the American Federation of Musicians quietly stopped issuing the Kinks work permits to perform in the United States. The ban lasted four years, kept in place after a string...
Isaac Hayes was trying to get David Porter out of the Stax Records restroom and back to work. Porter yelled back through the door, "Hold on, I'm comin'." Before he'd finished buttoning his pants, the two of them realized...
On New Year's Day 1958, a 20-year-old inmate at San Quentin State Prison watched Johnny Cash perform for the men inside. Merle Haggard was serving time for a botched burglary, one stop in a string of arrests and short-li...
Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry met, started writing together, and got married, essentially all in the same stretch of 1962. Over the next few years they wrote some of the defining singles of the girl-group era, "Da Doo R...
"Sweet Caroline" has been sung by strangers in bars, sports stadiums, and wedding receptions for more than fifty years, and most of them have no idea who Caroline actually was. Neil Diamond eventually told the story hims...
By BMI's own count, "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'," written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil with producer Phil Spector, has been played more than eight million times on American radio and television, more than any othe...
By the mid-1970s, country radio had banned enough Loretta Lynn songs that she could joke about it from the stage. At the 1975 Academy of Country Music Awards, she told the crowd she wouldn't be performing "The Pill," her...
Harlan Howard once summed up an entire genre in six words: country music, he said, is "three chords and the truth." It's one of the most quoted lines in Nashville, repeated so often it's practically become the industry's...
In 1958, a seventeen-year-old in Los Angeles wrote a song built on words he'd seen on his father's tombstone: "To have known him was to have loved him." Phil Spector's father, Ben, a steelworker, had killed himself nine ...
Neil Sedaka died on February 27, 2026, at 86, and the obituaries mostly led the same way: the man behind "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do," "Calendar Girl," and "Laughter in the Rain." That's fair. It's also only half the stor...
To start Motown Records in January 1959, Berry Gordy borrowed $800. It didn't come from a bank or an investor. It came from his family's cooperative savings fund, a pool the Gordys had built by contributing ten dollars a...
In 1973, Burt Bacharach and Hal David wrote the score for a big-budget musical remake of "Lost Horizon." It was supposed to be an event. It was, instead, a disaster, not one song from it became a hit, and several were ou...
Sometime in the late 1950s, broke and working as a radio DJ and part-time music teacher around Houston, Willie Nelson sang his guitar teacher, Paul Buskirk, a song called "Family Bible." Nelson needed money more than he ...
In the summer of 1966, at the absolute peak of his fame, Jacques Brel told his musicians he had nothing more to give and walked away from live performance. Not slowed down, not took a break. Stopped. He played a farewell...
On January 24, 1953, a song called "I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive" reached number one on the Billboard country chart. It knocked "Jambalaya (On the Bayou)" out of the top spot. Also a Hank Williams record. He'd ...
Two months before Oklahoma! opened on Broadway in March 1943, its prospects looked bad enough that a producer reportedly walked out of the New Haven tryout at intermission. A cable summarizing the industry's verdict made...
Every songwriter's career profiled in this series, including Johnny Mercer's own, eventually mentions the Songwriters Hall of Fame. Mercer is the reason that sentence is possible to write at all. He was the organization'...
Hoagy Carmichael graduated from Indiana University's law school in 1926, passed the state bar, and joined a law firm in Florida. He was, on paper, a working attorney. He was also the composer of "Stardust," one of the mo...
In 1933, MGM asked Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart for a song for a movie called Hollywood Party. They wrote one, called it "Prayer (Oh Lord, Make Me a Movie Star)," and the studio cut it before the film was finished. Th...
In 1932, the musical Of Thee I Sing became the first musical ever to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The award went to Ira Gershwin, lyricist, and to book writers George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind. It did not go to ...
Irving Berlin wrote more than a thousand songs, seventeen Broadway scores, and the best-selling single in recorded history, and he never learned to read or write sheet music. He played piano in exactly one key, F-sharp, ...- Irving Berlin wrote more than a thousand songs, seventeen Broadway scores, and the best-selling single in recorded history, and he never learned to read or write sheet music. He played piano in exactly one key, F-sharp, ...