Holland-Dozier-Holland, the Maestros of MotownĮven simply mentioning Motown invokes a swagger and confidence in me that is palpable. While American consumers loved music written by African Americans and Jewish people, it would take another decade or more before they’d pay to hear anyone but white Christians sing it, helping to launch the great songwriter-artist divide. They married their love of the commercially under-appreciated musical style with an undisputed pop talent, and the rest is history. Leiber and Stoller, themselves marginalized for being Jewish had written largely for black artists and took a lot of inspiration from the black music they grew up around. Elvis is often both credited and criticized for being inspired by and/or stealing from black styles of music, and bringing them into the mainstream, very white pop music industry. They saw the value and quality of black music at the time and brought it into the mainstream limelight. Elvis was an icon in his time, but the amazing music that was written for him made him a dominating figure in music history.Įnter Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, the songwriting duo that wrote some of his biggest hits, including: “Hound Dog,” “Jailhouse Rock,” and “Kansas City.” They were some of the first people to use the music coming out of black America and pair it with elaborate production values. Elvis was the perfect icon for his era - his good looks, southern charm, and his ability to turn on the sexual bravado when he needed to was the perfect rallying point for a youth counterculture that wanted to push up against conservative forces like McCarthyism. If you were a record executive why would you trust some unknown singer from the middle-of-nowhere in Mississippi to write the song when you could just go with someone working in your office to bring the hits?Įlvis Presley was lucky to be able to work with many talented songwriters over the years and managed to find success with most of them, perhaps speaking to his own ability to internalize the songs so well.
Singers in the 1950s and ’60s weren’t typically presumed to be writing their own music. So we wanted to shed a bit of light on the historical relationships between popular performers and their trusted songwriters (as well as any other contributors) who helped make them the biggest and brightest stars.
It proved more profitable to sell the myth of the singular star than to publicly credit the entire chain of talented people who contributed to the songs we love. But the music industry’s marketing machine found that fact inconvenient to the narrative they preferred to sell, and relegated the work of songwriters and producers to the liner notes. Even if the performer does write their own melody or lyric, often a producer will come in and work out how the song will ultimately come together on a larger scale. In reality, however, most pop music hits are written by someone other than the performer. The people on the screen, they must be the beautiful, rare geniuses that they are portrayed to be… When we think about how the world’s most popular music is written, recorded, and performed, it is both more convenient and more glamorous to imagine that the entire process is undertaken by a single individual or band.
Guest post by Evan Zwisler of Soundfly's Flypaper
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