I first talked about Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller back in 2015. At that time I said
At a time when songs by black R&B artists were classified as “race records” and had a hard time getting airplay on Top 40 radio stations, many of those songs were written by two white Jewish guys, Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller. They had a long list of songs that charted on the US and UK pop charts and on the R&B chart, both as a songwriting duo and as composers working with other songwriters, and artists as diverse as Big Mama Thornton, Hank Snow, Michael McDonald, and Elvis Presley had hits with their songs, many of which were covered by other artists and became hits for them as well.
Here are five by Jerry and Mike…
- Wilbert Harrison, “Kansas City”
- The Coasters, “Yakety Yak”
- Elvis Presley, “Hound Dog”
- The Searchers, “Love Potion Number Nine”
- Peggy Lee, “Is That All There Is?”
Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, your Five for Friday, September 30, 2022.
The Sound of One Hand Typing 
Great songwriters… some of those songs were cornerstones of their generation.
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They’re classiccs. I talk about “standards” all the time and sometimes it seems like the standards came from the first half of the 20th Century, but there has been lot of great music written since then. Lieber and Stoller have written a few that could be considered standards.
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I totally agree about the “standards”
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The musical Smokey Joe’s Cafe was a celebration of their music. It was the first Broadway show I took our daughter to.
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I saw ads for that somewhere during my travels, and it looked good. Maybe I’ll actually get to see it sometime…
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Great oldies!
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They ended up writing songs that appealed to a wide audience, and some will be around forever. That’s a hell of a legacy.
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Yes, it is. I never paid attention to who wrote the songs back then.
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