20 Songwriters Behind Hits You Know Who Stayed Unknown

Otis Blackwell made his living pressing pants at a Brooklyn tailor’s shop. In 1955, still doing so, he sold the song “Fever” under a pseudonym and then composed demo versions of what became the hits “Don’t Be Cruel” and “All Shook Up,” which were copied almost verbatim by Elvis Presley. Presley’s manager, Col. Tom Parker, insisted on half the writing credit before allowing Presley to sing the songs. But Blackwell composed the songs alone. The two men never met.

Eden ahbez was a vegetarian drifter who lived in a tent under the Hollywood sign and who lowercased his own name because he believed only the words “God,” “Infinity,” and “Universe” should be capitalized. He handed a rolled-up manuscript to a valet backstage at a theater in Los Angeles in 1947, hoping the valet would give it to Nat King Cole, the jazz singer. Cole recorded “Nature Boy” in 1948, and it went to No. 1 for eight weeks. The composer Herman Yablokoff filed a lawsuit against ahbez, claiming that the tune was his. They settled out of court for $25,000, though ahbez never admitted guilt and continued living in his tent.

Mae Boren Axton was a 41-year-old high school teacher in Jacksonville, Florida, who moonlighted as a songwriter. In late 1955, her songwriting partner, Tommy Durden, showed her a news story about a man who destroyed his ID and jumped to his death, leaving a note reading “I walk a lonely street.” They turned it into “Heartbreak Hotel” in around an hour. She gave Elvis Presley a third of the credit just to get him to commit to recording it. It stayed at number one for seven weeks. Axton went back to teaching.

“Louie Louie” was written by the Los Angeles R&B singer Richard Berry as a sort of cha-cha about a Jamaican sailor. He cut it himself as a throwaway B-side, but needed money to marry his fiancée, so sold the rights outright for $750. An Oregon garage band called the Kingsmen made their own version, which blurred the lyrics to the extent that a rumor sprang up that there was an obscene message buried within the recording. The F.B.I. launched an investigation and found that, no matter how you played it back, it just couldn’t be understood. Berry lived in near-poverty until he won back partial rights decades later.

A Mississippi blues singer turned Chicago laborer named Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup sang his own composition “That’s All Right” in Chicago, earning only a handful of small fees. Decades later, a young truck driver named Elvis Presley sang that same song during a break at Sun Studio in Memphis. The founder, Sam Phillips, immediately realized that Presley possessed a star-quality gift, and it led to his first record deal. A later back-royalty deal for Crudup collapsed when his publisher refused to sign it, and Crudup gave up on music and spent his last years picking corn and cutting timber in Virginia.

Hy Zaret was a Brooklyn attorney with a sideline as a lyricist. In 1954, the film composer Alex North approached him to write lyrics for a prison film called Unchained. Zaret said yes, but the word unchained does not appear once in the final lyric. When Unchained came out in 1955, the song, now titled “Unchained Melody,” was nominated for an Oscar and has been recorded by more than 670 different performers. Zaret quietly continued composing educational songs, virtually unknown to the millions of people who hummed his lyrics every day.

For 20 years, Bart Howard, a cabaret pianist in New York City, had been scribbling highly intricate, Cole Porter-style songs. Then, when one of his publishers asked if he could write something simple and straightforward, Howard sat down and came up with “In Other Words” in 20 minutes. Singer Peggy Lee later talked him into changing the title to “Fly Me to the Moon.” After Frank Sinatra recorded it, it became a standard, and though most people think that Sinatra wrote the song, Howard has been getting a nice pension for more than half a century from it. Astronaut Buzz Aldrin later played the Sinatra version on the Apollo 11 mission.

In 1931, Herman Hupfeld, a songwriter based in Montclair, New Jersey, composed “As Time Goes By” for a Broadway show titled Everybody’s Welcome that soon closed. Years later, while traveling in Europe, a playwright named Murray Burnett came across the song. He incorporated it into his own play, which was never produced. The play went on to become the movie Casablanca at Warner Brothers, with Hupfeld’s song as it was written. Onscreen, actor Dooley Wilson lip-synced to the music played by a studio pianist. Hupfeld did not achieve any similar hits afterward.

In August 1932, Thomas A. Dorsey, a Georgia native who had begun as a blues pianist and traveled with the singer Ma Rainey, was conducting a church revival in Chicago when he received a telegram saying that his wife, Nettie Harper, had died during childbirth. Two days later, their baby son died. Dorsey returned to his piano and wrote “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” a bluesy spiritual. The combination of religious and secular elements would become the blueprint for gospel.

Johnny Marks was a Jewish-American songwriter. He didn’t celebrate Christmas. But his brother-in-law, a Montgomery Ward copywriter named Robert L. May, had created a storybook poem in 1939 about a reindeer with a glowing nose. Marks wrote a song about him in 1949, and even though singing cowboy Gene Autry initially refused to cut it, he relented after pressure from his wife. And from that single take, Autry sold millions of copies of the song, which became the second-highest-selling holiday single ever, behind only “White Christmas.”

Claude DeMetruis was a Black songwriter from Maine who had relocated to Harlem and previously had penned hits for Louis Armstrong and B.B. King. For Elvis Presley’s 1957 film Loving You, he wrote “Mean Woman Blues,” then did “Hard Headed Woman” for 1958’s King Creole. When it was released as a single, it hit No. 1 on the charts, and in August of 1958, it became the first rock ‘n’ roll single ever to be certified Gold by the recording industry’s trade group. DeMetruis’s name, however, remained largely unknown outside of the music business.

Mabel Wayne was a Brooklyn-born concert pianist trained in Switzerland, and worked in a songwriting world that was largely run by men. In 1926, she wrote “In a Little Spanish Town,” a number-one hit for bandleader Paul Whiteman, and the following year penned “Ramona” to promote a silent film. It was one of the first songs to sell more than a million copies of both sheet music and records, although other writers supplied the lyrics. Wayne’s name had already started fading into public oblivion.

Bob Merrill, born Henry Robert Merrill Levan, grew up behind a soda fountain. He never learned how to play sheet music but could pick out a tune on a $1.98 toy xylophone. In 1952, he wrote “(How Much Is That) Doggie in the Window?” for Patti Page, the singer. It was a No. 1 hit. In 1954, with a deadline looming, he dictated the lyrics and melody of “Mambo Italiano” to a studio pianist over the phone. Merrill eventually made it to Broadway by writing “People” and “Don’t Rain on My Parade.” But pop audiences never knew his name.

Jimmy Kennedy, from County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, was a prolific songwriter who composed thousands of songs, though his name rarely appeared anywhere, in print or in person. In 1932, he added lyrics to “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic,” an instrumental composition that had been around for decades. In 1935, inspired by the sunset over a yacht he saw on the Northern Ireland coast at Portstewart, he wrote “Red Sails in the Sunset.” He went on to write “South of the Border” and “Harbor Lights.” Together, these songs amassed more than 30 world number-one hits, recorded by Bing Crosby, Sinatra, Presley, and others.

Jack Yellen was a Polish-born immigrant, a former Buffalo police reporter turned Tin Pan Alley lyricist. Right as the stock market crashed in October 1929, he and his songwriting partner, composer Milton Ager, published “Happy Days Are Here Again,” which was at first played as a dark joke on Wall Street. President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) adopted it as his theme at the 1932 Democratic convention, and it became the party’s permanent anthem. The voters singing his words had no idea who he was.

Arthur Hamilton penned “Cry Me a River” in 1953 as a vehicle for jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald to sing in the 1955 movie “Pete Kelly’s Blues.” The scene didn’t make it into the final cut, and he took the song to Columbia Records. Mitch Miller, the label’s head of talent, rejected the song, saying people would never get the word plebeian. Hamilton instead gave the song to Julie London, his old high school classmate. London recorded the song in 1955 and hit No. 9 on the charts. It’s been covered by more than 500 artists.

In 1957, Felice and Boudleaux Bryant wrote a song, “Bye Bye Love,” that was rejected by over 30 recording acts. Finally, two teenage boys who were practically unknown, Don and Phil Everly, took it and sold a million copies. They followed up with “Wake Up Little Susie” and “All I Have to Do Is Dream.” The Bryants went on to write more than 6,000 songs together. Boudleaux was a former classical violin player, and his wife, Felice, was a former elevator operator. They were the first songwriting couple in Nashville to work independently and full-time.

Stanley Davis Jones was a full-time park ranger for the National Park Service in California’s Death Valley. While out on patrol in 1948, Jones composed “(Ghost) Riders in the Sky,” drawing from a story an old frontiersman had told him as a child about the cattle ghost herds that raced across the night sky. Randolph Scott, then a movie star, heard him sing it by the campfire and took Jones to his publisher. Bandleader Vaughn Monroe’s 1949 recording spent 12 weeks at number one, and the Western Writers of America later named it the greatest Western song ever written.

Ann Ronell (born Ann Rosenblatt), a Radcliffe alumna, interviewed George Gershwin for her college paper. He helped her start as a songwriter. She composed both the music and lyrics for “Willow Weep for Me” in 1932, in dedication to Gershwin, and it went on to be covered by Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, and Nina Simone. The following year, she put words to the tune that became “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” for Disney’s “Three Little Pigs,” which became the studio’s first hit song. Sexist rumors circulated that Gershwin actually wrote “Willow Weep for Me” and let Ronell take credit for the composition, but the song was indeed her work.

Ervin Drake, a New York composer and lyricist, also headed a songwriters’ rights group. In 1946, he co-wrote “Good Morning Heartache,” which Billie Holiday recorded as her signature ballad. During the Korean War, Drake was asked to write a song of hope and produced “I Believe.” Singer Frankie Laine’s rendition of “I Believe” reached the top of the British singles chart for 18 non-consecutive weeks, a record which remains unbroken to date.

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