Mick Hartley

Obituaries at the BBC, NYT, LA Times, Rolling Stone.

The great thing about Leiber and Stoller songs were how well-crafted they were. They were literate; funny – especially the stuff they wrote for the Coasters:

Leiber said in a 1995 interview that the Coasters songs were among his favorites, "because they could tell a story and have some fun." 

They also included some of his most inventive lyrics.

"Little Egypt" was the story of a stripper who came out on stage "wearin' nothing but a button and a bow" and who "had a picture of a cowboy tattooed on her spine / Saying ‘Phoenix Arizona nineteen-forty-nine.' "

"Down in Mexico" told of a honky-tonk musician who "wore a red bandana / played a blues piana." 

Their other songs included "Hound Dog," "Don't," "Jailhouse Rock" and "King Creole" for, "Poison Ivy" and "Searchin' " for the Coasters, "There Goes My Baby" and "Ruby Baby" for the Drifters, and "Stand By Me" for Ben E. King. 

There must have been so many white kids who got their first introduction to Black Music and the world of Rhythm and Blues through a Leiber and Stoller song. They were also, it's worth remembering, part of the extraordinary story of the Jewish contribution to American popular culture at the time, along with Carole King and Gerry Goffin, Neil Diamond, Neil Sedaka, and nearly all of the other Brill Building songwriters, plus Phil Spector (nevermind, later on, Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Leonard Cohen, Simon and Garfunkel…).

Though we should resist the urge to make out that literate witty lyrics only arrived in Black Music with Leiber and Stoller. Ray Charles, to give just one example, was recording It Should've Been Me back in 1953, and Greenbacks in 1955. The latter in particular has the kind of hip vernacular and storyline that, frankly, Jerry Leiber could only dream of writing:

As I was walking down the street last night
A pretty little girl came into sight
I bowed and smiled and asked her name
She said, "Hold it bud, I don't play that game"
I reached in my pocket, and to her big surprise
There was Lincoln staring her dead in the eyes….

There's a dark mordant humour there as well, which was pretty much absent from Leiber's white pop sensibility. 

Still, writing some of the finest pop lyrics of the past 60 years, and helping to turn R'nB into Rock and Roll, ain't a bad legacy.