For a generation of rock 'n' roll fans, Otis Blackwell, who died on May 6th aged 70, was no more than a name on record labels, in small type beneath the titles of Elvis Presley's Don't Be Cruel and All Shook Up.
Those inquisitive enough to follow the clue further found Otis Blackwell credited on several other potent songs, including Jerry Lee Lewis's Great Balls Of Fire and Breathless, Jimmy Jones's Handy Man and Dee Clark's Hey Little Girl. He wrote the Peggy Lee hit Fever, though the composer credit went to the artist who first recorded it, Little Willie John.
Don't Be Cruel was one of half-a-dozen songs that Otis Blackwell sold on Christmas Eve, 1955, for $25 each, to the New York publisher Moe Gale. Soon afterwards he cut a demo recording of it, playing his own piano accompaniment, with a drum part tapped out on a cardboard box.
Presley liked the song very much and, when he came to record it, followed Otis Blackwell's interpretation closely.
RCA Records, not divining its potential, issued it as the B-side of Hound Dog, but record-buyers overturned the decision by turning the record over: Hound Dog topped the chart for four weeks, but Don't Be Cruel for nine. It remained on the chart for half-a-year, a milestone not passed until Presley did so a year later with All Shook Up, also based on Otis Blackwell's demo.
According to music business legend "Goldy" Goldmark, Gale's partner in Shalimar Publishing, said to Otis Blackwell, "You can write about anything. Write about this!" Whereupon he shook a bottle of soda.
Otis Blackwell went home and wrote All Shook Up. "After he came out with Don't Be Cruel," Otis Blackwell remembered, "and I heard how close it was to the demo record I had done, I made sure I did all the demos for my songs. I didn't mind that he copied the demos so closely: I figured making good demos was a surer way of getting him to record my stuff."
Although Presley went on to buy more Otis Blackwell compositions, such as Return To Sender and One Broken Heart For Sale, the songwriter was carefully prevented from meeting his best customer. The deal for writers in those days was that if Presley condescended to record their songs, they had to split the composer royalties with him. So it was important, reasoned Presley's manager, Colonel Tom Parker, to keep composers ignorant of the fact that Presley was often enthusiastic about their work and would have recorded it anyway.
Otis Blackwell was born on February 16th, 1932, and grew up in Brooklyn. In 1952, he won a talent contest at the Apollo Theatre and began working in clubs, encouraged by the singer and songwriter Doc Pomus.
Falling in with the veteran recording man Joe Davis, he recorded several singles for his Jay-Dee label, among them Daddy Rollin' Stone (1953), which was revived in the 1960s by the Jamaican blue beat singer Derek Martin and then by The Who.
His plaintive singing style was derived in part from the popular R&B singers Chuck Willis and Larry Darnell, and in part from cowboy music.
"I was a big cowboy fan and liked western music," he told interviewer Bill King in 1989. "You couldn't get that stuff where I lived, so I hung out at a little theatre that played Gene Autry and Tex Ritter movies. Tex Ritter is still my favourite singer."
Otis Blackwell was always modest about his songwriting. "I played a little boogie-woogie and the shuffle, so I wrote over that," he once said. "Then the Beatles came over and knocked that out."
He spent much of the 1960s and '70s in the shadows of pop music history, but after being acknowledged by Stevie Wonder at a 1976 awards ceremony he re-entered the business as a performer, recording albums of his work such as These Are My Songs (1978).
In 1989, he reported: "You know, my thing was always about I Love You, Your Feet's Too Big and that kind of stuff, so I figured I'd sit down and write something different. One of the new songs deals with the situation with guns, and another one deals with the homeless. I've got two or three rock 'n' roll tunes. It's the best stuff I've done in a long time."
He was then dividing his time between his home in Brooklyn and Nashville, where he had been inducted into the Nashville Songwriters' Hall of Fame in 1986.
In 1994, he received a Pioneer Award from the Rhythm & Blues Foundation and saw the release of a tribute album, Brace Yourself, with versions of his songs by Chrissie Hynde, Deborah Harry, Graham Parker and Joe Ely. Otis Blackwell suffered a stroke in 1991 and had been in poor health for some time.
Otis Blackwell: born 1932; died, May 2002