Word: tunesmiths
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...could write the songs. Before Dylan, the decades-long Tin Pan Alley division of labor between singer and songwriter held sway. Dylan's success (and the Beatles') convinced every vocalist he was a poet, and every tunesmith an Elvis. Except in Nashville, the profession of songwriter disappeared. Whatever the lasting results - a lot of ragged vocals, I'd say, and tons of bad songs by singers who should never have picked up a pencil - but the singer-songwriter has been the m.o. ever since...
DIED. CINDY WALKER, 87, Hall of Fame country tunesmith whose hits for performers from Bing Crosby to the Byrds--including You Don't Know Me and In the Misty Moonlight--made the pop or country charts some 400 times; in Mexia, Texas. She drew unequaled praise from peers (Dolly Parton said Walker had "never written a bad song"; Willie Nelson last month released his CD of her songs; songwriting legend Harlan Howard called her the "greatest living songwriter of country music"), and she had Top 10 hits in every decade from...
KEVIN KLINE had no trouble getting COLE PORTER under his skin for this summer's De-Lovely, a movie musical about the master tunesmith's complex relationship with his wife, muse and taskmistress, LINDA LEE PORTER, played by ASHLEY JUDD. Kline--who has experience with sexually ambiguous characters from 1997's In & Out--portrays the composer as a "lover of wine, men and song," he says. He sang 95% of his tunes in the film live rather than lip-synching over a score. "These songs are part of our musical collective unconscious," Kline says. "Or our Muzakal unconscious; we hear...
DIED. OTIS BLACKWELL, 70, pioneer rock-'n'-roll tunesmith; of an apparent heart attack; in Nashville, Tenn. He wrote songs that helped define the careers of Elvis Presley (Don't Be Cruel, All Shook Up), Jerry Lee Lewis (Great Balls of Fire), Peggy Lee (Fever) and James Taylor (Handy Man). A modest man who never met most of the singers made famous by his songs and one of the few black composers of the proto-pop era, Blackwell blended country with rhythm and blues to make music the world still sings...
...Steve Earle/"Transcendental Blues" Speaking of Dukes, this rambunctious tunesmith's latest offering finds him striking a happy truce between his various, sometimes adversarial personae. Typically, Earle's affect has alternated between Good Steve and Bad Steve: On traditional and more introspective material, he tends toward the former, but when he rocks out he often adopts a much raunchier vocal delivery, as if singing like he's gargling with Valvoline will somehow boost his hardass cred. For the most part, Earle sounds at ease and unaffected on his most eclectic offering to date, allowing us to focus on the highly...