This is #8 in a very occasional series plucked from my files of quotes and snippets and what-have-you. I've spent a lot of time over the last year or so immersed in the early history of rock-and-roll, both because I find it inexhaustibly fascinating [a shout-out to Andrew Hickey's stupendous "History of Rock Music in 500 Songs" podcast] and because I'm thinking of writing something "serious" about the way that several arcane provisions of US copyright law affected the structure and development of the music industry in the '40s and '50s. So this post, and probably others into the future, will be full of rockandroll-iana.
- Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller started writing songs together as teenagers, two East Coast Jewish music nerds recently transplanted with their families to Los Angeles. They had their first (of many) #1 hits before either turned 20 years old—"Hound Dog," recorded in 1953 by Big Mama Thornton (and by many, many others in subsequent years). They went on to become one of the most successful songwriting duos in the early years of rock-and-roll, with a long string of mega-hits (Jailhouse Rock, Stand By Me, On Broadway, There Goes My Baby, Love Potion #9, Yakety-Yak . . .) to their credit.
Stoller was the better technical musician of the two, a talented classically-trained pianist (a big Bartok fan, apparently) whose true passion was jazz and rhythm-and-blues. He was able to persuade the great jazz pianist James P. Johnson to give him lessons in stride/boogie-woogie piano, a style that Johnson himself had basically invented back in the 1910s and 20s, and which Johnson had taught to, among others, Fats Waller and Willie ("The Lion") Smith, and whose influence on a whole generation of great jazz pianists is impossible to overstate.
