Mort Shuman

Mort Shuman crafted numerous enduring pop compositions either independently or in tandem with his writing partner Doc Pomus, among them “Save the Last Dance for Me” and “Teenager in Love.” Born in Brooklyn to Jewish immigrant parents, he attended the New York Conservatory yet felt rejected and alienated by neighborhood peers. Aligning himself with Harlem’s black community, Shuman acquired his genuine musical grounding inside the district’s boisterous R&B clubs, absorbing the styles of Ruth Brown and fellow performers. He began writing lyrics at eighteen and achieved early recognition once Elvis recorded numbers such as “Surrender.” The year 1958 introduced him to Doc Pomus, another white devotee of R&B, after which the pair settled into a modest Greenwich Village apartment and launched a thriving songwriting alliance. Securing staff positions at the Brill Building, they supplied hits to the Drifters (“Save the Last Dance for Me” and “Sweets for My Sweet”), Elvis (“Little Sister”), and Dion & the Belmonts (“Teenager in Love”). Those early-sixties creations marked the height of Shuman’s inventiveness—“Last Dance” alone receiving more than four million airplays—though he continued furnishing material for Janis Joplin, Andy Williams, and the Small Faces among others. Hearing Belgian composer Jacques Brel’s work in 1966 prompted an immediate revelation, so Shuman relocated to France and started rendering the songs into English. In the early seventies he composed and staged a musical drawn from those translations, titling it Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris. Several of his own French-language recordings, delivered with a New York accent, also turned into domestic hits and established him as a star in France. In 1991, just before mounting a musical based on his life, Shuman died at fifty-two in a London hospital from complications following a liver operation.