Otis Blackwell

Few songwriters matched the output of Otis Blackwell during rock & roll’s formative decade. Among his enduring works stand Little Willie John’s “Fever,” Elvis Presley’s “Don’t Be Cruel” and “All Shook Up,” Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Great Balls of Fire” and “Breathless,” plus Jimmy Jones’s “Handy Man.”

Although he frequently teamed with Winfield Scott, Eddie Cooley, and Jack Hammer amid the bustling New York R&B community of the 1950s, Blackwell’s writing voice remained as distinctive as those of Willie Dixon or the team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. His contributions helped shape the very language of the emerging genre.

Unusually for the period, his earliest inspirations arrived from outside conventional blues circles. Growing up in Brooklyn, he absorbed the Western films shown at a neighborhood theater, where Tex Ritter became his primary hero; smooth blues stylists Chuck Willis and Larry Darnell also left their mark. A 1952 triumph at an Apollo Theater amateur contest earned him a contract with producer Joe Davis on RCA, followed the next year by sessions for Davis’s own Jay-Dee imprint. While there he cut a steady stream of sides, scoring regional attention with the pulsing “Daddy Rollin’ Stone,” later revived by the Who. After 1955 he largely stepped away from performing, channeling his energy into composition, though scattered singles later surfaced on Atlantic, Date, Cub, and MGM.

Co-written with Cooley, “Fever” marked his initial breakthrough; contractual ties to Jay-Dee forced him to adopt the pseudonym John Davenport. Blackwell never encountered Elvis face to face, yet a steady flow of his material reached the singer, including “Return to Sender,” “One Broken Heart for Sale,” and “Easy Question.” Dee Clark (“Just Keep It Up” and “Hey Little Girl”), Thurston Harris, Wade Flemons, Clyde McPhatter, Brook Benton, Ben E. King, the Drifters, Bobby Darin, Ral Donner, Gene Vincent, and numerous other early rock figures drew on his catalog before the British Invasion reshaped the Brill Building landscape.

Blackwell resumed recording in 1976 with a Herb Abramson-produced collection for Inner City that featured his own interpretations of the compositions that defined his career. A stroke in 1991 left the veteran tunesmith partially paralyzed, yet his legacy prompted the 1994 all-star tribute Brace Yourself!, which drew performances from Dave Edmunds, Joe Ely, Deborah Harry, Chrissie Hynde, Kris Kristofferson, Graham Parker, and bluesman Joe Louis Walker. He passed away at his Nashville residence on May 6, 2002.