Madge-World: Welcome to it.

Jerry Lieber, lyricist, died today. He was 78. He and composer, Mike Stoller, wrote big hits for Elvis, the Drifters among others. Remember, “Hound Dog?” Well, they wrote it for Big mama Thornton and her 1953 rendition simply knocks Elvis on his ass.

I do love this little excerpt from the NY Times obit:

“The earlier market of swing and Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee and Duke Ellington was pretty much gone, but we liked that kind of sound and wanted to imitate it,” he told The New York Times in 1995. “In a way we had helped kill it with what we had done. We had helped bring down the cathedral, and now we didn’t know where to pray.”