Burt Bacharach
Burt Bacharach composed “I Say a Little Prayer,” “Alfie,” and “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” writing most of his biggest hits with the lyricist Hal David. His catalog of more than 500 compositions includes 48 top 10 hits and nine number one songs, and his work appeared on the Billboard Hot 100 more than 80 times. He won three Academy Awards, two for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in 1970 and one for “Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do)” in 1982; the Recording Academy gave him its Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008; and in 2012 he and David received the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song. Dionne Warwick’s recording of “Walk On By” is 51st on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time (2021).
A Kansas City native born on May 12, 1928, Bacharach studied cello, drums, and piano as a child before his family moved to New York City, where he played in jazz bands in the 1940s. After studying composition in New York, Montreal, and Santa Barbara and serving in the Army, he backed singers in nightclubs and began writing songs. His first hit came in late 1957, when Marty Robbins took “The Story of My Life,” written with Hal David, into the American Top 20 and to number one in England.
Bacharach and David followed with “Magic Moments” for Perry Como in 1958, and from late 1962 they focused most of their writing on Dionne Warwick, who took 15 of their songs into the Top 40 by 1968, among them “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” “Message to Michael,” and “Do You Know the Way to San Jose?” He scored What’s New Pussycat?, Casino Royale, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and with David wrote the songs for the Broadway musical Promises, Promises, whose cast album won a Grammy. The Carpenters took “(They Long to Be) Close to You” to number one in July 1970. Writing with Carole Bayer Sager in the 1980s, he returned to number one with “Arthur’s Theme,” written with Christopher Cross and Peter Allen, and with “On My Own,” sung by Patti LaBelle and Michael McDonald, and “That’s What Friends Are For,” recorded by Warwick, Elton John, Gladys Knight, and Stevie Wonder, won the Grammy for Song of the Year. His 1998 album with Elvis Costello, Painted from Memory, began another partnership, and on At This Time (2005), which won a Grammy, he wrote his own lyrics for the first time.
Bacharach’s life ended on February 8, 2023. He won six Grammy Awards from 21 nominations and received the Recording Academy’s Trustees Award, and “The Look of Love,” “Walk On By,” and Warwick’s “Alfie” are in the Grammy Hall of Fame. He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1972 and received its Johnny Mercer Award in 1996. Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time (2021) also includes Aretha Franklin’s “I Say a Little Prayer” at 117 and Isaac Hayes’s “Walk on By” at 312.
His late work included three songs on Elvis Costello’s 2018 album Look Now, the 2020 EP Blue Umbrella with Daniel Tashian, and Some Lovers, written with Steven Sater, which was nominated for the Grammy for Best Musical Theater Album in 2022. In March 2020 he entered a long-term strategic partnership with Primary Wave Music Publishing, which administers and markets his songs, and in 2023 Doja Cat built “Paint The Town Red” on a sample of “Walk On By.”
