Great Songs and the Artists Who Created Them: Spanish Harlem

Culture

Jerry Leiber, right, and Mike Stoller, left, 'fueled the birth of rock and roll.'

Author:

By Mark R. Gould

Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller wrote some of the most memorable hits in rock and roll history. The list includes “Hound Dog,” recorded by Elvis Presley in 1956, which turned Leiber and Stoller into the hottest songwriting team in America. They later wrote “Jailhouse Rock,” “Loving You,” “Don’t,” “Treat Me Nice,” and “King Creole” for Presley.

But their soulful sound and lyrics also led to hits for the Drifters including “On Broadway,” written with Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. "Spanish Harlem," which Leiber wrote with Phil Spector, gave Ben E. King his first hit after leaving the Drifters. King's most famous recording, "Stand By Me," was a Leiber-Stoller song on which he collaborated. Peggy Lee’s “Is That all There is?” also topped the charts.

They wrote a series of entertaining hits for the Coasters, including “Charlie Brown,” “Young Blood” with Doc Pomus, “Searchin’,” “Poison Ivy” and “Yakety Yak.” Other hits included “Love Potion Number 9” and “Kansas City.”

“Smokey Joe’s Cafe,” a 1954 hit written for the Robins, became the title of a Broadway musical based on the Leiber and Stoller songbook. It has been staged all over the world and ran for more than five years on Broadway.

According to Rolling Stone Magazine, “More than any other top writing and production team in the Fifties, Leiber (words) and Stoller (music) initiated mainstream white America into the sensual and spiritual intimacies of urban black culture that fueled the birth of rock & roll. Their songwriting captured the essence and nuances of black music and language with a melodic invention, narrative ingenuity and cool hilarity that were true to the source while transcending it – heavy-duty R&B with a pop sensibility and lyric universality.”

There is a rose in Spanish Harlem
A red rose up in Spanish Harlem
It is a special one, it's never seen the sun
It only comes out when the moon is on the run
And all the stars are gleaming
It's growing in the street right up through the concrete
But soft and sweet and dreamin'

There is a rose in Spanish Harlem
A red rose up in Spanish Harlem
With eyes as black as coal that look down in my soul
And starts a fire there and then I lose control
I have to beg your pardon
I'm going to pick that rose and watch her as she grows in my garden

I'm going to pick that rose and watch her as she grows in my garden

(There is a rose in Spanish Harlem)
La-la-la, la-la-la, la-la-la-la
(There is a rose in Spanish Harlem)
La-la-la, la-la-la, la-la-la-la
(There is a rose in Spanish Harlem)
FADE

"Spanish Harlem" was written by Leiber (1931-2011) and Phil Spector and produced by Leiber and Stoller in 1960. During a 1968 interview, Leiber credited Stoller with the arrangement; Leiber said that Stoller had written the key instrumental introduction to the record.

Stoller created the "fill" while doing a piano accompaniment when the song was presented to music executives Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler of Atlantic Records, with Spector playing guitar and Leiber doing the vocal. " In popular music, a fill is a short musical passage, riff, or rhythmic sound which helps to sustain the listener's attention during a break between the phrases of a melody “Since then I have never heard the song played without that musical fill. I presumed my contribution was seminal to the composition, but I also knew that Phil didn't want to share credit with anyone but Jerry, so I kept quiet," said Stoller.

Richard Corliss in Time wrote, “Besides producing the Drifters' hits with Stoller, Leiber wrote one masterpiece that his partner had nothing to do with. Transferring the simile in the Robert Burns poem "My Love Is Like a Red, Red Rose" to uptown Manhattan, he composed the lyric of "Spanish Harlem": "With eyes as black as coal / It looks down in my soul / And starts a fire there and then I lost control. / I have to beg your pardon. / I'm going to pick that rose / And watch her as she grows / In my garden."

Ben E. King album cover "Stoller being unavailable, Leiber gave the word sheet to the 20-year-old Spector, then serving as the pair's assistant. The wunderkind somehow poured a symphonic melody into the 12-bar blues structure and 'solved' the challenge of the run-on lyrics in the middle of the verse. When King recorded the song, as his first single, Stoller added the plaintive "la-la-la" underscoring to help create an improbable, and angelic, hit. Stoller performed another form of magic — the dominant bass line — on King's second solo hit, "Stand by Me." Both records have the same impact today as they did 50 years ago: heavenly.”
Read more: "Remembering Jerry Leiber, the 'Hound Dog' Poet of Rock 'n' Roll."

“Spanish Harlem” has been recorded by 150 artists. Leiber and Stoller were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1985 and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987.

"They corrupted us with pleasure," critic and author John Lahr wrote of the songwriters in the introduction to Graham's Baby, That Was Rock & Roll: The Legendary Leiber and Stoller (1978). "Dancing and laughing, we came of age to their songs."

In the early 1950s, Leiber and Stoller first started writing for Big Mama Thorton, Ray Charles, Joe Turner and other black artists.

“They were, however, very different from each other. Stoller, the trained musician, was the quieter one. The restless Leiber was the big talker,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

Atlantic Records producer Jerry Wexler, said Leiber "was a charming mess — extravagantly verbal, always in a flamboyant dither," Wexler wrote in Rhythm and the Blues: A Life in American Music (with David Ritz).

When Leiber and Stoller met in Los Angeles in 1950 as teenagers, their talent for writing songs together was so immediate that they each described it as "spontaneous combustion." It was not unusual for them to write a song in a matter of minutes.

They were barely 18 when they had their first success with Charles Brown's 1951 recording of "Hard Times." Leiber was still a student at Fairfax High in Los Angeles and Stoller, was a freshman at Los Angeles City College.

Jerome Leiber was born on April 25, 1933, in Baltimore, where his parents, Jewish immigrants from Poland, ran a general store. When Jerry was 5, his father died and his mother tried, with little success, to run a small store in one of the city’s worst slums. When he was 12, she took him to Los Angeles.

“Often I would have a start, two or four lines,” Leiber told Robert Palmer, the author of Baby, That Was Rock & Roll: The Legendary Leiber and Stoller (1978). “Mike would sit at the piano and start to jam, just playing, fooling around, and I’d throw out a line. He’d accommodate the line — metrically, rhythmically.”

In 1952, they visited the bandleader Johnny Otis to listen to several of the rhythm-and-blues acts who worked with him, including Big Mama Thornton, who sang “Ball and Chain” for them. Inspired, the partners went back to Stoller’s house and wrote “Hound Dog.” “The groove came together and we finished in 12 minutes flat. I work fast. We raced right back to lay the song on Big Mama,”said Leiber.

According to Rolling Stone Magazine,”The... thing Stoller, then seventeen, noticed about his future partner, also seventeen, was the notebook in Leiber's hand. "He had lyrics written in it," says Stoller, a classically schooled pianist and serious blues and jazz buff who had been less than keen when Leiber first phoned him about writing songs together. "I looked at it, and I said, 'These aren't songs, these are blues.' Because he would have a line of lyric and ditto marks, then a rhyming line. These were twelve-bar blues progressions. I said, 'I like blues.' And we started writing."

Leiber told Rolling Stone Magazine, “ We used to go to Mike's house, where the upright piano was. We went there every day and wrote. We worked ten, eleven, twelve hours a day.”

ELis Presley Stoller said, “When we started working, we'd write five songs at a session. Then we'd go home, and we'd call each other up. "I've written six more songs!" "I've written four more." Our critical faculties, obviously, were not as developed [laughs], and we just kept on writing and writing.

Leiber: "Hound Dog" took like twelve minutes. That's not a complicated piece of work. But the rhyme scheme was difficult. Also the metric structure of the music was not easy. "Kansas City" was maybe eight minutes, if that. Writing the early blues was spontaneous. You can hear the energy in the work.

Stoller:"In the early days we'd go back and forth note for note, syllable for syllable, word for word in the process of creating.

“Spanish Harlem” climbed the Billboard charts, eventually peaking at #15 R&B and #10 Pop. It was later ranked #349 on Rolling Stone Magazine's list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

Jay and the Americans released a cover version of the song on their 1962 album, "She Cried."

Aretha Franklin sang a cover version of the song in the summer of 1971 that outperformed the original on the charts, charting #1 R&B for three weeks and #2 Pop for two weeks.

A beautiful version was recorded by Laura Nyro, who covered "Spanish Harlem" in her live concert, at the Fillmore East, released in 2004 on the CD "Spread Your Wings And Fly: Live at the Fillmore East May 30, 1971." Nyro released a studio version on the album "Gonna Take a Miracle" in the early 1970s. Nyro has been nominated for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. You can vote for her at: http://rockhall.com/get-involved/interact/poll/

The song was also covered by The Mamas & the Papas, Kenny Rankin, Willy DeVille, Leon Russell, Trini Lopez Percy Faith, Chet Atkins, Neil Diamond, Tom Jones and Herb Alpert's Tijuana Brass. Led Zeppelin covered the song, at least in part, in a live recording of "Dazed and Confused."

Leiber: “We're a unit. The instincts are very closely aligned. I could write, "Take out the papers and the trash" ["Yakety Yak," by the Coasters], and he'll come up with "Or you don't get no spendin' cash."

“That is literally what happened. I think Jerry shouted out that first line, and I started playing that funny shuffle, oom-paka-oom-paka, on the piano. He shouted out the first line, and suddenly I shouted out the second line. And we knew we had something,” said Stoller.

Contact your local library to obtain resources about the history of rock and roll.

Baby That was Rock and Roll: the Legendary Leiber and Stoller
by Robert Palmer

Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography
by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller and David Ritz

A History of Rock Music 1951-2000
by Piero Scaruffi, (2003).

A History of Popular Music before Rock Music
by Piero Scaruffi, (2007).

The Rock & Roll Almanac - The Songs, the Stars, the Scandals, the Stories
by Mark Bego, (1996).

The Rise and Fall of Popular Music: A Narrative History from the Renaissance to Rock n' Roll
by Donald Clarke, (1995) - from medieval Europe through the twentieth century

Virgin Story Of Rock N Roll
by Paul Du Noyer, (1995)

The Rock Pack
by James Henke, and Ron Meer, (1998).

The Rhino history of Rock 'n' Roll
by Eri Lefcowitz, (1997).

The Tapestry Of Delights - British Music 1963-1976
by Vernon Joynson, (1996).

The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll
by Anthony DeCurtis, James Henke, Holly George-Warren, (1992).