Burt Bacharach, the songwriter who delighted millions with the quirky arrangements and unforgettable melodies of Walk on by, Do You Know the Way to San Jose and dozens of other hits, has died at the age of 94.
Bacharach died on Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles of natural causes, publicist Tina Brausam explained today, Thursday. Over the past 70 years, only Lennon-McCartney, Carole King and a few others have rivaled Bacharach's genius for instantly catchy songs that continue to be sung, played and hummed long after they were written.
The author, born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1928 and raised in New York, had a streak of top ten hits from the 1950s to the 21st century, and his music was heard everywhere from movie soundtracks and radios to home players, whether it's Alfie and I Say a little prayer or I'll never fall in love or This guy's in love with you. Dionne Warwick was his favorite performer, but Bacharach, often toe-to-toe with lyricist Hal David, also created top-notch material for Aretha Franklin, Dusty Springfield, Tom Jones, and many others.
Elvis Presley, the Beatles, and Frank Sinatra were among the countless artists who covered his songs, with more recent artists to sing or sample it, including the White Stripes, Twista, and Ashanti. The Walk on by single was covered by everyone from Warwick and Isaac Hayes to British punk band The Stranglers and Cyndi Lauper.
Bacharach grew up with jazz and classical music and had little attraction to rock when he broke into the business in the 1950s. His sensibilities often seemed more aligned with Tin Pan Alley than with Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and other writers who emerged. later, but rock songwriters appreciated the depth of his seemingly old-fashioned sensibility. “The shortened version of it is that it has something to do with easy listening,” said Elvis Costello, who wrote the 1998 album Painted from Memory with Bacharach, in a 2018 Associated Press interview.
He received classical training at schools in Montreal, New York and California and, after a stint in the army, became an accompanist pianist for musicians such as Vic Damone, the Ames Brothers and his first wife, Paula Stewart. He also worked as an arranger and conductor for Marlene Dietrich when she toured Europe in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Bacharach succeeded in many forms of art. To his credit there are six Grammys, a Broadway award for Promises, promises and three Oscars. He received two Academy Awards in 1970, for the score of Two Men and One Fate and for the song Raindrops keep fallin' on my head (shared with David). In 1982, he and his then-wife, lyricist Carole Bayer Sager, won an Oscar for Arthur's Best That You Can Do. Other of his movie soundtracks included What's new, pussycat?, Alfie and Casino Royale. In 2012, Barack Obama presented her with the Gershwin Award, after having sung Walk on by during his election campaign.
Bacharach had four wives, after divorcing Paula Stewart in 1958, he married three more times, to Angie Dickinson (1965), Carole Bayer Sager (1982), and Jane Hansen (1993). He and Hansen, who remained married until his death, had two children, Oliver and Raleigh. Nikki Bacharach, his daughter with Dickinson, committed suicide in 2007, at age 40, after a history of mental health problems.
Despite his eventful love life, Bacharach formed his most enduring ties with work. He was a perfectionist who could spend hours adjusting a single chord. Sager once observed that Bacharach's life routines remained essentially the same, only the wives changed.
