A songwriter, Blackwell was the brains behind some of rock and roll’s greatest hits. He wrote over 1,000 songs, including All Shook Up, Return to Sender, and Don’t Be Cruel for Elvis Presley.
“Otis wrote in a style that came to define a new synthesis that Elvis was groping for,” said Presley’s biographer, Peter Guralnick. “From the first moment Elvis heard Don’t Be Cruel, he just snapped on it. It was a perfect song for him.” Yet Blackwell and Presley never met.
Blackwell also wrote Jerry Lee Lewis’s classic Great Balls of Fire, as well as such Lewis hits as Breathless and Let’s Talk About Us. Growing up in Brooklyn, Blackwell was inspired by Tex Ritter singing cowboy movies. “Like the blues, [cowboy music] told a story,” he once said. “But it didn’t have the same restrictive construction. A cowboy song could do anything.” Blackwell died May 6 in Nashville from a heart attack. He was 70.