He wrote, “Don’t Be Cruel.” He wrote, “All Shook Up.” He wrote, “Return to Sender.” He wrote “Great Balls of Fire” for Jerry Lee Lewis and co-wrote “Fever.”
If you have ever sung along to fifties rock and roll, you have sung his words. His name was Otis Blackwell — and in his entire life, he and Elvis Presley never met. Not once. Not backstage, not in a studio, not for a handshake.
Blackwell was a quiet Black songwriter from Brooklyn who’d started out wanting to sing and turned to writing to pay the bills. He made his own homemade demo recordings in an era before proper multitracking, working out how to lay down a piano part and then overdub his own voice on top. He had no drummer and no drum kit, so he did what any determined man would do — he used a box to bang out the beat.
The moment everything changed for him is one of the great scenes in music history, and it’s cold. On Christmas Eve 1955, Otis Blackwell was standing outside the Brill Building in New York — the famous songwriting factory — with no hat and holes in his shoes, in the snow, trying to earn some Christmas money. An arranger he knew asked if he had any songs on him. He did. He was taken inside, introduced around, and sold six songs for roughly $150.
Otis Blackwell: I Taught Elvis Presley How to Sing
One of them was “Don’t Be Cruel.”
It got passed to Elvis, who recorded it in July 1956 — working it out with his band and running through 28 takes to get it right. It became one of the biggest records of his career. Then Blackwell wrote “All Shook Up”, reportedly sparked when a music executive shook up a bottle of Pepsi in front of him and suggested there was a song in the phrase.
But look at what Blackwell had to give up. Under the publishing arrangement around Elvis, songwriters handed over a large share of their credit and royalties for the privilege of having him record their work — and Blackwell agreed, because the alternative was obscurity. So on some of the biggest songs of the twentieth century, Elvis Presley’s name sits next to his, on songs Elvis had nothing to do with writing.
Otis Blackwell: The Original Man Elvis Presley Imitated
Worse, Blackwell had already sold “Don’t Be Cruel” outright for a tiny sum before any of that, in some tellings for as little as $25.
Elvis, to his credit, knew exactly how good the man was. His publishing manager said Elvis loved Otis Blackwell — that Blackwell had a feel for Black music that Elvis responded to instantly, and that when anything of his arrived, Elvis would listen to it straight away.
So why did they never meet? There’s a story that has followed Blackwell for decades: that he deliberately kept away out of a kind of superstition, worried that meeting the man might break whatever it was that made the songs work. Whether that’s the whole truth or not, the fact itself is not in dispute. They never met.
Otis Blackwell died in 2002 and is now in the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. He didn’t write many songs compared to some of his rivals. He didn’t need to. A man standing in the snow with holes in his shoes wrote the words that came out of the most famous mouth on earth — and the two of them never once shook hands.