Sonny Curtis, who wrote such classics as “I Fought the Law,” “Walk Right Back” and the theme for the “Mary Tyler Moore” show, “Love Is All Around,” died Friday after a sudden illness, according to a social media post by his daughter. Curtis also worked closely with Buddy Holly and performed with his band, the Crickets, both before and after the legendary singer’s death. He was 88.
A native of Texas, Curtis was born in 1937 to a musical family — his uncles performed in a bluegrass group called the Mayfield Brothers. He met Buddy Holly at the age of 15 and formed a group with him, opening for such legends as Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins, and played guitar on several of his recordings. He left Holly to tour with Slim Whitman before rejoining Holly and his band the Crickets in 1958, shortly before Holly’s death in a plane crash in February of 1959 — “the day the music died,” as Don McLean’s “American Pie” described it.
Curtis took over as frontman of the Crickets and the group released his song “I Fought the Law” on their first post-Holly album, “In Style With the Crickets.” While neither that song nor another from the album, “More Than I Can Say” (cowritten with drummer Jerry Allison) were hits for the Crickets, they became major hits when covered later by other artists: the former by the Bobby Fuller Four (and later the Clash) and the latter by Bobby Vee (and later by Leo Sayer).
Curtis was drafted into the Army in 1959 and wrote “Walk Right Back” while in basic training. During a three-day pass he played it for Allison, who by then was playing drums for the Everly Brothers. Allison duly took it back to the brothers and Curtis had another Top 10 hit (Anne Murray also scored a hit with it in the 1970s).
Yet Curtis’ most widely known song, “Love Is All Around,” was first released in 1970 as the theme for the “Mary Tyler Moore Show,” a monumentally popular TV program that ran for seven years. As noted by the Hollywood Reporter, Curtis had been given a four-page treatment of the show “about a young girl who gets jilted in this small community in the Midwest and moves to the big city in Minneapolis and gets a job at a news station and rents an apartment she has a hard time affording,” as he told CBS Sunday Morning.
“I homed in on the part that she rented an apartment she had a hard time affording and wrote, ‘How will you make it on your own? … this world is awfully big, and this time you’re on your own.’”
Curtis continued to write and perform, both as a solo artist and with the Crickets, into his seventies. His other hits include “The Straight Life” (covered by Glen Campbell and Bobby Goldsboro), “I’m No Stranger to the Rain” (Keith Whitley), “A Fool Never Learns,” (Andy Williams) and others. He was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1991.
