Sonny Curtis, the singer and guitarist who played with Buddy Holly, fronted The Crickets and wrote and performed “Love Is All Around,” the indelible theme song for The Mary Tyler Moore Show, has died. He was 88.
Curtis died Friday after a “sudden illness,” his daughter, Sarah, announced on Facebook.
Curtis also wrote the rebellious “I Fought the Law” in 1958 and recorded it with The Crickets following the death of Holly, Ritchie Valens, J.P. Richardson (“The Big Bopper”) and pilot Roger Peterson in a plane crash on Feb. 3, 1959.
The Bobby Fuller Four took the song to No. 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1966, and it also was memorably covered by The Clash, Roy Orbison, Hank Williams Jr., Green Day, the Dead Kennedys and dozens of other acts over the years.
His songwriting credits also included “Walk Right Back” and “More Than I Can Say,” top 10 hits on the Billboard Hot 100 for The Everly Brothers and Leo Sayer in 1961 and 1980, respectively.
To rectify an oversight, Curtis was inducted by special committee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2012 alongside three fellow Crickets: drummer Jerry Allison, bassist Joe B. Mauldin and rhythm guitarist Niki Sullivan. (They were not inducted with Holly in 1986.)
In 1970, Curtis wrote and performed “Love Is All Around” — known for such lyrics as “Who can turn the world on with her smile?” — which accompanied footage of Moore tossing her hat into the air in the middle of a busy Minneapolis intersection for her fabled CBS sitcom that ran from 1970-77.
He 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,” he told Mo Rocca on CBS Sunday Morning in 2022.
“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.’”
The second youngest of six children, Curtis was born on May 9, 1937, in Meadow, Texas. His parents, Arthur and Violet, were cotton farmers. He learned to play the guitar when he was 4, inspired by his uncles, Edd, Herb and Smokey, who as The Mayfield Brothers were one of the first bluegrass outfits in Texas.
Curtis was 15 when he first met Holly, and they formed a band with Holly’s high school friend Bob Montgomery. They performed on bills with Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley, and he played lead guitar on Holly’s 1956 song “Blue Days, Black Nights” and on his own composition, “Rock Around With Ollie Vee.”
After high school, Curtis left Holly to tour with Slim Whitman, then joined Buddy Holly & The Crickets in late 1958. He became the frontman after Holly’s death.
The Crickets recorded “I Fought the Law” for their first post-Holly album, 1960’s In Style With the Crickets, but it was not a hit for them. The LP also included “More Than I Can Say”; written by Curtis and Allison, it was a hit for Bobby Vee in 1961 and for Sayer, who took it to No. 2 in 1980.
Curtis had been drafted into the U.S. Army in 1959, and during basic training in California, he wrote “Walk Right Back” and performed it for Allison, then the drummer for The Everlys. The singers recorded it and brought it to No. 7. (Anne Murray also had a hit with it in 1978.)
Curtis moved to Los Angeles after the service and wrote jingles for commercials. He also had a solo career while also playing with The Crickets until the death of Mauldin in 2015.
Other Curtis songs were recorded by the likes of Glen Campbell and Bobby Goldsboro (“The Straight Life”), Keith Whitley (“I’m No Stranger to the Rain,” named the Country Music Association’s Single of the Year in 1989) and Andy Williams (“A Fool Never Learns”).
Curtis lived near Nashville was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1991. Survivors include his wife of more than 50 years, Louise.