Jerry Ragovoy born September 4, 1930

Jerry Ragovoy (September 4, 1930 – July 13, 2011) was an American songwriter and record producer who specialised in creating three-minute songs of intense emotion, enhanced by complex orchestral arrangements and was one of several white American songwriters and producers who, in the 1960s, helped mould the new African-American sound of soul music.

Jordan "Jerry" Ragovoy was born in Philadelphia, the son of a Hungarian-born Jewish optometrist. As a child he learned the piano and absorbed European classical music. He wrote his first song at eight, describing it later as "a direct steal from the Nutcracker Suite". Ragovoy's interest in African-American music was sharpened after leaving high school, when he worked in an electrical appliance store that also sold 78rpm records. He supplemented his income by giving piano lessons.

The Castelles

One day in 1952, a group of black teenagers, who had been singing at high school dances as the Castelles, came in with a demo recording to play to the shop's owner, Herb Slotkin. Impressed, Slotkin and Ragovoy set up Grand Records to release tracks by the group. Success was immediate when My Girl Awaits Me was a national R&B hit, with Ragovoy the pianist and producer. The next record, This Silver Ring, was the first of dozens of Ragovoy songs to be recorded over the next two decades. Grand Records never replicated the success of that first release and soon Ragovoy was working with Philly's premier pop label, Chancellor Records, home to Frankie Avalon and Fabian. There he wrote A Wonderful Dream for the Majors, a top 30 hit in 1962, a novelty number for which Ragovoy persuaded the group's male lead singer to sing falsetto.

                                   

Unhappy with the commercialism of Chancellor, Ragovoy moved to New York City. The first person he contacted was the songwriter and producer Bert Berns, whom Ragovoy had met when Berns was a music publisher's rep pitching songs to record companies. Berns needed a song for a new black vocal group, Garnet Mimms and the Enchanters. "He'd been working on this song called Cry Baby for six months," Ragovoy told the journalist Tony Cummings. "He was disgusted: he couldn't complete the song no-how. But one day, over at Berns' house, we got the thing finished." Cry Baby (one of a number of songs for which Ragovoy used the pseudonym Norman Meade) was a million-seller in 1963. Its mixture of pop, gospel, R&B and Ragovoy's lush string-laden orchestration has earned it the reputation of a pioneering soul recording. Among its backing singers was Dionne Warwick. Cry Baby also launched the most successful period of Ragovoy's career. 

Jerry with Garnet Mimms & The Enchanters

Working mainly with Berns until the latter's premature death in 1967, he crafted a series of soul records that combined high sales with artistic excellence. Among these were Time Is On My Side by Irma Thomas (1964), Erma Franklin's Piece of My Heart (1967), Howard Tate's Ain't Nobody Home (1966) and Lorraine Ellison's sublime Stay With Me (co-written by George David Weiss), a slice of grand emotion to rival almost any operatic aria (Ragovoy once said of this song "that's my Puccini influence"). Ellison's 1966 performance was recorded with the help of a full orchestra assembled in the studio to accompany Frank Sinatra, after Sinatra had cancelled.

Several of these songs were to become big hits for white artists. Time Is On My Side was a global hit for the Rolling Stones and the Walker Brothers recorded Stay With Me, while Piece of My Heart became the Janis Joplin hit. Joplin also recorded versions of Cry Baby, and another song Ragovoy wrote for Ellison, Try (Just a Little Bit Harder). Their composer was less impressed by some of these efforts, once complaining that "lots of singers, male and female, felt they were obliged to scream until the veins popped out of their necks", than by the royalty cheques they brought him. As late as 1999, it was rumoured that the producers of a proposed film about Joplin had paid more than $1m to use Piece of My Heart.

Outside the soul music genre, Ragovoy worked with such artists as the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and the exiled South African singer Miriam Makeba, whose version of a traditional tune Pata Pata was a Top 20 hit in 1967. In the late 1960s, Ragovoy ploughed some of his earnings into a New York recording studio, the Hit Factory, which he was to sell in 1975. Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life was among the albums made there. Ragovoy also owned a shortlived record label, Rags. After 1970, Ragovoy was much less active in the record industry, although he won a Grammy award as producer of the cast album of the Broadway show Don't Bother Me, I Can't Cope. In 1974, Ragovoy teamed up with Dionne Warwick to produce her Then Came You album, which peaked at No. 35 in the US Billboard R&B albums chaHe also produced albums by Bonnie Raitt and Milkwood. 

He decided to come out of retirement in 2003 for a reunion with Howard Tate, writing the songs for an album by the veteran singer.  A comprehensive collection of his best productions, The Jerry Ragovoy Story: Time Is On My Side, was issued on CD by the British company Ace Records in 2008.  Prior to Joplin's death, Ragovoy wrote a song especially for her next album, titled "I'm Gonna Rock My Way to Heaven". The song was never recorded or performed until it was included in the theatrical production One Night with Janis Joplin, written and directed by Randy Johnson with arrangements and musical direction by Len Rhodes. Ragovoy was in attendance on opening night when the show premiered at Portland Center Stage on May 27, 2011.

Ragovoy was taken ill shortly after giving an interview for a documentary film about Berns. He died, due to complications from a stroke at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan, New York City on July 13, 2011, at the age of 80. In 2025 Ragovoy was posthumously Inducted Into the Songwriters Hall of Fame during an intimate ceremony held in New York City.

(Edited from Dave Laing obit @ The Guardian, Wikipedia & Broadway World)