Artists/creators whose work is famous--yet they inexplicably are not!

Cafe Society
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Sometimes there are people who are, in essence, giants in their field, whose work is currently appreciated by millions of people, yet their names are barely known. Here are three examples. What are yours?

Frank Loesser. He wrote the music and lyrics to two of the best musicals ever: Guys and Dolls and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. He wrote other musicals too, of course, that contain songs that are still quite famous: “Once in Love with Amy” from Where’s Charley? and “Standing On the Corner” from The Happiest Fella. OK, people who don’t know or care about music theater might still not know his name, but he also wrote the Holiday classic, “Baby It’s Cold Outside.” He also wrote the lyrics to the song “Heart and Soul.” Would Loesser’s name recognition in the English-speaking world be even 1%? I doubt it. I have no idea why.

Tim Rice. Whenever Andrew Lloyd-Weber’s many, many famous musicals come up, he seems to get 100% of the credit 90% of the time. But Rice wrote the goddamn lyrics, people! Last time I checked, that’s half the song. We talk about “Rogers and Hart” and “Rogers and Hammerstein,” but why don’t we talk about “Weber and Rice”? It makes no sense.

Hal David. Another lyricist who gets ignored, despite having written a ton of hits with Burt Bacharach and others.

Those are songwriters, but I’m sure there are many other musicians, writers, directors, etc., that you will think of!

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Rudy van Gelder. Recording engineer trom Jersey. Rudy specialized in Jazz music, responsible for some of the most famous recordings of Miles Davis and John Coltrane. Rudy recently passed away…His death put him more in the spotlight than when he was alive.

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Larry Gelbart should be as well-known as Woody Allen, Mel Brooks and Neil Simon. He was the writer of Tootsie and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. He was the show runner for MAS*H (TV version). He came from the same pool of writers for Sid Caesar’s various TV shows as the three other comedy greats I listed before. In the business he was a demigod, but to the general public, not so much.

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It’s *The Most Happy Fella.
*
And lyricists are rarely as famous as composers. Even in opera, the librettist’s name is basically a footnote.

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Harry Warren (and his lyricist Al Dubin). He’s one of the top five of the Great American Songbook, and the composer whose work you’re likely to have encountered first. But he’s always taken the back seat. The best compilation of his tunes doesn’t mention his name on the cover. The Broadway musical that is almost entirely his songs never listed his name on its promotional material.

Some of his songs are familiar catchphrases even today (though that’s Dubin). They include
“I Only Have Eyes for You”
“Chattanooga Choo-Choo”
“42nd Street.”
“We’re In the Money”
“Lullaby of Broadway”
“That’s Amore.”
“Shuffle Off to Buffalo.”
“Dames”
“Jeepers Creepers”
Most of the songs for Busby Berkeley musicals

He won several Oscars, and, because he worked for Warner Brothers, his songs were used in many Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies.

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Another couple of song writers, but Lieber and Stoller, witers and co-writers of over 70 chart hits.

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Curt (Kurt) Siodmak. German writer and screenwriter who left Germany when Hitler came to power, and spent the rest of his days as a screenwriter for Universal and others.
1.) He’s the guy responsible for vampires dissolving in sunlight. I know it was first used in Nosferatu much earlier, but nobody today would remember it from that. Siodmak re-introduced it in the 1940s in Son of Dracula and House of Frankenstein, and after that it was canon.

2.) He invented much of the wolfman/werewold “mythology” – the pentagram, the poem “Even a man who goes to church by day…”. He didn’t imvent the idea of changing at the full moon or the lethality of silver, but he re-emphasized them.

3.) He popularized the idea of the “Brain in the Aquarium”. He didn’t invent the idea, again, but his novel Donovan’s Brain popularized it, and it was filmed three (!) times.

4.) He wrote one of the first space station novels. In essence, it was a development of his German 1930’s film F.P. 1 Does Not Answer, which was filmed in three different languages, about a way=station in the Atlantic (Floating Platform 1) to allow trans-atlantic flights during the days before airplanes could comfortably make the trip.

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A few years back, I found myself annoyed by a mainstream (NY Times, I think) article about MAD, where after the names Al Jaffee, Don Martin, David Berg, Sergio Aragones, and Antonio Prohias were dropped came “the guy who wrote the song parodies”, when it would have easier and quicker to say “Frank Jacobs”. I will say to his debit that I mispronounced “quinoa” for decades thanks to him. Luckily, it was almost always in my head.

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“American Gothic” is one of the most iconic paintings in history, an American “Mona Lisa.” How many people know it was painted by Grant Wood, or could name any other painting he did?

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Basil Poledouris did some of the best movie scores of all time – Robocop, Conan the Barbarian, Hunt for Red October, and many more. Very memorable scores and worth listening to outside of the movies.

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Popeye creator Elzie Segar is not as famous as he should be. As a matter of fact, a lot of people don’t even know Popeye was originally a character in one of the greatest comic strips ever.

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I am now The Most Corrected Fella. :slight_smile:

Sorta agree with you, but society is inconsistent. As I said above, we always say “Rogers and Hart” and “Rogers and Hammerstein.” We also always say “Lerner and Lowe.”

Arlen and Harburg seem to get equal credit for the Wizard of Oz’s songs, including “Over the Rainbow”–equal but very minimal credit. They are another example for this thread.

It’s true that librettists don’t get the same credit as Mozart and Verdi and so on, but one reason is probably that opera composers worked with different librettists and typically have a larger body of work beyond opera (Verdi’s string quartet is one of my favorites… funny that that is one of his very non-vocal pieces… it’s so confident and so good).

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Right. I used to see his name as a kid on the B&W Popeye cartoons. And it was always his last name only, and I wondered why that was!

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It’s “Rodgers”. :slight_smile:

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Dorothy Fields wrote the lyrics for:

Big Spender
Bojangles of Harlem
Diga Diga Doo
Doin’ the New Low Down
Don’t Blame Me
Exactly Like You
Fine Romance
I Can’t Give You Anything but Love
If My Friends Could See Me Now
I’m in the Mood for Love
Never Gonna Dance
On the Sunny Side of the Street
Pick Yourself Up
Porgy
The Way You Look Tonight

She was one of the few successful female songwriters of the Tin Pan Alley era, yet most people have never heard of her.

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Hahahaha.

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I can’t name any other paintings of his, but damn, that is a painting to remember. Art history classes burned it into my brain, along with the info that his dentist and sister are the models.

Damn, the score to Conan is recognizable. It’s more memorable than the movie, and I like the movie a lot.
My contribution is Hal Blaine. He was a member of the Wrecking Crew, but he played on a staggering number of other records with a beat that made your butt move. I don’t like all of those songs, but I can’t find fault with the drums on any pop song he played, and you’ve probably grooved to his drums at some point.

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There’s also Raymond Scott, whose music was liberally borrowed for use in Warner Brothers cartoons; Powerhouse is probably his most well-known.

And while we’re on the subject, Carl Stalling is the one who did the borrowing and wrote the music during Warners’ golden age.

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Bolding added.

Sorry to truncate your quote, but I think you’ve hit on the reason (or one of the reasons) right here.

We think of “Rodgers and Hart,” “Rodgers and Hammerstein,” and “Lerner and Loewe” because they were more or less permanent teams, at least for a long period. Rodgers basically wrote only with Hart or Hammerstein for most of his career, and Lerner and Loewe worked with each other pretty much exclusively until Loewe’s retirement. So it makes sense to think of them as a unit.

Lloyd Webber and Rice worked together on several shows when they were both starting out. But then they split, and since then each has worked extensively with many others. Rice has collaborated with Alan Menken, Elton John, the guys from ABBA, even John Barry and Rick Wakeman. Lloyd Webber has collaborated with Don Black, Richard Stilgoe, Charles Hart, and several others. And, of course, T.S. Eliot.

On those shows that Rice was involved in (Joseph, Superstar, Evita, etc.), I do tend to see both Lloyd Webber and Rice’s names on posters and such. For those in which Lloyd Webber worked with other lyricists, his name tends to dominate, and most people would be hard pressed to name the lyricist of, say, Phantom of the Opera (it was Charles Hart, with additional lyrics by Richard Stilgoe).

It doesn’t always work that way–as you say, Hal David isn’t as well known as Burt Bacharach (although I think his name is somewhat recognizable)–but I think that’s a big part of it.

This sort of frequent changing of collaborators is quite common on Broadway. The kind of long-term partnerships that you see with Rodgers and Hart/Hammerstein or Lerner and Loewe are relatively rare.

Edited to add: Just to avoid confusing anyone not familiar with musical theater, Charles Hart, who has worked with Andrew Lloyd Webber, is no relation to Lorenz Hart, who was Richard Rodgers’s long-time lyricist.

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He also wrote “The Ballad of Rodger Young.”

… such as the score for Starship Troopers, a fun movie we have discussed many times that, oddly, does not feature “The Ballad of Rodger Young” like it should!

That’s Pouledouris’s daughter Zoë singing at the high school graduation party where Johnny Rico decides he’s going to enlist in the Federal Service.