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1950-2000: The 10 Greatest Songwriting Teams

The attribution of songwriting credit in the popular music industry is fraught with all manner of swindling and cheating. Royalty checks are sent as often to pretenders and usurpers as they are to the true creative parties. I am not going to attempt to untangle the twisted and arcane competing stories underlying the extant listed publishing rights. With regard to just one band, The Beach Boys, there is an entire cottage industry of books devoted to arguing the minutiae of “who really deserves credit” for the band's most celebrated recordings.

So here, with the above caveat, is my list of the 10 greatest songwriting twosomes of the last half of the 20th Century.

1. John Lennon/Paul McCartney
2. Boudleaux Bryant/Felice Bryant
3. Burt Bacharach/Hal David
4. Gerry Goffin/Carole King
5. Kenneth Gamble/Leon Huff
6. Benny Andersson/Bjorn Ulvaeus
7. Ronald Dunbar/Edythe Wayne
8. Jerry Leiber/Mike Stoller
9. Mick Jagger/Keith Richards
10. Jimmy Page/Robert Plant
tweakgeek
jposs
99 posts
 
Bono and the edge
Ian Brown and John Squire
tweakgeek OP
76 posts
 
Tok20000,
Simon and Garfunkel were, as you are no doubt aware, more than good. However, it was Paul Simon who got the songwriting credit.
tok20000's avatar
tok20000
608 posts
 
True Tweakgeek, but together they were great. Apart... well... Paul has been good, but I think he lost something when they broke up. Call me strange, but I own none of Paul Simon's albums (even Graceland which I know is pretty good). I own ever studio album that Simon & Garfunkle put out. Sometimes it takes a team to be successful, and I think the two (had they stayed together) would have been much more successful than either did on their own.

KF
mrwigglewm
60 posts
 
It may be worth remembering that Jimmy Van Heusen's 40 year career as a song writer extended into the 50s and 60s. With lyricist Johnny Burke he wrote Here's That Rainy Day in 1953 (prior to that, Polka Dots and Moonbeams, But Beautiful, Imagination, Swinging on a Star, and with Eddie De Lange, Darn That Dream). He went on to write with Sammy Cahn such memorable tunes as Love and Marriage, Call Me Irresponsible, All the Way, The Second Time Around and Only the Lonely.
Antonio Carlos Jobim did some of his best work with lyracist Vinicius De Moraes: The Girl From Ipanema, Favela, Insensatez, One Note Samba, O Grande Amor, Chega De Saudade (No More Blues), Once I Loved, Agua De Beber.
Last but not least, there was the collaboration of Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim on West Side Story in 1957.
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