Sonny Curtis, a prolific singer-songwriter who performed with Buddy Holly, opened for Elvis Presley and wrote hits like “I Fought the Law,” “Walk Right Back” and “Love Is All Around” — the effervescent theme song for “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” which he also sang — died on Friday in Nashville. He was 88.
The cause of his death, in a hospital, was complications of pneumonia, his daughter, Sarah Curtis Graziano, said.
Born in a Dust Bowl dugout in West Texas to sharecroppers during the Great Depression, Mr. Curtis was an important, if not famous, figure in the history of both rock ‘n’ roll and country music.
During his seven-decade career, he wrote hundreds of songs, which were performed by a remarkable range of musicians, including the Everly Brothers, the country star Keith Whitley and the 1960s teen idol Bobby Vee.
The Bobby Fuller Four, Hank Williams Jr., Roy Orbison, Bruce Springsteen and the Clash were among the many acts that covered “I Fought the Law,” with its memorable refrain, “I fought the law and the law won.”
“The song came quick,” Mr. Curtis said in an interview with the International Songwriters Association. “It was one of those West Texas afternoons where the sand was blowing, those days you have in the spring. Probably March 1958. I wrote it in 15 minutes — bam! If you listen to it, you can tell you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to write those lyrics.”
Those 15 minutes were lucrative.
“It has been recorded a lot,” he told The Tennessean in 2014. “It’s my most important copyright.”
Mr. Curtis got his start in music as a teenager after a friend introduced him to Mr. Holly, who grew up nearby in Lubbock, Texas. In 1957, he played guitar on Mr. Holly’s album “That’ll Be the Day”; the title track, released as a single, hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.
The next year, Mr. Curtis began playing guitar with Mr. Holly’s band, the Crickets. But after opening for Elvis Presley and playing other big gigs, the band fell apart, mostly because Mr. Holly had moved to New York. He died in a plane crash in 1959.
Not long after that, the band got back together, and Mr. Curtis eventually joined again. “I Fought the Law” appeared on the band’s album “In Style With the Crickets,” released in 1960.
The band played together in various forms on and off through the 1980s and ’90s. The Crickets were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2012.
Mr. Curtis was living in Los Angeles and writing commercial jingles in 1970 when he got a tip from a friend that the creators of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” needed a theme song. The producers showed him a four-page summary of the show.
“I honed in on the part that she was renting an apartment she had a hard time affording,” Mr. Curtis said in an interview on “CBS Sunday Morning” in 2002.
The song he wrote began, “How will you make it on your own?”
Mr. Curtis performed it for the show’s producers, including James. L. Brooks.
“He smiled and said, ‘Sing that again,’” Mr. Curtis said. “And I had to sing it about 10 times before I left that afternoon. The room was full of people standing all around the wall. I thought, ‘I believe I got a shot at this.’”
After Ms. Moore’s character found success in her career as a TV news producer in the show’s first season, Mr. Curtis tweaked the lyrics. The new version began, “Who can turn the world on with her smile?”
Sonny Curtis was born in Meadow, Texas, on May 9, 1937, to Arthur and Violet (Moore) Curtis. He was the second youngest of six children.
“I was born in a dugout,” he said in an interview with The Austin Chronicle in 2004. “My dad dug a hole in the ground, put a corrugated tin roof on top of it, and that’s where I was born. I beat my sister ahead of me. She was born in a tent.”
Sonny’s uncles had a bluegrass band and helped teach him to play the guitar when he was 4.
Working on his family farm gave him ample opportunity to dream up songs.
“Driving a tractor,” he told “CBS Sunday Morning,” “you go down half a mile that way, and when you get there you turn around and come back a half mile this way. You have plenty of time to write a song.”
Mr. Curtis married Louise Halverson in 1970. In addition to their daughter, she survives him, along with their three granddaughters and a sister, Alene Richardson.
His daughter, Sarah Curtis Graziano, an essayist and journalist, recently finished a book about her father, “Daughter of a Song.” It is to be published next month.
“When he was growing up, I know he definitely wanted to be famous,” she said in an interview. “I think as time went on, he saw a lot of tragedies related to fame. He saw people succumb to accidents and addiction. He saw Buddy Holly die.”
Her father, she said, accepted and even embraced the ability to walk through a mall without being recognized: “He was able to live a normal life but still make a living in the music business. And that’s no small feat.”
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