Gene Pitney was born Gene Francis Alan Pitney on 17 February 1940, in Hartford, Connecticut, and raised in Rockville, Connecticut, where his family lived in a house that also served, at various times, as a kind of informal boarding house for musicians. He learned guitar as a boy, sang in school groups, and, by his late teens, was writing songs and recording them with a high-school band. His first recordings, made in 1958 with a group called Jamie and the Jane, went nowhere, but they taught him the basics of the studio, and they introduced him to the world of New York songwriting, where a good song could be worth more than a good voice. Pitney, who had both, would spend his career living in both worlds at once: as a songwriter whose songs became hits for other singers, and as a singer whose own hits were often written by other people. That double life, which sounds like a contradiction, was in fact the key to his success, and to his unusual place in the history of early-1960s pop.
Pitney’s breakthrough as a songwriter came before his breakthrough as a singer. In 1960 he wrote “Hello Mary Lou,” which became a hit for Ricky Nelson in 1961, and he wrote “He’s a Rebel,” which became a number-one hit for the Crystals in 1962, a record produced by Phil Spector that is now regarded as a classic of the girl-group era. The irony of “He’s a Rebel” would follow Pitney for years, because in 1962, when his own record, “Only Love Can Break a Heart,” was climbing the charts, it was kept from number one by “He’s a Rebel” — a song Pitney himself had written, sung by another act. Pitney liked to tell that story, with a mixture of pride and ruefulness, because it captured his career perfectly: he was good enough to write a number one for someone else, and good enough, almost, to have a number one himself, at the same time. The story also captures something about the early 1960s music business, in which songwriters, singers, and producers were often the same people, moving between roles, and in which a song could travel from one artist to another in a matter of weeks.
Town Without Pity and the film song
Pitney’s first solo hit under his own name was “Love My Life Away,” released in 1961, which reached the top forty. His first major hit as a singer, and the song that defined his early career, was “Town Without Pity,” recorded in 1961 as the title song for a film of the same name. The film, starring Kirk Douglas, was a courtroom drama about a rape case involving American soldiers in Germany, and its theme song needed to convey, in a few minutes, a sense of judgement, pity, and moral weight. The music was written by Dimitri Tiomkin, one of Hollywood’s great film composers, whose scores for High Noon and other films had already won Academy Awards, and the lyrics were written by Ned Washington, a veteran lyricist who had worked with Tiomkin before. The combination — a film composer’s dramatic melody and a lyricist’s plain, moral language — produced a song that was, from the first note, larger than a pop record. It sounded like a film cue, like a verdict, like a confession, all at once.
Pitney’s vocal on “Town Without Pity” is one of the great performances of early-1960s pop, and it is worth listening to closely. His voice, a high tenor with a distinctive, almost cracking quality at the top of its range, climbs the melody with a sense of urgency that matches the lyric’s plea. He does not sing the song smoothly. He sings it as if he is arguing, pleading, and warning, all at the same time, and the slight strain in his voice at the climax is part of the performance, not a flaw in it. The record reached number thirteen on the Hot 100 in late 1961, and number thirty-two in Britain, and it won the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song, but lost to “Moon River” from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a defeat that Pitney, who performed “Town Without Pity” at the Oscar ceremony on 9 April 1962, bore with grace. The song’s success established Pitney as a singer of dramatic, cinematic pop, a singer who could handle a big melody and a serious lyric without making either sound pretentious.
The man who shot Liberty Valance, and the songs he gave away
Pitney’s next hits confirmed that identity. “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David in 1962, was inspired by the John Ford western of the same name, starring James Stewart and John Wayne, though Pitney’s recording was not actually used in the film — the film had already been released by the time the record was made, a fact that Pitney himself later explained with amusement. The record reached number four in America, and it became one of Pitney’s signature songs, a piece of pop storytelling that, like “Town Without Pity,” sounded like a film in miniature. “Only Love Can Break a Heart,” written by Bacharach and David as well, reached number two in 1962, kept from the top, as noted, by Pitney’s own “He’s a Rebel” in the Crystals’ version. “It Hurts to Be in Love” (1964), “I’m Gonna Be Strong” (1964), and “Looking Through the Eyes of Love” (1965) followed, each a dramatic ballad, each sung with Pitney’s characteristic intensity, each a hit.
At the same time, Pitney kept writing for others. His songs were recorded by the Searchers, by Bobby Vee, by Billy J. Kramer, and by many others, and his reputation as a songwriter grew alongside his reputation as a singer. That double reputation was unusual, because most singers of his generation either wrote their own material or sang other people’s, but rarely did both at a high level. Pitney did both, and he did them in different styles: his own records were dramatic, high-tenor ballads, often with orchestral arrangements, while his songs for others ranged from girl-group pop to rock and roll to country. The range suggests a writer who understood the pop song as a form, not as a personal statement, and who could adapt his writing to the singer in front of him. That adaptability, which Pitney shared with the Brill Building writers he admired, is why his catalogue is larger than his own chart record suggests.
Britain, and the second act
In the mid-1960s, as the British Invasion changed American pop, Pitney’s chart career in America slowed, but his career in Britain flourished. He had a string of hits there, including “Something’s Gotten Hold of My Heart” (1967), which reached number five in Britain, and he toured Britain regularly, building an audience that remained loyal long after his American hits had faded. In the 1980s that British audience gave him an unexpected second act: a duet version of “Something’s Gotten Hold of My Heart,” recorded with the British singer Marc Almond in 1989, reached number one in Britain, twenty-two years after Pitney’s original version had been a hit there. The duet, which paired Pitney’s seasoned tenor with Almond’s dramatic, theatrical style, was a commercial and critical success, and it introduced Pitney to a new generation of British listeners who had not been born when “Town Without Pity” was released. Pitney, who was by then in his late forties, treated the comeback with the same professionalism he had brought to his first career, touring, recording, and appearing on television as if no time had passed.
Pitney’s British success is a reminder that popular music careers do not follow a single national narrative. A singer who is forgotten in one country can be a star in another, and a song that is a minor hit in America can become a standard in Britain. Pitney understood that, and he worked both markets, and others, for decades. He toured constantly, often performing more than two hundred shows a year, and he was known among fellow musicians as a tireless, professional performer who never gave a careless show. That work ethic, which came from his Connecticut upbringing and from the early years of struggling in New York, stayed with him until the end of his life.
The last song, in Cardiff
Pitney died on 5 April 2006, in Cardiff, Wales, at the age of sixty-six, after performing a concert there the previous evening. He had, as was his custom, closed the show with “Town Without Pity,” the song that had made him a star forty-five years earlier, and he had received a standing ovation. He returned to his hotel, and later that night he was found dead of a heart attack. The poignancy of that ending — a singer dying, hours after singing the song that had defined his career, to an audience that had cheered him — was noted by obituarists around the world, and it has become part of Pitney’s legend. It should not obscure the larger story, which is of a songwriter-singer who wrote hits for others, sang hits for himself, built a career in two countries, and kept working, with professionalism and passion, until the night he died.
“Town Without Pity” remains, for many listeners, Pitney’s greatest record, and it remains a remarkable piece of pop music: a film song that outlived its film, a dramatic ballad that still sounds dramatic, and a vocal performance that still sounds urgent. It is a song about judgement — about a town without pity, about lovers judged by their neighbours, about a world that condemns without understanding — and Pitney sang it as if he believed every word, because, as a songwriter who had written about love and loss for others, he probably did. Gene Pitney’s career, lived in two worlds at once, is a reminder that popular music is not only about stars. It is also about craftsmen, about writers who sing and singers who write, and about songs that travel from a film studio to a chart, from a chart to a concert hall in Cardiff, and from there into the memory of everyone who has ever heard a high tenor climb, strain, and hold a note, and felt, for a moment, that the town, for all its judgement, might yet learn pity.
Twenty Four Hours from Tulsa, and the Bacharach-David years
Pitney’s partnership with Burt Bacharach and Hal David, which produced several of his biggest hits, deserves a section of its own, because it shows a singer and a songwriting team at the height of their powers. “Twenty Four Hours from Tulsa,” written by Bacharach and David and recorded by Pitney in 1963, is a masterpiece of pop storytelling: a man, driving home to his lover in Tulsa, stops for a night in a motel, meets another woman, and, in the space of a day, betrays everything he was driving home to. The song’s structure — a verse that sets up the journey, a chorus that delivers the betrayal, and a final verse that leaves the man stranded between two lives — is as tight as a short story, and Pitney’s vocal, which climbs with the melody and breaks slightly at the climax, makes the betrayal feel both sudden and inevitable. The record reached the top twenty in America and the top five in Britain, and it remains, for many listeners, Pitney’s finest single performance, ahead even of “Town Without Pity” in its dramatic construction.
Bacharach and David wrote for Pitney because his voice suited their melodies: high, clear, and capable of the wide intervals and unexpected turns that Bacharach’s tunes demanded. Other singers found Bacharach’s melodies difficult; Pitney, with his training and his range, found them natural, and he sang them with a sincerity that made their sophistication sound like emotion rather than cleverness. “Only Love Can Break a Heart,” “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” “It Hurts to Be in Love,” and “Twenty Four Hours from Tulsa” all share that quality: melodies that are more complex than they first sound, sung by a voice that makes them sound simple. That partnership, which lasted through the mid-1960s, is one of the great singer-songwriter collaborations of the era, alongside Dionne Warwick’s work with the same team, and it is a large part of why Pitney’s records from those years still sound fresh. They were not formula hits. They were crafted songs, sung by a craftsman, and the craft shows.
Pitney’s later years also included a return to songwriting for himself, and a series of albums that, while not chart hits in America, were valued by his British audience and by collectors. He recorded country songs, he recorded standards, and he continued to write, because writing was, for him, not a phase but a habit. He wrote in hotel rooms, on tour buses, and at home in Connecticut, and he kept notebooks of lyrics and melodies that he drew on for decades. That habit, learned as a teenager in Rockville, is the thread that runs through his whole career: from the high-school band recordings of 1958, through the Brill Building years, through the Bacharach-David hits, to the Cardiff concert in 2006. Gene Pitney was, first and last, a songwriter who sang, and a singer who wrote, and the two halves of his career, far from contradicting each other, explain each other. He wrote hits for others because he understood songs. He sang hits for himself because he understood singers. And he closed his last show, as he had closed so many shows before, with the song that had started it all.
Sources
- Billboard chart history for “Town Without Pity” (1961), “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” (1962), and “Only Love Can Break a Heart” (1962)
- Golden Globe and Academy Awards records for “Town Without Pity” (1961 film song, Oscar performance 9 April 1962)
- Songwriting credits for “Hello Mary Lou” (Ricky Nelson, 1961) and “He’s a Rebel” (The Crystals, 1962)
- Contemporary reporting on Gene Pitney’s death in Cardiff, April 2006, and his final concert
- UK Official Charts history for “Something’s Gotten Hold of My Heart” (1967 and 1989 duet with Marc Almond)
Image credit: Image: Franco Monsalvo via Pexels, free licence (thematic stage image, not a photograph of Gene Pitney).
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