Most people didn’t know who Will Jennings was, but many of the biggest names in music knew they had to call him. He wrote the words to some of pop music’s most famous songs.
If not anything else After a long illness, Jennings died at the age of 80. He will be remembered forever for his part in Celine Dion’s masterpiece, “My Heart Will Go On.” The song, which was written with James Horner, was the theme song for James Cameron’s hugely popular 1997 movie Titanic and went to the top of the charts in more than 25 countries.
It was Dion’s operatic performance that Horner’s music set the stage for, and Jennings’s words told the story of a love affair that goes beyond space and time. LA Times reviewer Mikael Wood said that the song “condensed that movie’s epic melodrama into five endlessly re-playable minutes of sweeping faux-Celtic majesty.”
Jennings talked about how he wrote it: “I met this very lively woman who was about 101 years old when I met her…” I thought she might have been on the Titanic. So I wrote everything as if I were a very old person looking back over a very long time. Of course, the love story was what made the movie great.
He got his second Academy Award for Best Original Song, as well as a Golden Globe and a Grammy, for the song. He won his first Academy Award and Golden Globe 15 years before for Up Where We Belong, the unforgettable theme song from Taylor Hackford’s movie An Officer and a Gentleman sung by Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes. It also became a worldwide hit.
A group of record companies in the US named both this song and “My Heart Will Go On” Songs of the Century. People Alone, which he wrote with Lalo Schifrin and was nominated for an Oscar in 1980, was from the movie The Competition and was about two competing musicians who fall in love.
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Together with Steve Winwood, he wrote most of the songs on Winwood’s second solo record, Arc of a Diver, which came out in 1980. With “While You See a Chance,” they had a top 10 hit in the US. This was the first of many big hits to come.
“Back in the High Life Again,” “Freedom Overspill,” and “Higher Love,” which was the number one hit in the US, are all from the album “Back in the High Life.” Roll With It (1988), the record that came after, was a US No. 1 and had three number-one singles: “Holding On,” “Don’t You Know What the Night Can Do?” and the title track.
Another important moment was when he worked with Eric Clapton on the song “Tears in Heaven,” which was on the soundtrack of the 1991 movie Rush. The song was written after Clapton’s four-year-old son Conor died in an accident. It made it to the top five in both the UK and the US and won three Grammys, including Song of the Year.
Hershel Jennings and Millie (nee Hughes), his wife, had three children. Jennings was born in Kilgore, Texas. He was the youngest. After finishing Tyler Junior College (TJC), he went to the University of Texas at Austin. He then moved to Stephen F. Austin State University and earned both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees there. In the 1960s, he went back to teach at TJC and then at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.
Will Jennings obituary https://t.co/zjqLTYkTph
— Guardian US (@GuardianUS) September 15, 2024
Although they met at TJC, they got married in 1965. The college gave Jennings its Legends of TJC award in 2019 and revealed that the Carole and Will Jennings Lobby in the Rogers Palmer Performing Arts Center would be named after them.
Barry Manilow became a US chart-topper with Looks Like We Made It (1977), which had lyrics by Jennings. This helped Jennings get from being an academic to being a big name in the music business. It was a stately ballad written by Richard Kerr with strings and a lot of vocal harmonies. It showed how good Jennings was at writing words that were just the right amount of sad and silly to make you cry.
He found it interesting that people got the song wrong and thought it was about a happy pair when it was actually about two people who had “made it” by breaking up and finding new partners.
“It’s a sad and ironic line about making it through life alone, but everyone thinks it’s a positive message,” he thought further. “I’m not sure.” “Maybe it is… in a way.”
Somewhere in the Night was written by Kerr and Jennings together. It had been recorded by acts like Helen Reddy and Kim Carnes before Manilow put it on his album Even Now (1978). It made it into the US Top 10 the next year. I’ll Never Love This Way Again, a song by Jennings and Kerr, reached No. 5 on the US list in 1979 thanks to Dionne Warwick.
Other highlights of his work include Whitney Houston’s number-one hit with “Didn’t We Almost Have It All (1987),” which he wrote with Michael Masser, and Tim McGraw’s number-one country hit with “Please Remember Me,” which he wrote with Rodney Crowell. He also started writing with Joe Sample of the Crusaders and it worked out well. They wrote all but one of the songs on BB King’s 1978 album Midnight Believer.
They did the same thing for King’s 1979 and 1991 records Take It Home and There Is Always One More Time. Also, they wrote Street Life, which Randy Crawford and The Crusaders made to Number 5 in Britain, and One Day I’ll Fly Away, which Crawford released by himself and became UK Number 2 in 1980.
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Jennings worked with Horner and Mariah Carey on the song “Where Are You Christmas?” Faith Hill covered it for the soundtrack of “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” (2000), and it would stay on the US Holiday 100 chart for a long time. Over the years, Jennings’ skills have helped Roy Orbison, Diana Ross, Jimmy Buffett, and Peter Wolf, who used to be in the band J Geils.
Wolf, who worked with Jennings on a number of his solo albums, said this about him after his death: “Will shared his talents with me, always patient and generous; he was a treasured friend and teacher who made my life better in so many ways.” Being able to work with such a creative genius was an honor. The Songwriters Hall of Fame made Jennings a member in 2006.
Carole and his sisters Joyce and Gloria will miss him.
Will Jennings was a songwriter who was born on June 27, 1944 and died on September 6, 2024.
