Burt Bacharach & Hal David: selected hit songs, 1963 + This Empty Place, A Lifetime of Loneliness

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This Empty Place — separate page

True Love Never Runs Smooth

Twenty Four Hours From Tulsa

Wives and Lovers

Anyone Who Had a Heart

A Lifetime of Loneliness

First recorded in 1963, becoming a hit in 1964 (see Bacharach & David: selected hit songs 1964 +):

Wishin’ and Hopin’
(There’s) Always Something There to Remind Me
Reach Out for Me
To Wait for Love

First recorded in 1963, becoming a hit in 1970 (click on title to visit separate page)

(They Long to Be) Close To You

All songs featured on this page were written by Burt Bacharach (music) and Hal David (lyrics).

This Empty Place (Bacharach & David)

See our separate feature page: This Empty Place

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True Love Never Runs Smooth

Gene Pitney – – produced by Aaron Schroeder & Wally Gold, arranged by Burt Bacharach, Musicor single 1032, released June 1963, peaked at #21 on the Billboard Hot 100 pop chart

Twenty Four Hours from Tulsa

Gene Pitney — issued in October 1963 on the single Musicor MU 1034, b/w “Lonely Night Dreams (of Far Away Arms)” — produced by Aaron Schroeder & Wally Gold; arranged by Burt Bacharach

Wives and Lovers

Jack Jones with orchestra directed by Pete King, Kapp single 551, released September 1963. It reached #14 after debuting on the chart 2 November 1963.

(below) 1964 television performance, on (I think) The Joey Bishop Show

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In 1962 Bacharach and David began to use Dionne Warwick as a demo artist. Noting that her demos would often surpass in quality the work of the stars, they began writing songs for her.

The first Dionne Warwick single was recorded in August 1962, and issued in October 1962 on Scepter 1239, featuring “I Smiled Yesterday,” backed with”Don’t Make Me Over.” However, it was the B-side that became the hit, reaching #21 on the Billboard Hot 100. The story of the creation of “Don’t Make Me Over” is legendary. Quoting Wikipedia:

Warwick originally thought that “Make It Easy On Yourself” would be her debut as a lead singer, and was angry when she learned Bacharach and David were giving the song to Jerry Butler. An upset Warwick balked, “Don’t make me over, man”, which was street slang for “Don’t lie to me”. The duo decided to turn the slang into a song for Warwick and she recorded it in New York.

Warwick’s first top ten hit was “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” released in December 1963, which was recorded at the same November ’63 session that yielded “Walk on By.” Cilla Black’s recording of “Anyone Who had a Heart” was released in Europe before Warwick’s, and hers is the better known version there.

Anyone Who Had a Heart

From Wikipedia:

[Dionne] Warwick’s recording reached #8 on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming her first top ten hit. The tune was also a crossover smash and hit #6 on the Cashbox R&B Chart (Billboard did not print R&B charts from 11/30/63 to 1/16/65) and #2 on the Billboard Adult Contemporary Chart. Dionne’s recording peaked at #42 in the UK.

Outside of the US the cover version by British singer Cilla Black is better known; Cilla’s first hit, it charted across Europe before the original recording was released overseas, and reached #1 in the UK.

“Anyone Who Had a Heart” was presented to Dionne Warwick in unfinished form while she, Burt Bacharach and Hal David were rehearsing in Bacharach’s Manhattan apartment for an upcoming recording session. Bacharach had finished the score which, in his words, “changes time signature constantly, 4/4 to 5/4, and a 7/8 bar at the end of the song on the turnaround. It wasn’t intentional, it was all just natural. That’s the way I felt it.” This was the first use of polyrhythm in popular music.^[1] However David had written only about a third of the lyric and was reluctant to finalize the sixth line of the first stanza as “And know I dream of you” feeling the stress was unnatural (as opposed to “And know I dream of you”). Bacharach played a snippet of the tune for Warwick who was enraptured and at her urging David left Warwick to rehearse with Bacharach in the living room while he (David) retired to a bedroom where he completed the lyric. Of the unnatural stress in “I dream of you”, David later stated: “I tried to find a way to make the of do something and I could never do it…[I] had to let it go.”

Warwick recorded “Anyone Who Had a Heart” at Bell Sound Studios in Manhattan in November 1963, in a session produced by Bacharach which also yielded “Walk On By” and “In the Land of Make Believe”. According to published reports, Warwick nailed the tune in only one take – though an alternate remix of the take appears on a compilation album released in 1976 by Springboard International.

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Dionne Warwick — issued in November 1963 on the single Scepter 1262, b/w “The Love of a Boy” (Burt Bachararach & Hal David); chart success: #8 on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming Warwick’s first top ten hit

Cilla Black — released 31 January 1964 — It was Cilla’s first hit and topped the UK singles pop chart.

Marta Kubišová

recorded as “Denně Čekám” (Czech text by Pavel Vrba) on 21 July 1967, with the Karel Krautgartner Orchestra, conducted by Josef Vobruba

(below) from the TV series “Píseň pro Rudolfa III” (A Song for Rudolf III), Season 1, Episode 3 “Miss Diorling” — originally broadcast on 20 September 1967