Will Jennings was not a household name with the general public, but he was on the must-call list of many of the world’s most successful recording artists. He wrote the lyrics for some of the best known songs in pop music history.
If nothing else Jennings, who has died aged 80 after a long illness, would have achieved immortality for his contribution to Celine Dion’s magnum opus, My Heart Will Go On. Co-written with James Horner, the song became the standard-bearer for James Cameron’s monstrously successful film Titanic (1997), and topped the charts in more than 25 countries.
Horner’s music gave Dion the platform for a performance of operatic grandeur, while Jennings’s lyrics expressed the film’s theme of a love affair transcending boundaries of space and time. Mikael Wood, the Los Angeles Times critic, described how the song “condensed that movie’s epic melodrama into five endlessly re-playable minutes of sweeping faux-Celtic majesty”.
Jennings explained how he wrote it: “I had met this very vibrant woman who was about 101 years old when I met her … and I realised she could have been on the Titanic. So I wrote everything from the point of view of a person of a great age looking back so many years. And it was the love story that made the film, of course.”
The song won Jennings his second Academy Award for best original song, as well as a Golden Globe and a Grammy award. He’d won his first Academy Award (and a Golden Globe) 15 years earlier for Up Where We Belong, the lump-in-the-throat theme from Taylor Hackford’s film An Officer and a Gentleman sung by Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes, and another international chart-topper.
Both it and My Heart Will Go On were anointed by the Recording Industry Association of America as Songs of the Century. In 1980, Jennings had received his first Oscar nomination for People Alone (co-written with Lalo Schifrin), from the film The Competition, about a pair of rival pianists who fall in love.
Also in 1980 he began a professional relationship with Steve Winwood by co-writing most of the songs on Winwood’s second solo album, Arc of a Diver. This produced a top 10 hit in the US with While You See a Chance, and was the prelude to a string of major successes.
The album Back in the High Life generated hit singles with Back in the High Life Again, Freedom Overspill and the US No 1 Higher Love. The follow-up, Roll With It (1988), was a US No 1 album and spun off US chart-topping singles with the title track, Don’t You Know What the Night Can Do? and Holding On.
Another milestone was his collaboration with Eric Clapton on Tears in Heaven, from the soundtrack of the film Rush (1991). The song was written in the aftermath of the accidental death of Clapton’s four-year-old son Conor reached the Top 5 in the UK and US, and won three Grammy awards including Song of the Year.
Jennings was born in Kilgore, Texas, the youngest of three children of Hershel Jennings, a labourer, and his wife Millie (nee Hughes). He graduated from Tyler Junior College (TJC), then attended the University of Texas in Austin. He transferred to Stephen F Austin State University, and after completing both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in the 1960s he returned to teach at TJC and later at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.
He met Carole Thurman while at TJC and they married in 1965. In 2019, the college presented Jennings with its Legends of TJC award, and announced the naming of the Carole and Will Jennings Lobby in the college’s Rogers Palmer Performing Arts Center.
Jennings’s journey from academia to the commanding heights of the music business was greatly assisted by Barry Manilow, who scored a US chart-topper with Looks Like We Made It (1977), with lyrics by Jennings. A stately ballad composed by Richard Kerr, adorned with strings and massed vocal harmonies, it was an indicator of Jennings’s gift for writing lyrics that trod a fine line between being tearfully heart-rending and perilously schlocky.
He was intrigued by the way listeners misinterpreted the song, assuming it was about one happy couple when in fact it was the story of two people who had “made it” by splitting up and finding other partners.
“It is a rather sad and ironic lyric about making it apart and not together, and of course everyone thinks it is a full on, positive statement,” he reflected. “I don’t know. Perhaps it is ... in a way.”
Kerr and Jennings had also combined to write Somewhere in the Night, which had been recorded by several artists including Helen Reddy and Kim Carnes before Manilow included it on his album Even Now (1978). It became a US Top 10 hit the following year. In 1979 Dionne Warwick took the Jennings/Kerr composition I’ll Never Love This Way Again to No 5 on the US chart.
Other career highlights included Whitney Houston’s chart-topping rendition of Didn’t We Almost Have It All (1987), written by Jennings with Michael Masser, and he had a country music No 1 with Tim McGraw’s performance of Please Remember Me (co-written with Rodney Crowell). He also struck up a successful writing partnership with Joe Sample of the Crusaders. They wrote all but one of the songs for BB King’s album Midnight Believer (1978), and repeated the feat for subsequent King albums Take It Home (1979) and There Is Always One More Time (1991). They also wrote Street Life (which Randy Crawford and The Crusaders took to Number 5 in Britain) and Crawford’s solo effort One Day I’ll Fly Away (a UK Number 2 in 1980).
Jennings collaborated with Horner and Mariah Carey on Where Are You Christmas?, recorded by Faith Hill for the soundtrack of How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000), and it would become a regular visitor to the US Holiday 100 chart. Other beneficiaries of Jennings’s skills over the years included Roy Orbison, Diana Ross, Jimmy Buffett and former J Geils Band singer Peter Wolf.
Following Jennings’s death, Wolf, who collaborated with Jennings on several of his solo albums, commented: “Will shared his talents with me, ever patient and generous; he was a treasured friend and teacher, enriching my life in so many ways. It was an enormous honour to have worked with such a musical genius.” In 2006 Jennings was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.
He is survived by Carole and his sisters, Joyce and Gloria.
• Will (Wilbur Hershel) Jennings, lyricist, born 27 June 1944; died 6 September 2024
