It must be an honor to have a piece of your work associated with something so culturally significant.Ībsolutely. That song has been very good to me financially and otherwise. AT&T would pick it up and want to use it in an ad - we did very well with that. Where we really made good money was through third-party usage. All the stations that ran it, they had to pay a fee. īefore you sold it, did you make money every time the show was broadcast? We sold it to EMI in New York, and what’s kind of ironic is that I think they turned around and sold it about six months later. Let’s sell this thing.” I said, “Man, Jerry, I can identify with that. My friend who played drums for the Crickets, Jerry Allison, he and I published that, and about four years ago - we are kind of getting on up there, I’m 79 and he’s a year younger - he called and said, “Man this is getting out of control. But if it’s just going to be somebody off the street, I’d like for it to be me.” And they finally agreed.ĭo you own the publishing rights to the song? I said, “If you can get Andy Williams, you got yourself a deal.
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Of course, Andy Williams had a big TV show, he was hotter than soap. They did say at one time, “Well, we were kind of thinking of maybe getting Andy Williams to do it.” The executive producers weren’t really comfortable with that in the beginning. You not only wrote the song but also sang it for the show, right? Everybody was there, the whole cast and crew, and Louise - my wife - and I were invited, and that’s where I met Mary. 19, 1970, Allan Burns had a big party up at his house. I did watch the show, and after the show aired for the first time on Sept. And at the very end, when it says, “Love is all around, no need to waste it/ You can have the town, why don’t you take it,” on the first season it ends, ‘You might just make it after all.’ And for the second season we changed that to, ‘You’re gonna make it after all.’” Opening with “how will you make it?” adds doubt into the equation. Mary Tyler Moore accepts her Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award from Dick Van Dyke at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles on Jan. The verse on the first show was, “How will you make it on your own?” After the first season, Allan Burns called me and said, “Sonny, we need a different set of lyrics, because she’s obviously made it.” The verse changed and the chorus stayed the same except for one line. I had not met her at that point.īut it might be significant for you to know that the first season was different from the second season - the lyrics. People can change their minds.ĭid you know of Moore’s work from “The Dick Van Dyke Show”? Of course, you never feel real confident. He ordered a cassette recorder and he said, “I want to take this to Minneapolis with me this weekend,” and I began to feel pretty confident at that time.
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I sang it about 10 times, and before I left that afternoon, he had that room full of people. I got my guitar out and picked the song for him and he said, “Sing that again.” I sang it and he got on the phone and started having people come down. Sonny Curtis, on auditioning “Love Is All Around” for producer James L. We sat down and he said, “We’re not quite at the stage of picking a theme song, but I’ll listen to what you have.” The only other thing in the room - it wasn’t as big as a gymnasium, but it was a big room - was a black telephone on the floor.
Brooks took me to a huge room and brought two iron-back chairs. I don’t know if you ever saw “Gunsmoke,” where they have all those big Quonset hut-looking buildings? That’s where their offices were. Brooks - he and Allan Burns were the executive producers - who was over there on Ventura Boulevard. I wrote the song in about two hours and called him back and said, “Who do I sing this to?” He sent me to James L. “She’s in the big city of Minneapolis and gets a job at a news station and rents an apartment she has a hard time affording,” that sort of thing. Like, “A young girl from the Midwest gets jilted and left at the altar” or something like that.
It was a treatment that didn’t have a lot of information. He said they’re going to do a sitcom on her and they all need a theme song.Īt his lunch break, he dropped off a four-page treatment that one of the writers or somebody had put together.
He called me one morning in the summer of 1970 and asked me if I would be interested in writing a song for Mary Tyler Moore. I had a very good friend who worked for the Williams-Price Agency, and they managed Mary Tyler Moore. It was a deal that happened all in one day. How did you come to write “Love Is All Around”? I just sat on my couch and took my guitar in hand and went for it.