Jerry Leiber

Listen to any cantor, any good hazan, sing and you can hear a little bit of Ray Charles going on.

— Jerry Leiber

I heard this music coming out of the radio and it was 'Ain't Nobody's Business.' It got me. I thought, 'I can…

— Jerry Leiber

Irving Berlin was the greatest songwriter of all time. I was in awe of him. But his music wasn't my music. My…

— Jerry Leiber

Elvis Presley, you can't define him in a couple of sentences, but he was a country boy and he was very respectful.

— Jerry Leiber

Elvis was incredibly cooperative. He would try anything. He wasn't a diva, no prima donna. When it came to work, he was…

— Jerry Leiber

Red-hot songs were born on the black streets of Baltimore, where I delivered five-gallon cans of kerosene and ten-pound bags of coal.

— Jerry Leiber

It's self-effacing, it's hard-luck, the shtetl stories. All those Coasters things are an amalgam of Yiddish and black humor.

— Jerry Leiber

Our songs did not transcend being R&B hits. They were R&B hits that white kids were attracted to. And if people bought…

— Jerry Leiber

I was brought up in black neighborhoods in South Baltimore. And we really felt like we were very black. We acted black…

— Jerry Leiber

I felt black. I was as far as I was concerned. And I wanted to be black for lots of reasons. They…

— Jerry Leiber

The first memory I have was my sisters dancing to the radio when they played records by Benny Goodman and Harry James…

— Jerry Leiber

And there's always one special element. In 'There Goes My Baby,' it's the out-of-tune timpani. 'Stand by Me,' it's the bass pattern.…

— Jerry Leiber

Teenagers especially are very, very conscious about what is hip and what is lame and what is square and what is out…

— Jerry Leiber

The early influences, in many ways, were in Baltimore. I was passing open windows where there might be a radio playing something…

— Jerry Leiber

'Hound Dog' took like twelve minutes. That's not a complicated piece of work. But the rhyme scheme was difficult. Also the metric…

— Jerry Leiber

The Jewish background is not that far from the black groove. Blacks are downtrodden, Jews are downtrodden, therefore they have something in…

— Jerry Leiber