NEW YORK, NY.- Jerry Fuller, a songwriter who helped give the sexual revolution a Top 40 soundtrack, died July 18 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 85.
The cause was complications of lung cancer, said his wife, Annette Fuller.
Fuller had a brief solo career as a crooner, starting in the late 1950s. Though he would become well known as a songwriter a decade later, his compositions retained some of the earnestness of this earlier period.
He specialized in love songs, and in songs about lustful desire that sounded like love songs. His first major hit was “Travelin’ Man,” about a globe-trotter who sings, “In every port I own the heart/Of at least one lovely girl.” Ricky Nelson took it to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 in 1961.
The song — which boasts of “a pretty senorita waiting for me down in old Mexico,” “my sweet fraulein down in Berlin town” and “my cute little Eskimo” in Alaska — emphasizes the yearning behind each affair rather than conquest.
Fuller, together with his friend Glen Campbell, became part of the Los Angeles recording studio scene. They played on the same team as Nelson in touch football games organized by Elvis Presley when Presley was in town making movies.
In 2019, talking to Tom Meros, who interviews figures in early rock ’n’ roll on YouTube, Fuller labeled 1968 his “biggest year ever.” He produced O.C. Smith’s recording of the love song “Little Green Apples,” which reached No. 2 on the Billboard chart. More important, he oversaw the rise to fame of Gary Puckett and the Union Gap.
Hired the previous year as a producer for Columbia Records, Fuller was charged with finding new talent, and he succeeded with Puckett, whom he came across performing in a San Diego bowling alley. Impressed with his rich baritone voice, he offered to sign Puckett to Columbia that night.
From the end of 1967 to the end of 1968, Fuller produced four singles that sold 1 million or more copies for the band: “Woman, Woman” and three songs he himself wrote — “Young Girl,” “Lady Willpower” and “Over You.”
But none of those songs had the staying power of “Young Girl.”
The song tells the story of an older man realizing, in the midst of an intensifying flirtation, that he is with an underage girl. She is “a baby in disguise” — with “perfume and makeup,” she pretends to be “old enough to give me love.” He admonishes her, “Better run, girl,” worried that he will give in to an attraction that is “way out of line.”
The song is chaste compared with others of the time. Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones, in the 1968 song “Stray Cat Blues,” sang to an imagined love object, “I can see that you’re 15 years old/No, I don’t want your ID.” Four years later, Jerry Lee Lewis, who married his third wife when she was 13, sang melancholically in “Middle Age Crazy” about a man beginning an affair with a much younger woman, doing in fact what the narrator of “Young Girl” resists.
Yet in later decades, with more moral scrutiny brought to bear on pop culture, “Young Girl” drew scorn for its upbeat treatment of a potentially criminal situation. It appeared on lists like “10 Songs That Just Aren’t OK Anymore” and “Secretly Horrifying Song Lyrics,” a multipart series published by Paste magazine, which responded to Puckett sardonically, “We’re all so sad that you wanted to sleep with an underage girl and now you can’t, Gary.”
To this day, many music fans from the 1960s and ’70s seem not to share that view. A recording of the song posted on YouTube with 19 million views includes a comment section full of heartfelt tributes.
“Met a guy in 1971 when I was 17, he was 26,” one listener wrote. “This was our song. Married the guy in 1982. In two weeks we will celebrate our 34th anniversary.”
Several listeners praised the song for withholding judgment. “How I loved the 60s and 70s,” one listener wrote. “What fun we all had. Life was so simple then.”
Jerrell Lee Fuller was born Nov. 19, 1938, in Fort Worth, Texas, to Clarence and Lola (Tomlin) Fuller. His father was a carpenter, and his mother taught her children to sing. Fuller and his brother Bill performed a cappella together at talent shows and church functions.
Fuller began a recording career in Texas and soon dropped out of college there to move to Los Angeles. He was drafted into the Army in 1962 and spent his two-year hitch stationed in New York state entertaining his fellow troops.
His first marriage, which began about the time of his high school graduation, ended in divorce. In 1965, Campbell introduced him to Annette Smerigan. They married later that year.
Fuller left Columbia Records in 1971 and became an independent producer. He gave a new song of his, “Show and Tell,” first to Johnny Mathis and then to Al Wilson, who made it a hit in the early 1970s. Fuller also began writing country songs, for singers including Ray Price and Reba McEntire.
His many songs were also recorded by Sam Cooke, Lawrence Welk, the Kingston Trio, Billy Eckstine, Engelbert Humperdinck and others.
In addition to his wife, Fuller is survived by their children, Adam and Anna Fuller; his brother Bill; and a sister, Claudine West.
Puckett, now 81, is still touring. In March 2018, performing in Agoura Hills, California, outside Los Angeles, he invited Fuller onstage. The two sang songs that Fuller had written for Puckett 50 years earlier.
The crowd sang along with them, word for word, during their duet of “Young Girl,” and then gave them a standing ovation.
“What better to sing about,” Puckett asked onstage, “than girls, ladies, women and summer?”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
