Hal David, Dionne Warwick, and Burt Bacharach. By 1962 lyricist David and melodist Bacharach, both working together and separately, had enjoyed some success as songwriters. However, the success wasn't so immense that they could just sit back and let the record companies and recording artists come knocking on their door. They still had to take their wares and hawk their wares to labels big and small, and that was best done with demos. Hire a competent sessions vocalist to give voice to a song the two had composed, and if the record exec liked what they'd heard, they'd assign the song to a different vocalist, one who was already a star, or on the fast track to becoming a star. The sessions vocalist Bacharach and David hired was a young woman by the name of Dionne Warwick. Stories vary, but Warwick seems not to have realized at first that the two men wanted her only as a demo singer, to be merely a tool to make someone else a star, rather than turning her into a star herself. Once she wised up to their nefarious plan, she was said to have shouted out in anger, don't make me over! Rather than take offense at this act of insubordination and fire her on the spot, Bacharach and David looked at each other and said something along the lines of, hey, that might not be a bad idea for a song title. The demo for "Don't Make Me Over" with Warwick's vocals was sent to a label. The record exec heard it and didn't assign the song to a different vocalist who was already a star or who was on the fast track to becoming a star, but to Dionne Warwick herself, who quickly became a star herself. Many, many more Warwick/Bacharach/David collaborations followed. In the little booklet that came with my The Very Best of Dionne Warwick CD, I count fourteen and I'm sure there were more. Eventually, Bacharach and David themselves became songwriting stars, and recording artists as disparate as B.J. Thomas and Jackie DeShannon and Herb Albert and Tom Jones and The Carpenters came knocking, even banging, on their door. Dionne Warwick lives on, but Hal David died in 2012 at age 91, and Burt Bacharach (who also cowrote several hits with third wife Carole Bayer Sager) passed away just the other night at 94. R.I.P Burt.
