Felice Bryant

Co-writer of such hits as 'Bye Bye Love'

Matilda Genevieve Scaduto (Felice Bryant), songwriter: born Milwaukee, Wisconsin 7 August 1925; married 1945 Boudleaux Bryant (died 1987; two sons); died Gatlinburg, Tennessee 22 April 2003.

The husband-and-wife team of Felice and Boudleaux Bryant formed one of the most successful songwriting partnerships in the history of popular music. During the course of a 40-year career they wrote more than 800 songs, with international sales in excess of 500 million copies. They were best known for an association with the Everly Brothers that produced classic hits such as "Bye Bye Love" and "Wake Up Little Susie", but their songs have also been covered by acts as diverse as Buddy Holly, Tony Bennett, the Grateful Dead and Ray Charles.

They met in 1945 whilst Felice was working as a lift operator in the Schroeder Hotel, in Milwaukee. Boudleaux Bryant, a classically trained violinist from Georgia, had been lured to the city to work with Hank Penny's Radio Cowboys and was, at the time, playing jazz in the hotel's cocktail lounge. Felice later recalled:

I had dreamed of Boudleaux when I was eight years old. When this man was walking toward me I recognised him right away. The only thing that was wrong was that he didn't have a beard, although he grew one for me later. In the dream we were dancing to our song. Only it was our song.

They eloped just days later.

She was born Matilda Scaduto in Milwaukee in 1925 and as a child composed lyrics to the Italian folk tunes that filled the family home. Woody Herman, the future jazz giant, was a neighbour, though not one for whom she much cared. At the age of six she sang on a local radio show and over the next few years became a mainstay of the city's musical theatre scene. She supplemented her income by working as an usherette and, eventually, as a lift operator at the Schroeder.

Following their marriage, the Bryants led something of a nomadic existence before settling in Boudleaux's home town of Moultrie, Georgia. It was here that he and the wife to whom he gave the pet name Felice kickstarted their writing partnership. She remembered:

After we moved back to Moultrie I went back to writing. He'd come home at night and say, "What did you do today?" It was a game and he'd help me whenever I needed it.

A friend encouraged them to send examples of their work to Fred Rose of the Nashville publishing house Acuff-Rose. He was impressed with an offering entitled "Country Boy" and gave it to the Grand Ole Opry star Little Jimmy Dickens, who took it to No 7 in the country charts in 1949. A year later the Bryants moved to Nashville, where they concentrated full-time upon songwriting. In 1953 Carl Smith had a major country hit with their song "Hey Joe", whilst Frankie Laine sold over a million copies of the version he took into the pop charts.

Other country successes for the Bryants during the Fifties included Eddy Arnold's "I've Been Thinking" (1955) and the Jim Reeves classic "Blue Boy" (1958). With the advent of rock'n'roll they found themselves writing a string of hits for the Everly Brothers, including "Bye Bye Love" and "Wake Up Little Susie" (both 1957), and Boudleaux's "All I Have to Do is Dream" (1958). Phil Everly later said of the pair:

They were masters. Anybody would be a fool not to watch how they did it. I learned more from them than from anybody.

In 1958, at what proved to be his final recording session, Buddy Holly recorded their song "Raining in My Heart", one of the great rock'n'roll love songs. Two years later Bob Luman had crossover success with another solo piece from Boudleaux, the witty "Let's Think About Livin' ".

Back in 1954 the Bryants had started their own publishing house, Showcase Music, whilst retaining their involvement with Acuff-Rose. Unusually, their contract with Rose's operation stipulated that the rights to their songs would revert to them when their relationship with Acuff-Rose ended. It did so in 1966 and they formed the very successful House of Bryant.

In 1967 they wrote, in the space of 10 minutes, "Rocky Top", a number that became a bluegrass classic when recorded by the Osborne Brothers later that year, and which in 1982 became a state song of Tennessee. In 1974 Charley Pride enjoyed a country smash with "We Could", a song Felice wrote as a birthday present for Boudleaux. All I Have to Do is Dream, an album recorded in 1975 for the British label DB (and released in the United States as A Touch of Bryant), surfaced in 1980.

The Bryants were a modest, likeable couple and, in the years leading up to Boudleaux's death in 1987, ran the Rocky Top Inn in the Smoky Mountain resort of Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Felice continued to write on occasion and in 1991 received the Nashville Arts Foundation's Living Legend Award, the same year in which the Bryants were inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.

Paul Wadey