Allee Willis: Songwriter who had a string of successes in the 1970s and 1980s

Allee Willis, who has died of a heart attack aged 72, was a Grammy award-winning songwriter who helped to compose the catchy theme song for the TV sitcom Friends as well as hits for the Pointer Sisters and Earth, Wind & Fire.

Willis was noted for her garish outfits of clashing patterns and bright colours, often with gold or pink sneakers. She cut her hair in a lopsided style that was long on one side, short on the other. She filled her pink, Art Deco-style Los Angeles home with an overflowing collection of kitsch – from board games to celebrity-endorsed shampoos – and her own art, which she cobbled together from assorted odds and ends.

But she was best known as a songwriter who had an instinctive feel for the upbeat tunes that kept audiences dancing in the 1970s and 1980s. She could not read music or play an instrument, but in collaboration with other tunesmiths she co-wrote several Top 10 hits, including “September” and “Boogie Wonderland” by Earth, Wind & Fire, the brassy, dance-all-night band of the 1970s.

After Willis released her first and only album, Childstar, in 1974, her songs were noticed by Bonnie Raitt and other performers, who asked her to write for them. She became known as the “Rock Doc”, tweaking songs (often without credit) for better-known artists such as Ray Charles, James Brown, George Benson and Patti LaBelle.

But she was in poverty when in 1978 she received a call from Maurice White, the leader of Earth, Wind & Fire, who asked her to help write songs for the group. “As a white Jewish girl getting a break, you could not get better than Earth, Wind & Fire,” Willis said later. “And as I opened the door, they had just written the intro to ‘September’. And I just thought, dear God, let this be what they want me to write because it was obviously the happiest-sounding song in the world.”

She went on to co-write most of the songs on Earth, Wind & Fire’s 1979 album I Am, including the hit “Boogie Wonderland”. A few years later, she helped to write “Neutron Dance”, a hit for the Pointer Sisters in 1985.

In 1986 Willis shared a Grammy for her work on the soundtrack of the film Beverly Hills Cop, then scored another hit as a co-writer of the Pet Shop Boys’ 1987 song with Dusty Springfield, “What Have I Done to Deserve This?”.

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Perhaps her most widely heard tune, “I’ll Be There for You”, on which she collaborated with several other songwriters, debuted in 1994 as the theme for the sitcom Friends. It became a hit for The Rembrandts.

For several years, Willis’s songwriting took a back seat to her artwork, party-giving and early adoption of the internet. She turned her kitsch collection (“The worse something is, the more I love it”) into an online museum, and her interactive website, Willisville.com, was something of a 1990s forerunner to modern-day social media platforms. She also directed music videos for Blondie and The Cars and worked as a set designer.

Willis returned to music in the early 2000s, after a theatrical producer asked her for suggestions of people who could compose a musical version of The Color Purple. She suggested herself.

With two other songwriters, Brenda Russell and Stephen Bray, Willis wrote both words and music for the musical play, which ran on Broadway from 2005 to 2008. The score was nominated for a Tony. After a Broadway revival beginning in 2015, the theatrical album of The Color Purple netted Willis her second Grammy.

Alta Sherral Willis was born in 1947, in Detroit. Her mother was a schoolteacher, and her father ran a scrapyard. During the early years of the Motown music boom in Detroit, Willis said she would sit outside the studio and listen through the walls to recording sessions, “which is how I became a songwriter”.

She graduated from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1969, then moved to New York, where she wrote copy for record companies and composed songs.

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After settling in Los Angeles, Willis claimed to be the mentor and manager of an artist named Bubbles. She sold more than 1,000 paintings and sculptures before revealing that Bubbles was, in fact, one of her alter egos.

“My whole career is based on two truths,” she said in 1987. “What can’t possibly happen, happens. And what should be happening, doesn’t. There’s no middle ground.”

She is survived by her partner, Prudence Fenton.

Allee Willis, songwriter, born 10 November 1947, died 24 December 2019

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