Burt Bacharach Made Movie Music History With Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid
American songwriter and composer Burt Bacharach has unfortunately passed away at the age of 94. A recipient of six Grammy and three Academy Awards, Bacharach was also bestowed with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award when he was proclaimed music's "Greatest Living Composer" in 2008. Bacharach always felt like a man out of time in a sense. His ubiquitous compositions could never really be pinned down to one era, and his innate ability to craft unforgettable memories allowed for his songs to stay relevant over multiple decades.
In Bacharach's autobiography, "Anyone Who Had a Heart: My Life and Music," the iconic songster recalled how he became a part of George Roy Hill's pop Western "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" — a decision that would later shower Bacharach with numerous accolades and unprecedented success. The song "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" was written for the 1969 hit starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford, a fact that's easy to forget considering the song doesn't really seem to fit inside a rough-and-tumble Western about two fugitives on the run.
Bacharach wasn't sure about Hill's decision to heavily feature the song in a whimsical, seemingly out-of-place bicycle scene, until he flew up to San Francisco to watch a preview (on the day after Sharon Tate was murdered by the Manson Family, no less). The scene was a hit. Bacharach and his creative partner Hal David would go on to win the Oscar for Best Score for "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" and Best Score for "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" on the same night, an astounding achievement.
The makings of a classic melody
In "Anyone Who Had a Heart," Burt Bacharach mentioned that the bicycle sequence featuring Paul Newman riding around with Katharine Ross had originally been edited to an entirely different tune, namely Simon and Garfunkel's "Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy)." Bacharach wasn't even sure that the director wanted to hear someone sing during the scene. But the words to "Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head" kept repeating over and over in his head. "I knew this song was going to start with a ukulele, and that there would be a tack piano on it to get a honky-tonk kind of feeling," he wrote. "What I would do back then was come up with words that had no meaning but just sounded good to me on the notes I was writing."
Seeing how the sun is actually shining brightly during the bicycle sequence, coupled with the fact that singer B.J. Thomas had laryngitis when he and Bacharach recorded the song in the studio together, it's a wonder that "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head" worked as well as it did. Cut to the night of the Oscars ceremony, and Bacharach was quietly confident about the chance to make history, even though he had already lost the little golden man three times before. Finally, his name was called. "After I won the Oscar for Best Score, I thought, 'Hey, it's looking really good like we're also going to win for Best Song,' he wrote in his tell-all book. "Hearing them call my name when they announced that Hal and I had won the Academy Award for Best Song was an unbelievable, spine-tingling feeling, an incredible rush."
Bacharach made movie history that night. Like a lot of his songs, he will always be a timeless treasure.