He formed a partnership with the decade younger Mort Shuman and the parade of hits began. ![]() Though one of the first big hits he wrote, “Lonely Avenue,” was for established artist Ray Charles, Pomus was eager to take advantage of the newly emerging market for teenage music. He began singing almost by accident, and under a pseudonym he adopted to keep his parents in the dark, ended up recording almost 50 sides. The young Felder, overweight and Jewish, became obsessed with the blues, and as a teenager and young adult was often the only white person in New York blues clubs, even though navigating the subway trains he took to get there and getting up and down the long stairways on crutches was a trial. Polio had landed him in a series of institutions where, his journals reveal, he was regularly beaten up and bullied, in effect punished for being disabled. ![]() As writer Peter Guralnick puts it, “he put his insecurities, his weaknesses into his songs.” Plus he added a touch of the blues to almost everything he did.īy the time the 11-year-old Jerome Felder heard the Big Joe Turner blues song that he always said changed his life, he’d already gone through a lot. As many people in the film testify, he wrote the most romantic, yearning music despite coming out of a difficult life. Pomus was an open-hearted man of great personal warmth, and his songwriting gift was based on an understanding of both love and pain.
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