Donald's Encyclopedia of Popular Music

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HUGO & LUIGI

Hugo Peretti (d 1986) and Luigi Creatore (d 13 December 2015 in Boca Raton FL, aged 93) were cousins, songwriters and producers. Peretti played trumpet on a Charioteers session in 1940. (The Charioteers was an instrumental small group at Columbia Records whose personnel changed at every session.) Creatore's father Giuseppe, born in Naples, had been a successful USA bandleader in the mould of John Philip Sousa; Luigi wrote advertising jingles and plays, and having served in the U.S. Navy in Pearl Harbor when it was attacked by the Japanese turned that experience into a novel, The World Is Mine, about a veteran with amnesia, which got some good reviews in 1947.

Then the cousins shared an office in the Brill Building. They both wrote both words and music, and were sometimes joined by George David Weiss (d 2010). As pop producers they had had success at Mercury in 1955, where they covered LaVern Baker's hits with Georgia Gibbs, copying the arrangements note for note and even hiring the same backup singers. At Roulette (where they were said to be co-owners) they coined money with the likes of folk-pop singer Jimmie Rodgers ('Honeycomb'), and were said to be behind the 'Cascading Voices' and 'Cascading Strings'. At RCA they produced Perry Como, Elvis Presley, the Isley Brothers, and turned Sam Cooke into an MOR artist; they were so successful at cranking out hits for RCA that they got credits on the album covers, complete with a logo, unusual then. One of their best-known songs was 'Can't Help Falling In Love', which they wrote with Weiss for Presley's movie Blue Hawaii. They had a no. 1 hit in 1961 on RCA with 'The Lion Sleeps Tonight' by the Tokens, which they had adapted from 'Wimoweh', a Zulu song discovered by Pete Seeger; unbeknownst to anyone, the song had actually been written by Solomon Linda, who sued and successfully got some royalties. 

They left RCA in 1964. With Weiss they collaborated on a musical show about the Civil War, Maggie Flynn, in 1968; it starred Shirley Jones and ran 73 performances. Later, in 1977, they won a Grammy for their production of the orginal cast album of Bubbling Brown Sugar.

Meanwhile, in 1974-6 they were producing the Stylistics for their own Avco label, and had a no. 1 with 'The Hustle', described as one of the first disco records, by Van McCoy (b 6 January 1944, Washington DC; d 6 July 1979, Englewood NJ: McCoy had had his own label around 1960 where he produced the Shirelles, Gladys Knight, and the Drifters). But by that time black pop production had acquired its own slickness and time was passing for Hugo & Luigi. See entries for Tom Dowd and rock'n'roll.