The songwriter whose words made other people’s hits

John David Souther was born in Detroit in 1945 and raised in Amarillo, Texas. His father sang in a jazz band and later ran a shop selling records and instruments, and his grandmother was an opera singer; the first song he learned as a child was Puccini’s “Nessun Dorma”. He played violin, then clarinet, saxophone and guitar, and left Amarillo College to play drums with his first band, The Cinders. Their earliest recordings were made at Norman Petty’s studios in Clovis, New Mexico.

In 1969 he moved to Los Angeles and met Glenn Frey. They became roommates and collaborators, performing for a short time as the folk duo Longbranch Pennywhistle. Souther helped the Eagles form as the backing band for Linda Ronstadt, and he played with them at the Troubadour when they stepped out on their own. When they offered him a place in the band, he declined and signed with David Geffen’s Asylum label instead. In 1972 he formed the Souther–Hillman–Furay Band with Chris Hillman and Richie Furay, a group that released two albums which did not sell.

The songs were his real engine. He co-wrote “Best of My Love”, “New Kid in Town” and “Heartache Tonight” for the Eagles, the last of which became their final number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1979. He wrote “Run Like a Thief” for Bonnie Raitt and sang backing vocals for Dan Fogelberg and Christopher Cross. His second solo album, Black Rose, was produced by Peter Asher in 1976 and includes a duet with Ronstadt.

His own biggest hits were “You’re Only Lonely” in 1979 and “Her Town Too” in 1981, a duet with James Taylor. He also acted on television and in movies, and in 2008 he joined the Eagles on their farewell tour. When he died in September 2024, the phrase used to describe him was that he was a principal architect of the Southern California sound, a title earned mostly by writing songs that other people got to sing.