#FlashbackFriday: The Associate Who Wrote the Yankees Theme Song—And More

The headline in the October 1956 edition of The Exchange Post reads “Employee Scores With Big Song Hit.”

The employee was Lou Stallman, a 22-year-old cafeteria worker at the Manhattan Beach Air Force Station Exchange in New York who co-wrote “Treasure of Love,” a hit for soul singer Clyde McPhatter that went to No. 16 on the pop charts and No. 1 on the R&B chart in late spring/early summer 1956. (You can hear it here.)

Although they didn’t have hits with the song, Dorothy Collins and Pat Boone also recorded it in 1956. Stallman, who co-wrote “Treasure of Love” with Joseph Shapiro, credited their versions with helping popularize the song. (The September 1956 edition of the Exchange Post includes a photo of Collins at the ribbon-cutting for a new Nellis Air Force Base Exchange.)

Described in The Exchange Post as an “amateur songwriter who suddenly turned professional,” Stallman said he enjoyed his job making salads in the Exchange cafeteria, where he would get inspiration for songs by studying the customers. In 1956, he had no plans to leave his job. But soon enough, becoming a professional songwriter took over as artists such as Rosemary Clooney and Dion & the Belmonts recorded his songs.

In 1967, he teamed with Bob Bundin to write “Here Come the Yankees,” which would become the official theme song of the New York Yankees. According to author Harvey Frommer’s “The Ultimate Yankee Book,” published in 2017, the song does not get as much play at Yankee Stadium as it used to, but an instrumental version is used on Yankees radio broadcasts. (Listen to the original version here.)

The website SecondHandSongs credits Stallman as co-writer on more than a dozen songs, but other sources say he had a catalog of more than 500. One of those songs is “It’s Gonna Take a Miracle,” which Stallman co-wrote with Teddy Randazzo and Bobby Weinstein, the duo behind such ’60s R&B hits as “Goin’ Out of My Head” and “Hurt So Bad.”

“It’s Gonna Take a Miracle” was a Top 30 R&B hit in 1965 for the Royalettes, but its best-known version is Deniece Williams’ 1982 cover, which went to No. 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 1 on the R&B chart. Williams received a 1982 Grammy nomination for Best R&B Vocal Performance, and Stallman, Randazzo and Weinstein were nominated in the Best Rhythm & Blue Song category for their song that was written more than 15 years earlier.

In 2018, Australian singer Sia covered “Round and Round,” another Stallman-Shapiro composition that originally was a hit for Perry Como in 1957.

In the late ’70s, Stallman began a long collaboration with Jerry Potente, a younger songwriter who became so close with Stallman that he referred to him as his “second father.” According to Potente’s Facebook page, Stallman died Sept. 3 of this year at age 88.

Sources: Exchange Post archives, Grammy.com, MusicVF.com, US World Report.