Three-time Grammy Award winner and iconic songwriter-performer Jimmy Webb will be honored at the 37th Annual Bistro Awards on Monday, May 16, where he will be receiving the ASCAP–Bob Harrington Lifetime Achievement Award, the Bistro Awards’ highest honor, for musical and storytelling accomplishments over his five decades-plus career.
Young Webb saw his star rise quickly in the 1960s, when his work seemed to be on the airwaves everywhere. His engaging melodies, striking lyrics, and musical versatility as composer, lyricist, arranger, and producer made the Oklahoma-born Webb a household name when he was still in his 20s. He remains the only person to win Grammys for music, lyrics, and orchestration.
His heralded, chart-topping songs include “Up, Up and Away,” “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” “Wichita Lineman,” “Galveston,” “Didn’t We,” “MacArthur Park,” “Highwayman,” and many others. They have been recorded by performers from Glen Campbell to Frank Sinatra, from Richard Harris to Nina Simone, from The Fifth Dimension to Wu Tang Clan. He composed the cantata The Animals’ Christmas and has scored such films as The Last Unicorn and Voices.
Mr. Webb holds the distinction of having been the youngest writer inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and he has received the National Academy of Songwriters Lifetime Achievement Award and the Johnny Mercer Award.
His singing career has included appearances over the decades at New York City cabaret venues, including Jan Wallman’s, The Bottom Line, The Cutting Room, and Feinstein’s at the Regency. His diverse catalog of songs has, of course, been embraced by generations of Manhattan club singers.
Webb has released more than a dozen albums under his own name, and he continues to make some 50 concert appearances each year, dazzling generations of fans with his playing, singing, and storytelling. In late May, he will embark on a multi-city concert tour in the U.K and Ireland.
His first book was his celebrated guide for aspiring composers and lyricists, Tunesmith: Inside the Art of Songwriting (1999). In 2017, he followed up with The Cake and the Rain, a candid and quirky memoir of his early life and career. Dominic Green of The Wall Street Journal hailed it as “a dream of sin and redemption, told with contrapuntal rigor” and “quite possibly the best pop-star autobiography yet written.”
He is a Board member of ASCAP, and has been supporting and fighting for songwriter rights for more than two decades. He is married to PBS’s Laura Savini. He has six children and—by the time the Bistro Awards event happens—five grandchildren.
Jimmy Webb’s songs live on in cabarets and concert halls the world over, and audiences young and old continue to be thrilled, enriched, and moved by his extraordinary artistry.
The Bistro Awards gala will be held on Monday, May 16, beginning at 7 pm, at Gotham Comedy Club, 208 W. 23rd St. It is being produced by Sherry Eaker, who has headed up the event since the awards’ inception in 1985.
ASCAP, the music rights organization, will be a sponsor of the event, as it has been for the past 25 years.
A complete list of honorees will be announced the week of April 4. Tickets will go on sale at that time, at www.BistroAwards.com.
