Rodney Marvin McKuen (/məˈkjuːən/ mə-KEW-ən; né Woolever; April 29, 1933 – January 29, 2015) was an American poet, singer-songwriter, and composer.

McKuen's translations and adaptations of the songs of Jacques Brel were instrumental in bringing the Belgian songwriter to prominence in the English-speaking world.

[7] Sexually and physically abused by relatives,[8] raised by his mother and stepfather, who was a violent alcoholic, McKuen ran away from home.

He drifted along the West Coast, supporting himself as a ranch hand, surveyor, railroad worker, lumberjack, rodeo cowboy, stuntman, and radio disc jockey, always sending money home to his mother.

After dropping out of Oakland Technical High School prior to graduating in 1951,[10] McKuen worked as a newspaper columnist and propaganda script writer during the Korean War.

He settled in San Francisco, where he read his poetry in clubs alongside Beat poets like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.

McKuen began to translate the work of this composer into English, which led to the song "If You Go Away" – an international pop-standard – based on Brel's "Ne me quitte pas".

In 1974, singer Terry Jacks turned McKuen's "Seasons in the Sun" into a best-selling pop hit, and also charted with a cover of "If You Go Away."

McKuen also translated songs by other French songwriters, including Georges Moustaki, Gilbert Bécaud, Pierre Delanoé, and Michel Sardou.

[9] In 1978, after hearing of Brel's death, McKuen was quoted as saying, "As friends and as musical collaborators we had traveled, toured and written – together and apart – the events of our lives as if they were songs, and I guess they were.

"[13] In the late 1960s, McKuen began to publish books of poetry, earning a substantial following among young people with collections like Stanyan Street & Other Sorrows (1966), Listen to the Warm (1967), and Lonesome Cities (1968).

[1] His songs have been performed by such diverse artists as Robert Goulet, Glenn Yarbrough, Barbra Streisand, Perry Como, Petula Clark, Waylon Jennings, The Boston Pops, Chet Baker, Jimmie Rodgers, Johnny Cash, Pete Fountain, Andy Williams, The Kingston Trio, Percy Faith, the London Philharmonic, Nana Mouskouri, Daliah Lavi,Julio Iglesias, Dusty Springfield, Johnny Mathis, Al Hirt, Greta Keller, Aaron Freeman, and Frank Sinatra.

[18] His hoarse and throaty singing voice on these and other recordings was a result of McKuen straining his vocal cords in 1961 due to too many promotional appearances.

McKuen's contribution to A Boy Named Charlie Brown, the first feature-length animation based on Charles M. Schulz's comic strip Peanuts also included him singing the title song.

The program, billed as McKuen's "first television special", featured the songs "The Loner", "The World I Used to Know", "The Complete Madame Butterfly", "I've Been to Town", "Kaleidoscope", "Stanyan Street", "Lonesome Cities", "Listen to the Warm", "Trashy", and "Merci Beaucoup".

[20] McKuen's Academy Award-nominated composition "Jean", sung by Oliver, reached No.1 in 1969 on the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart and stayed there for four weeks.

[9] In 1971, McKuen became popular in the Netherlands, where the singles "Soldiers Who Want to Be Heroes" and "Without a Worry in the World" reached number one in the charts, as did the album Greatest Hits, Vol.

[22] During the 1970s, McKuen began composing larger-scale orchestral compositions, writing a series of concertos, suites, symphonies, and chamber pieces for orchestra.

[27] He often gave benefit performances to aid LGBT rights organizations and to fund AIDS research.The cover of McKuen's 1977 album Slide... Easy In featured a photo of popular gay adult actor Bruno's arm gripping a handful of vegetable shortening;[27][31][32] the can was a pastiche of Crisco – then widely used by gay men as a sexual lubricant for fisting[33]– with the label instead reading "Disco".

Michael Baers observed in Gale Research's St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture that "through the years his books have drawn uniformly unkind reviews.

In fact, criticism of his poetry is uniformly vituperative ..."[36] In a Washington Post obituary, Matt Schudel suggests that McKuen's commercial success engendered a backlash from the literary community.

"[3] In a Chicago Tribune interview with McKuen in 2001 as he was "testing the waters" for a comeback tour, Pulitzer Prize-winning culture critic Julia Keller claimed that "Millions more have loathed him [...] finding his work so schmaltzy and smarmy that it makes the pronouncements of Kathie Lee Gifford sound like Susan Sontag," and that his work "drives many people crazy.

They find it silly and mawkish, the kind of gooey schmaltz that wouldn't pass muster in a freshman creative-writing class" while stating that "The masses ate him up with a spoon, while highbrow literary critics roasted him on a spit."