Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic With a new exhibit celebrating the Songwriters Hall of Fame that has opened at the Grammy Museum in downtown Los Angeles, the facility finally has a space in which the pen is definitively mightier than the sword. Although there are some axes on view, too — but this is an exhibit where attendees are at least as likely to ooh and aah over Sammy Cahn’s typewriter or Burt Bacharach’s hand-written scores as they are Tom Petty’s guitar or Jimmy Jam’s keytar. The range of artifacts on display in “The Power of Song: A Songwriters Hall of Fame Exhibit” runs a gamut from from Irving Berlin’s piano and Cole Porter’s walking stick to material contributions from contemporary writers like Benny Blanco and Imagine Dragons’ Dan Reynolds. In-between those poles, you can find handwritten lyrics and sheet music, telegrams, production notes, cassette demo tapes, Oscars, and — lest a writers’ exhibit seem like too much of a paper chase — even some jackets worn by more sartorially flashy writer-performers like John Legend and Annie Lennox.
