"On Broadway" was a collaboration between the familiar songwriting team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, and the also-successful team of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. As such, it represents an especially distilled example of the "Brill Building sound." However, as Leiber and Stoller, and even such music scholars as Al Kooper and Ken Emerson, are hasty to remind us, the "Brill Building sound" actually came from 1650 Broadway as much as it did from 1619 Broadway (the address of the actual Brill Building). Weil and Mann worked out of 1650; Leiber and Stoller at 1619.

Pay attention to the instrumentals and vocals here. The Drifters were a cross-over from doo-wop to R&B, with the vocals striking a balance here. The music has a hint of soul with a large production number, and that intrusive guitar kicking in towards the end gives a nod to rockabilly. At this time, Motown was just firing up with its new soul sound, and Mike Stoller reports in Hound Dog: The Leiber & Stoller Autobiography, "Some say Sam Cooke invented soul music in the fifties, and some say Ray Charles. Some say soul didn't come about until later, in the sixties, with the advent of Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin. Others have told us that our productions for the Drifters began it all. Who can say?"

It's no surprise, then, that Berry Gordy came to see Jerry Leiber at his Brill Building office right before this song came out. Explaining that he wanted to make R&B more appealing to whites by softening the sound, he played some demo tapes for Leiber. Gordy then offered him a partnership. But Leiber turned him down, telling him, "You don't need me. You have everything you need. Just go back to Detroit and do it."

Phil Spector was an apprentice to Leiber and Stoller at the time, and he played the guitar solo on this. Spector learned many of his production techniques watching Leiber and Stoller produce The Drifters.
This was one of the last Drifters songs featuring lead singer Rudy Lewis, who replaced Ben E. King in 1961. Lewis died of a heart attack in 1964.

According to Cynthia Weil, this was written with a girl group in mind (the original version, in fact, was first recorded by The Crystals in 1962). She told NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross: "It was about a girl coming to New York and dreaming of Broadway and stardom. It was much more kind of escape from a small town and I'm going to make it. When we met with Jerry and Mike and played this for them, they said, you know, we're doing The Drifters, so it would need a whole other perspective. You can go home and do it yourself, or you can write it with us. And these guys were our idols. We thought they were great and it would be a fantastic opportunity to work with them. So we ended up reworking the song together."