Earle Hagen

One of the most prolific composers of television soundtrack music from the 1950s through the 1980s, Earle Hagen came to the field after successes in big-band jazz and work in the movie industry as a musician and arranger. Hagen was born more than a decade before modern notions of movie music had even manifested themselves, in 1919. He was musically inclined as a boy and had taken up the trombone in junior high school in Los Angeles. He came of age amid the ascendancy of the big bands, and played with the likes of Isham Jones, Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Ray Noble, and Ben Pollack. By 1939 he had also developed interests in composition and arranging, and that year he wrote "Harlem Nocturne," an instrumental piece inspired by his love of Duke Ellington's work, which became his first success as a composer. Hagen served in the U.S. Army Air Force band, and after returning to civilian life he got a job as an arranger at 20th Century-Fox. Hagen worked under music director Alfred Newman at Fox, and served an arranger and orchestrator on scores by composers such as David Buttolph. He was at Fox for seven years, but by the early '50s, he could see that the opportunities to write music for films were becoming ever fewer, while new fields were opening up in other media, especially television. In partnership with composer Herbert Spencer, he started writing music for television in 1953, and had his first success that year with the theme from Make Room for Daddy (later known as The Danny Thomas Show). Hagen found an especially receptive patron in Sheldon Leonard, the actor/director/producer who produced the series, who liked Hagen's theme, a big-band arrangement of the traditional tune "Danny Boy" that became extremely popular as a distinctive early TV theme. As it happened, Leonard and his company became one of the busiest television production units in the industry, and Hagen got to apply his talents as a writer and arranger on many of the most successful shows in their output, including The Andy Griffith Show, Gomer Pyle, USMC, That Girl, The Mod Squad, and more. His most notable work, however, may have been the dozens of hours of original scoring that Hagen provided -- in addition to the title theme -- for most of the series' 82 episodes, which took him around the world with the series' film crew. Hagen saw a good deal more remuneration than most soundtrack composers, owing to Leonard's foresight -- the latter pegged Hagen as a talent worth nurturing, and set up a publishing company in partnership with Hagen early on. His last big success as a composer was The Dukes of Hazzard, although he saw belated use of his "Harlem Nocturne," which was picked up as the theme music for the 1980s Mike Hammer television series. He also wrote books about the art of film scoring and, in his '80s, also authored an autobiography. With the passing of David Raksin, Jerry Goldsmith, and Elmer Bernstein, as of the spring of 2005, Hagen is the dean of American soundtrack composers.
© Bruce Eder /TiVo