Word: tunesmith
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DIED. Johnny Marks, 75, Tin Pan Alley tunesmith whose Christmas songs include I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day (1956), Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree (1960) and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (first recorded by Gene Autry in 1949), which went on to become one of the most popular tunes of all time, with 150 million records and 8 million sheet music copies sold worldwide; in New York City...
DIED. John Frederick Coots, 87, Tin Pan Alley-era tunesmith who composed the music for Santa Claus Is Coming to Town, Love Letters in the Sand, You Go to My Head and hundreds of other songs, as well as the scores for a dozen 1920s Broadway shows, of which the best known was Sons o' Guns (1929); in New York City...
George Gershwin was the archetypal American composer: a Tin Pan Alley tunesmith with high artistic aspirations. The man who set the country humming Oh, Lady, Be Good and Someone to Watch Over Me also wrote more formally complex, jazz-tinged "crossover" works like Rhapsody in Blue, three Preludes for piano, and most ambitious of all, the Concerto in F for piano and orchestra...
Joseph Brooks, the neophyte film maker responsible for this comedy, broke into show biz by scoring a few feature films (The Lords of Flatbush) and winning 21 awards as a Madison Avenue tunesmith. His most famous composition is You've Got a Lot to Live and Pepsi's Got a Lot to Give-a work that seems downright metaphysical when compared with You Light Up My Life, which has crept into the leading ten on Variety's list of top-grossing films...
...during the Beatles era, but in the past few years, with the enthusiastic support of his friend Elton John, has come back as strong as ever. His music, somewhat more urbane, remains essentially unchanged: catchy songs designed for the top of the Pops. Sedaka treats McCartney as a fellow tunesmith of the highest order. "A Pop hit has to have certain hooks you can hang your hat on," Sedaka points out. "The hooks can be either musical or lyrical, but the best is a marriage of both words and music. McCartney does this. A song like Listen to What...