The guy responsible for one of the best-known television theme songs of all time has passed away:
Earle H. Hagen, a onetime big-band trombonist who wrote some of the most famous theme songs in television history, died Monday in Rancho Mirage, Calif., near Palm Springs. He was 88 and lived in Rancho Mirage.
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He wrote the folksy, countrified whistle that opened “The Andy Griffith Show,” accompanying Sheriff Andy Taylor (Mr. Griffith) and his young son, Opie (Ron Howard), down a dirt road toward a fishing hole; he did the whistling himself. He wrote the swinglike anthem for “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” accompanying Mr. Van Dyke’s entry into his suburban home and his tumble over an ottoman. (In later seasons, Mr. Van Dyke would sidestep the ottoman to the same playful musical phrase.) He wrote the cool, cosmopolitan and suggestively exotic theme for the espionage drama “I Spy.” He wrote the cheerily mock-military anthem for the bumpkin-in-the-marines comedy “Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C,” starring Jim Nabors. And he wrote the perky pop theme for the Marlo Thomas vehicle “That Girl.”
“He was one of the pioneers of original music for television,” said Jon Burlingame, who teaches the history of film music at the University of Southern California and wrote “TV’s Biggest Hits: The Story of Television Themes From ‘Dragnet’ to ‘Friends’ ” (Schirmer, 1996). “He was a gifted melodist who could see a show, imagine what it needed dramatically or comedically and translate it into music that within one or two hearings became familiar.”
So, you know, this one’s for you:
