The Forgotten Earle Hagen (Part 2)

By Jeff Sultanof

Read part 1.

Herbert Spencer and Earle Hagen

First, more record dates. Here is Frances Langford with the Starlighters:

• Sooner or Later

Monica Lewis for MGM Records:

• La Bota
• A Kiss to Build a Dream On

When Hagen was laid off from Fox, he decided to move to television. By that time, he’d formed a partnership with fellow Fox arranger/orchestrator Herbert Spencer called Music Scoring Inc. (MSI). The two earliest shows they worked on were “The Danny Thomas Show” (a/k/a “Make Room for Daddy”) and “The Ray Bolger Show.” The Thomas show theme, an arrangement of “Danny Boy,” is well known, but the Bolger show has been long forgotten; it ran for two years, in two different formats. Here is a complete segment of Where’s Raymond from 1954.

Spencer and Hagen made a few albums as the Spencer-Hagen Orchestra. They were first signed to Label X, later called Vik, an RCA subsidiary.

Here is the entire album of Recipes for Romance, with all original music. Hagen generally did the composing, and Spencer did the orchestrating. Many of these themes turned up as library music in Europe.

The entire album of I Only Have Eyes of You.

They created the music for a Desilu series starring Janis Paige entitled It’s Always Jan in 1956. Here is the 4^th episode.

In 1956, a sitcom called Hey Jeannie ran for twenty-six episodes. Jeannie Carson was a British actress who so impressed producer Max Liebman (producer of Your Show of Shows) that he signed her to a contract to appear on American television. In the series, Carson played a Scottish woman who emigrates to the U.S., hence the musical references. Please note the clip includes the theme of the re-vamped series, made for syndication; Hagen was not involved in that series.

Bonus:

I previously discussed the two Ray Bolger TV shows. In this compilation of TV themes from the fifties, you will find not only the alternate beginning of “Where’s Raymond,” but the beginning of the other Ray Bolger show. Start watching at 4:00.

—Jeff Sultanof

[Ed. note: Earle Hagen’s papers 1955–1968, including music scores for TV series and records of the time, are located at the American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming. ]