Jump to ContentJump to Main Navigation
Show TunesThe Songs, Shows, and Careers of Broadway’s Major Composers$
Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content.
Show Tunes: The Songs, Shows, and Careers of Broadway’s Major Composers

Steven Suskin

Print publication date: 2010

Print ISBN-13: 9780195314076

Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011

DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195314076.001.0001

Show Summary Details
Page of

PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. date: 26 October 2020

Meredith Willson

Meredith Willson

Born: May 8, 1902, Mason City, Iowa

Died: June 15, 1984, Santa Monica, California

Chapter:
(p.261) Meredith Willson
Source:
Show Tunes
Author(s):

Steven Suskin

Publisher:
Oxford University Press
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195314076.003.0022

This chapter examines the work of Meredith Willson. Willson, as a small-town child, despite musical tendancies did not take up the trumpet as he had a lisp. Rather, he sang barber shop songs and became proficient on the flute and piccolo. His mother gave him piano lessons, though. By the age of nineteen, Willson was playing flute in John Philip Sousa’s band, and in 1924 he moved over to the New York Philharmonic. At the decade’s end he headed to the West Coast and began a successful career in radio as performer and conductor.

Keywords:   Meredith Willson, flute, piccolo, musical theater, show tunes, John Philip Sousa, conductor

Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.

Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.

If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.

To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .