Frank DeVol never attained widespread personal recognition, yet for several seasons during the 1960s his music reached millions of American households each week, frequently more than once. Working chiefly as a conductor and orchestrator, he ranked among the most active musicians of the 1950s and 1960s; as a composer he supplied scores for more than fifty motion pictures. Even so, the themes he created for series such as My Three Sons and The Brady Bunch placed him squarely inside living rooms and the broader popular consciousness.
Born in Moundsville, West Virginia, and raised in Canton, Ohio, the son of a bandleader, DeVol became a paid member of the musicians’ union in 1925 at the age of fourteen. Already performing violin and piano in his father’s theater orchestra, he later purchased a saxophone and taught himself the instrument, soon playing professionally. By the close of the 1930s he was both performing with and arranging for the Horace Heidt Orchestra. Radio work followed when the Mutual Network engaged him as bandleader for one of its California programs; during the 1940s he served in the same capacities for Rudy Vallee and Dinah Shore. He also conducted and arranged recordings for Vic Damone, Doris Day, and Tony Bennett.
DeVol entered film scoring in 1954 after being hired to compose the music for Robert Aldrich’s low-budget production World for Ransom. Despite the picture’s modest profile, the score earned him the first of five Academy Award nominations. Aldrich continued to employ him on larger projects, including The Dirty Dozen, which produced a hit single, along with Kiss Me Deadly, Attack, Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte (another Oscar-nominated score), Flight of the Phoenix, Ulzana’s Raid, The Longest Yard, and All the Marbles. Other notable scores encompassed Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (likewise nominated for music), the 1950s romantic comedy Pillow Talk (also an Oscar nominee for music), the western comedy McLintock!, and the western adventure Duel at Diablo.
It was television, however, that gave DeVol his widest audience. The theme from My Three Sons remains among the most recognizable pieces of early-1960s small-screen music, while his title theme for The Brady Bunch brought one of five Emmy nominations he received overall. He also wrote the theme for Family Affair and many additional series. Occasional acting roles included the part of Mr. Bannister, the anxious employer of John Astin and Marty Ingels, on the early-1960s sitcom I’m Dickens, He’s Fenster. In the 1970s he appeared as Happy Kyne, leader of the studio band the Mirthmakers, on the satirical talk show Fernwood 2-Night, later known as America 2-Night. The incongruity of the visibly tense DeVol portraying anyone named “Happy” supplied its own humor, yet he invested the character with greater subtlety; when Happy Kyne & the Mirthmakers performed a patriotic medley on the July 4 broadcast of Fernwood 2-Night, the music would shift just as a recognizable march or an engaging rhythm began to emerge.
Throughout the 1950s DeVol also recorded numerous albums of popular standards and salutes to American songwriters in his capacity as bandleader.
