Meredith Willson launched his professional music career in the early 1920s as a songwriter, bandleader, and multi-instrumentalist, gaining lasting recognition for the Broadway scores of The Music Man in 1957 and The Unsinkable Molly Brown in 1960, along with writing the perennial holiday standard "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas." Born in Iowa in 1902, he pursued formal training at a New York music school while also taking private lessons. In the early 1920s he joined John Philip Sousa's concert band as its flute and piccolo soloist, traveling extensively across the United States and through Central and South America. Between the mid- and late 1920s he played with the New York Philharmonic, then moved into radio work as a music director in San Francisco during the 1930s. While based on the West Coast he composed scores for two motion pictures, The Great Dictator (1940) and The Little Foxes (1941), and later served briefly in the armed forces during World War II. By the mid-1940s Willson was hosting his own radio program; its closing theme, "May the Good Lord Bless and Keep You," became a million-selling hit in 1950. His initial Broadway venture, The Music Man, earned him a Tony Award and the Broadway Historical Society's Showman of the Year title in 1957, while the follow-up The Unsinkable Molly Brown proved equally popular in 1960, though Here's Love in 1963 met with less enthusiasm. Among his widely performed compositions are "You and I," "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas," "It's Easter Time," "I See the Moon"—a favorite among American G.I.s stationed in Korea—and the Music Man numbers "76 Trombones," "Till There Was You," and "Trouble." He also published two memoirs, And There I Stood With My Piccolo and But He Doesn't Know the Territory.
