Prodigious Hollywood composer gave us score to "Around the World in 80 Days" and dozens more.
Browse Song Catalog:
ASCAP
Harold Adamson
Inductee
Born/Died
Inducted
Career spanned more than 40 years and dozens of top films.
Harold Adamson was born on December 10, 1.906 in Greenville, New Jersey, and grew up in New York City. He attended public elementary and high schools, and then went to the University of Kansas and Harvard University. During high school, he wrote poetry for school publications as well as sketches for student shows. While attending Kansas, he wrote songs and worked in summer stock during vacations. At Harvard, be wrote sketches and composed lyrics for the Hasty Pudding shows. After graduating from college, he began to seriously pursue a songwriting career. By the early 1930s, he contributed to Broadway shows such as Smiles (for which, Mack Gordon and Vincent Youmans wrote "Time On My Hands", Earl Carroll's Vanities, and The Third Little Show.
In 1933, Adamson signed a contract with MGM., moved to Hollywood, and spent the remainder of his career writing music for the movies. Over the years, the composers he collaborated with included Burton Lane, Jimmy McHugh, Walter Donaldson, Victor Young, and Duke Ellington.
Among the movies he wrote music, and some of the songs from. them, are Dancing Lady ("Everything I Have Is Yours," "Heigh-Ho, the Gang's All Here"), The Great Ziegfeld ("You Never Looked So Beautiful," "You"), Top of the Town ("Where Are You?"), Higher and Higher (“A Lovely Way to Spend an Evening”, “The Music Stopped”), A Date With Judy (“It’s A Most Unusual Day"), Most Unusual Day"), and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which included the Adamson song “When Love Goes Wrong”.
In the 1950s, he began to write scores and/or songs for non-musical movies, including Around the World in 80 Days, An Affair to Remember, Separate Tables, The Seven Hills of Rome, Satan Never Sleeps, and The Incredible Mr. Limpit. Other songs on which Adamson collaborated that were not written for movies are "The Woodpecker Song" (Eldo DiLazzaro), "720 in the Books" (Jan Savitt and Leo Watson), and "It's a Wonderful World" (Jan Savitt and Johnny Watson). Adamson also provided the lyrics to Eliot Daniel's music for the theme to the television series "I Love Lucy." Adamson died in Beverly Hills, California on August 17, 1980.
