Canada's Million-Dollar Composer

It’s a tune that may be more Canadian than “O Canada.”

It’s the theme to “Hockey Night in Canada.”

Every Saturday night, there it was on the CBC to signal the start and end of a televised NHL encounter. Even die-hard hockey haters—what few of them there are in Canada—must have recognised the theme.

Music, as you know, doesn’t compose itself. The composer of the “Hockey Night in Canada” theme was a lady by the name of Dolores Claman. And I see that she has passed away just after her 94th birthday.

I had the pleasure of meeting her and her husband a little over 40 years ago. They had a company that sold LPs of music that you hear in the background of commercials and industrial films, and had a little office on the second floor of an old brick building in downtown Vancouver. I was a commercial announcer/producer at an obscure radio station which needed a production library, and I purchased one from them. Dolores admitted to me she wrote all the music but used pseudonyms to make her company look like it had a staff of composers.

Silly me, at the time I had no idea she was responsible for Canada’s most famous sports theme.

Claman was a native Vancouverite and was giving recitals by the mid-1930s. As time wore on, she ended up being responsible for a great number of commercial jingles heard at one time on Canadian television. If you were watching the CBC or CTV in the 1960s and 1970s, you could not avoid them.

Chatelaine magazine wrote this profile of her in its September 1966 issue:

Dolores Claman music to sell by

Dolores Claman and her husband Richard Morris head the company that writes the words and music for probably seventy-five percent of the English-language commercials for such firms as Imperial Oil (remember the original “Tiger in your tank” commercials?), Scott Tissue (with the “this old man” tune) and Black Magic chocolates. Working out of a drab office in a semislum section of Toronto, the Claman-Morris team average five new commercials weekly. Dolores writes the music, Richard the words, helping to sell cigarettes, soap, soup, candy, cars, beer and gasoline, and bringing in for Miss Claman alone close to $20,000 annually. Dolores, who is auburn, slim and nervously energetic, drives herself hard. She socializes little, spends no time at sports or hobbies, and employs a full-time housekeeper to cook and clean and care for the Morrises’ four-year-old daughter Madeline. She married Morris, an English playwright writing for TV shows, in 1957, when she was working in London composing music for TV shows, West End revues and special material for performers like Tallulah Bankhead. Born in Vancouver, Dolores studied music and drama at the University of Southern California then switched to the Julliard School of Music in New York to concentrate on the piano. In 1952 she produced her first big theatrical score, Timer, for Vancouver’s Theatre Under The Stars. Occasionally the Morrises return to their old love—theatre. They’ve contributed music to the CNE grandstand shows and, with fellow writer, Ted Wood, turned Dickens’ Christmas Carol into a musical, Mr. Scrooge, which CBC-TV taped in December 1964 starring Cyril Ritchard. They’re currently working on a musical based on the sourdough ballads of Robert W. Service. Like Scrooge, much of it is written at home, a roomy east Toronto house decorated with antiques, and an amiably ugly bulldog called Sheba. – Shirley Mair.

Her most famous work came about on an afternoon in 1968. A front-page story in the Toronto Globe and Mail in June 2008 explained Claman looked out her window at her garden and plunked away on her grand piano. She tried B-flat, then the key of C. She pictured Roman gladiators wearing skates; she had never been to a hockey game. Five notes came to her and it didn’t take long for the rest of the melody to be written.

She was paid $800 by a Toronto ad agency for writing it. That was the flat rate for a jingle. The 20 musicians who played it got residuals each time it aired. Among them were top Toronto session people like trombonist Rob McConnell and trumpeter Guido Basso. But in the early ‘70s, it was reclassified as a “theme,” meaning Dolores got music-use license payments. That worked out to around $4,000 a year on average. “Hold on!” said an agent in 1993, who told Claman to license the tune. That resulted in $500 for each hockey game; up to $45,000 a year.

In 2008 at age 80, Claman decided to sell the theme. By then, sports had changed in Canada. The CBC wasn’t the only outfit broadcasting play-by-play hockey. The Mother Corp offered $850,000. No deal, said Claman, who then accepted a minimum $1,000,000 from CTV. (The CBC reacted by staging a contest for a new theme).

Show business is littered with stories of people who don’t get rewarded or credit for their work. In this case, a friendly, honest woman got a nice windfall for a Canadian musical icon.

Farewell, Dolores.