Bill Lava

Carl Stalling was the master of musical directors for Warner Bros. cartoons, incorporating pieces of classical music, Raymond Scott’s compositions, and the-title-fits-the-scene popular songs to weave scores that have become fixed in the minds of millions of people. His arranger, Milt Franklyn, followed pretty much the same template. Frank Marsales, in the Harman-Ising era, put bouncy versions of tunes from Warner Bros. musicals into the background of cartoons. Norman Spencer and Bernie Brown (if Brown actually wrote music for the cartoons) provided serviceable accompaniment, despite the use of a back-beat woodblock that bordered on obsessiveness.

That brings us to Bill Lava.

Lava gets dumped on by some Warner Bros. cartoon fans because of his sparse orchestrations and less-than-melodic scores. Lava used far fewer of the Warners’ musical possessions than any of his predecessors. He was hired to score the cartoons after Franklyn’s death. One Sylvester-Tweety short, The Jet Cage (1962), features both composers, with Lava finishing the cartoon after Franklyn died.

Yet Lava shouldn’t be judged on cartoons alone, especially when the studio that employed him was past its prime. He had a fine career providing music for features and shorts. He wrote the theme song for F Troop, a stirring march that bore no resemblance to what sounds like budget-saving instrumentations on his cartoons.

William Benjamin Lava was born on March 18, 1911 in St. Paul, Minnesota; his father Abraham was a cotton broker specialising in bedding textiles who had emigrated to the U.S. from Poland. In 1916, the family was in Chicago. In 1930, Lava was employed as a railroad clerk. He studied at Northwestern University, writing for the university’s commerce magazine, and arrived in Hollywood in 1936; the Los Angeles City Directory in 1937 lists his occupation as “musician.”

The Hollywood Reporter of Aug. 2, 1937 mentions he supplied songs for Republic’s Sea Racketeers. Lava was responsible for more music for Republic and is mentioned as the “arranger for Joe Reichman’s orchestra” in the Jan. 26, 1938 edition of Variety. The Los Angeles Daily News of March 26, 1940 talks about his “pleasing music score” for Courageous Dr. Christian, produced by Stephens-Lang for RKO, while the Citizen-News of Sept. 11th that year reports he conducted a 92-piece orchestra in an original score for an industrial film for the Department of the Interior.

The two trades published occasional squibs about Lava. With the war on, Lava contributed to musical propaganda, co-writing “Let’s Take the Blitz Out of Fritz” (Variety, Oct. 21, 1942). He also spoke at a music conference at the Carthay Circle Theatre, discussing his score for Warners’ I Won’t Play. At the same conference, speaking about music for cartoons, was Scott Bradley, who elaborated on his scores for Bear Raid Warden and Dance of the Weed (Reporter, Oct. 26, 1944). Lava was on the staff of Warner Bros. at this point providing music for features and shorts, including the Joe McDoakes series starring George O’Hanlon.

He was involved in an unusual recording in 1946. Columbia released a single featuring the Hollywood Presbyterian Church choir performing “highly stylized” versions of “The Lost Chord” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” with a solo by Warners actor Dennis Morgan (Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, Mar. 10, 1946).

Radio beckoned Lava as well. On June 3, 1949, he began work as musical director (uncredited) of a new dramatic series about police work starring Jack Webb (Reporter, June 1). No, Lava did not write the well-known Dragnet theme. However, he did compose an opening/closing march featuring horns and a timpani that may have inspired Walter Schumann’s theme that debuted in the third episode.

A “musical poem” entitled “The Young Fox” was a Lava composition and debuted Nov. 5, 1950 at John Burroughs High School, performed by the Burbank Symphony.

With television now a big deal, Lava and N. Gayle Gitterman formed Allegro Productions in June 1951, with offices at the Goldwyn studios. The Reporter said the pilot for a special agent series (Special File, starring Dick Travis) was to be shot in a month. In October, the Los Angeles Times reported on casting for Allegro’s Voyage of the Scarlet Queen (starring Kim Spalding and Sean McLory), which had been a radio show on Mutual. The idea was to cut records with the series’ stars. Allegro ran into trouble. A show called Lives of the U.S. Rangers was cancelled before it even began filming; Lava blamed the “inability to secure certain conditions that were deemed essential,” according to the Reporter in Aug. 1951. Allegro went bust and Lava opened Telescene Productions, announcing a 15-minute filmed travelogue TV series called Beauty Is Where You Find It (Variety, Dec. 9, 1953) with James Brown as narrator-reporter (Reporter, Jan. 8, 1954).

In the meantime, he also scored his first cartoon, though not for the studio where he was on staff. He composed the music for UPA’s Fuddy Duddy Buddy (released Oct. 18, 1951). Britain’s Monthly Film Bulletin declared the music “witty,” a term never applied to his cartoons for Warners.

Lava joined seven other composers on the staff of Universal-International (San Bernadino County Sun, Oct. 31, 1954), though he was still at Warners writing music for theatricals and television. He also provided his first music for Walt Disney Productions in the short Stormy the Thoroughbred (released March 1954).

Starting with part of The Jet Cage, Lava scored about 60 Warners cartoons up to Snow Excuse (released May 21, 1966). Former Walter Lantz musical director Walter Greene took over for about a year, then Lava returned to compose music for Quacker Tracker (released April 29, 1967) until the studio closed for good in 1969. A few of the cues from the Stalling era returned, including “When My Dreamboat Comes Home,” “I Like Mountain Music,” “It’s Magic” and “April Showers,” but Lava compositions were responsible for the bulk of the scores.

Perhaps his best-known work was on the aforementioned Warner Bros. TV series F Troop which aired between 1965 and 1967. Lava spoke about the Old West sitcom in an article (possibly an ABC handout) that appeared in the Sacramento Bee of Jan. 22, 1967. He pointed out while actor James Hampton played the inept Fort Courage bugler, the sound actually came from the horn of session musician Larry Sullivan. “The only way I can get Larry to play bad,” Lava revealed, “is to break him up. While he’s recording I whisper something funny in his ear, or I tickle him. You’d be surprised at the crazy results. The best ones go on the finished sound track.”

After F Troop completed its run, Lava set up another company in the fall of 1968. Orbit Productions was based out of the home of partner George A. Summerson and was part-owned by Warner Bros. cartoon effects animator Harry Love.

Lava died of a heart attack on February 20, 1971. He was 59. Samuel H. Sherman, writing in Variety of April 7, 1971, lamented Lava’s loss as shrinking the ranks of veteran film composers, equating him with Max Steiner, Victor Young and Dimitri Tiomkin. The tribute noted he was self-taught, his career as a band arranger in the Midwest in the 1930s, his arrival in Hollywood to work under Nat Shilkret at RKO, mentioned he was working at the time of his death on a Disney feature on the Calgary Stampede and a pilot for Treasury Dept. with David Janssen. And while it referred to “a wide variety of major features” at Warners, some without screen credit, his work in animation was overlooked.

Those who find his Warners cartoon scores grating may think that’s not a real loss, but Lava’s time at the studio and his longevity in Hollywood deserve to be recognised.