Harry Simeone

From Wind Repertory Project
Harry Simeone

Biography

Harry Moses Simeone (9 May 1911, Newark, N.J. - 22 February 2005, New York City) was a distinguished American music arranger, conductor and composer.

Simeone grew up listening to stars performing at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, not far from his native Newark. Initiated and inspired by this childhood passion, he sought a career as a concert pianist. To this end, he enrolled in the Juilliard School of Music, which he attended for three years. But when he was offered work at CBS as an arranger for bandleader Fred Waring, he dropped out of Juilliard to accept it.

After garnering vocal and music arrangement credits for the 1938 RKO motion picture Radio City Revels, Simeone relocated to Hollywood with his wife Margaret McCrae. Once there, he had various music production jobs for several Paramount films between 1939 and 1946, including some that starred Bing Crosby. Sometime in 1948, Simeone joined NBC's The Swift Show as the program's orchestra leader, and during 1952, he joined NBC's The Firestone Hour as conductor and choral arranger.

When the Twentieth-Century Fox Records label contracted Simeone to make a Christmas album in 1958, he assembled a group he called "The Harry Simeone Chorale" and searched for recording material. After being introduced to an obscure song by friend and credited song co-author Henry Onorati titled Carol of the Drum, Simeone changed the title to The Little Drummer Boy and recorded it under that title for his album Sing We Now of Christmas. He received joint authorship and composition credit for the album, although he did not actually write or compose the song. The single The Little Drummer Boy quickly became extremely popular and scored on the U.S. music charts from 1958 to 1962. The Simeone Chorale had another Christmas success during 1962, with their rendition of the then-new song Do You Hear What I Hear?

In 1960, Simeone joined a revived half-hour version of The Kate Smith Show on CBS television, produced by Smith's long-time manager, Ted Collins. Though the program had good reviews, audience levels lagged at an early evening time, and the show was cancelled after some six months on the air

In the same year, 1960, Simeone organized another group which he called "The Harry Simeone Songsters," whose style he made similar to that of the Ray Conniff Singers. That year, under his direction, the Songsters produced a baseball-oriented song in 1960 called It's a Beautiful Day for a Ballgame. The song is on one of the Baseball's Greatest Hits CDs and is still played at major league baseball parks.

On May 22, 2000, Simeone and his wife, by then living on the Upper East Side of New York City, officially established the Harry and Margaret Simeone Music Scholarship at Yale University by bestowing a gift of $1 million.


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