- Carmen Dragon
Carmen Dragon (
July 28 ,1914 –March 28 ,1984 ) was an American conductor, composer, and arranger.Dragon was born in Antioch, California. He was very active in pops music conducting and composed scores for several films, including "At Gunpoint" (1955), "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (1956), "Night into Tomorrow" (1951), and "Kiss Tomorrow Good-bye" (1950).
With
Morris Stoloff , he shared the 1944 Oscar for the popularGene Kelly /Rita Hayworth musical "Cover Girl", which featured songs byJerome Kern andIra Gershwin .He made a popular orchestral arrangement of "America the Beautiful" and also re-arranged it for symphonic band.
According to his website, he was awarded an Emmy in 1964.
He conducted the
Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra, and they performed on the "Standard Oil Hour," broadcast on NBC for elementary schools in the late 1940s through the 1950s. The show was sponsored by Standard Oil Company of California (now Chevron Corporation), but other than the name there were no commercials. The program featured a high quality introduction to classical music for young people growing up in the 1940s and early 1950s.Dragon made a series of popular light classical albums for
Capitol Records during the 1950s with theHollywood Bowl Orchestra . Some of these recordings have been reissued byEMI on CD.Dragon appears as himself briefly at the end of the 1979 film "
The In-Laws ".Carmen Dragon is the father of
Daryl Dragon of the 1970spop music duo Captain & Tennille .Honors
A school named after him opened in his hometown of Antioch in 2004.
External links
* [http://carmendragon.com/index.php Official website]
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.
