Johnny Green

Johnny Green 1908-1989

Johnny Green

by Clifford McCarty • 5 August 2022

Johnny Green is a vital, candid, immensely knowledgeable man, who has won a series of successes in nearly every field of contemporary American music. For almost thirty years he has been outstanding as a song writer, pianist, band leader, recording artist, radio personality, arranger, conductor and film composer. He was born John W. Green in New York City on October 10th, 1908. Both of his parents, though not professional musicians, played the piano well, and he was brought up in an environment filled with interest in music, the theatre and the arts. He was educated at Horace Mann School and New York Military Academy, and he studied piano and theory with Herman Wasserman, Ignace Hilsberg and Walter Raymond Spalding. He entered Harvard University and throughout his college career was one of the most prominent collegiate musicians of his day. He played saxophone in and was the arranger for the Harvard University Band, and with Charles Henderson (also now active in film music) he organized and was the principal

An Interview with John Green

by Ford A. Thaxton • 5 August 2022

John Green was MGM’s Music Director from 1948 to 1958, after having established himself in the 1930s as a songwriter in New York. An economics major at Harvard, Green had studied with Adolph Deutsch when he came to Hollywood after gaining experience as an arranger and conductor at Paramount’s Astoria Studios in New York. Green’s association with such MGM musicals as AN AMERICAN IN PARIS, WEST SIDE STORY, and OLIVER! overshadows his effectiveness as a composer of dramatic works, and only a handful of soundtrack LPs exist showcasing Green’s work (RAINTREE COUNTY, also issued on CD, is the only full soundtrack of Green’s music to have been released. The MGM TWILIGHT OF HONOR LP only contained 2 cues – which is actually about all Green wrote for the film – supplemented by standards and excerpts from other MGM scores). His last score, THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON’T THEY?, was scored primarily with 1930s era dance standards, many of which Green had composed himself. Not quite a dozen of Green’s other film compositions ap

Raintree County

by Johnny Green • 4 August 2022

The composition of the dramatic music score for any “epic” motion picture presents many rough and special problems. Not the least of these is sheer length. A motion picture that is to run in excess of three hours will, the chances are, require a dramatic score of approximately ninety minutes. Some such films will, of course, call for less music; and there will be those, like RAINTREE COUNTY, that demand more. So many notes constitute, to say the least, a large composition chore, even without the stop watch. In the confines of a celluloid straitjacket the task is truly mountainous. Somehow, even with the best advance planning, schedules never seem to come off quite as promised, and inevitably there is that awful pressure on the composer to produce, in a given time unit, what should take, say, twice as much time for a composer blessed with even the greatest facility. RAINTREE COUNTY was no exception; towards the end of the composition period the boom fell and the panic was on. We’ll come back to this later.