I just got word that Appleton’s Maury Laws died last Friday at age 95. He wasn’t an Appleton native but called this place home for several decades. Laws was a musician, composer and arranger most famous for his wonderful orchestral arrangements of the songs written by Johnny Marks for the animated 1964 TV special “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.”
For millions of us from many generations, Maury was responsible for the way the soundtrack to our youthful Christmases sounded. He was the musical director for Rankin-Bass Company productions of “The Little Drummer Boy” (1968), “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town” (1970), “Here Comes Peter Cottontail” (1971), “The First Christmas” (1975), “The Wind in the Willows” (1987). He often wrote the songs with Jules Bass and then created the underscore for those classics. He worked on several other TV shows and big screen films and wrote the arrangement for the 1960 pop hit “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini” (but didn’t get listed credit for it).
I met Maury twice but only briefly. I wish I had known at the time that he’d won a Grammy award in 1979 for his score of the animated TV adaptation of “The Hobbit” by J.R.R. Tolkien. He also did the 1980 animated TV special of Tolkien’s “Return of the King.” I am a confirmed and wholly unembarrassed-by-it Lord of the Rings geek and such knowledge would have elevated our meetings to legendary status in my mind. Pretty sure I would have been a pest about it, too.
In keeping with his lifelong commitment to entertaining, his family has asked that any memorials to him be in the form of monetary contributions to the Fox Cities Performing Arts Center.
Rudolph photo credit: Rankin-Bass
