Frank DeVol

Frank DeVol was never quite a "household name," but for a few years in the 1960's, his name came into millions of American households every week, sometimes more than once each week. As a bandleader and arranger, he was one of the busiest working musicians of the 1950's and 1960's, and as a composer, he wrote more than 50 movie scores--but it was his theme music for series such as My Three Sons and The Brady Bunch by which he came into our homes and pop-culture consciousness for decades. Frank DeVol was born in Moundsville, West Virginia and raised in Canton, Ohio, the son of a band leader. In 1925, at age 14, he was already a paid-up member of the musicians' union, playing violin and piano in a band led by his father at a local theater. He taught himself the saxophone after saving enough to buy one, and he played professionally. By the end of the 1930's, DeVol was playing in and arranging material for the Horace Heidt Orchestra. He moved into radio work when the Mutual Network hired him as a band leader on one of its shows in California, and he went on to become a band leader and arranger for such renowned figures as Rudy Vallee and Dinah Shore during the 1940's. DeVol also worked as a band leader and arranger on recordings by figures such as Vic Damone, Doris Day, and Tony Bennett. In 1954, DeVol made the jump to composer when he was engaged to write the music for a Robert Aldrich movie called World for Ransom. Despite the fact that the movie was produced on a low budget and wasn't very visible to the trade, the score was good enough to get DeVol the first of five Oscar nominations that he would receive throughout his career. Aldrich used him on several subsequent big-budget movies, including The Dirty Dozen (which yielded a hit single), Kiss Me Deadly, Attack, Hush ....