Walter Schumann

Walter Schumann (October 8, 1913 – August 21, 1958) was an American composer, book writer, and performer born in New York City. He worked across film, television, theater, and radio, composing scores and themes that became widely recognized during the 1940s and 1950s. His Broadway credits include John Brown's Body and 3 for Tonight, the latter of which he also starred in during its 1955 run.

Schumann attended law school at USC in the early 1930s before leaving to perform with a college dance band. After the band dissolved, he remained in the music industry, collaborating with Eddie Cantor on Cantor's radio program and recording alongside Andre Kostelanetz. When the United States entered World War II, Schumann enlisted and rose to the position of musical director of the Armed Forces Radio Service, where he worked with major performers across the radio productions AFRS mounted during the war years. Following the war, he relocated to Los Angeles and took on composing and arranging work in film and television, contributing to several Abbott and Costello films.

In 1949, Schumann was commissioned to compose a theme for a new police detective program preparing to debut on NBC Radio. The result was the Dragnet theme, built around a four-note motif that became one of the most recognizable musical signatures in American broadcasting. The show moved successfully to television, and the theme's popularity earned Schumann the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Music Composition in 1955.

His theatrical work began with the opera John Brown's Body, which premiered in Los Angeles in 1953 before transferring to Broadway's New Century Theatre, where it ran for sixty-five performances. Schumann then wrote and starred in 3 for Tonight, a musical revue that opened on Broadway in 1955 in a production directed by and starring Gower Champion. The show received the Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Musical in 1955.

During this period, Schumann assembled an ensemble of twenty vocalists known as The Voices of Walter Schumann. The group recorded easy-listening albums for both Capitol Records and RCA Victor. Their recordings included a spoken-word space-themed album titled Exploring the Unknown and a nineteen-track Christmas album, The Voices of Christmas, which was reissued on compact disc by Collector's Choice Music in November 2007. In 1955, Schumann also composed and conducted the score for the Robert Mitchum film The Night of the Hunter. In 1956 and 1957, Schumann and the Voices appeared on the first season of NBC's The Ford Show, Starring Tennessee Ernie Ford.

By the summer of 1958, declining health led Schumann to seek treatment at the Mayo Clinic, where he underwent one of the first open heart surgeries performed in the United States. Complications following the operation resulted in his death on August 21, 1958, at the age of 44, just weeks before the third season of The Tennessee Ernie Ford Show was set to begin. Following his death, the members of the Voices ensemble continued performing under the name The Top Twenty and remained with Ford for an additional five years. Schumann's papers are archived at the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming.