May 23 - George Bruns

On this day, in 1983, George Edward Bruns passed away in Portland, Oregon. Born on July 3, 1914 in Sandy, Oregon, George took plenty of music lessons as a child. His innate talent was evident early on as it didn’t take him long to master the piano, the tuba and the trombone. He began attending Oregon State Agricultural College (now known as Oregon State University) in 1932 and played with the ROTC band in order to afford the tuition. For some reason, George was an engineering student but he didn’t stay one for terribly long. By the age of twenty, he’d decided to drop out of school to be a full-time musician (every parent’s dream). Luckily for George (and ultimately the rest of us), that plan worked out for once.

For the rest of the Thirties and the first half of the Forties, George played with various local groups in the Portland area. Following World War II, he started his own band (which included Doc Severenson of The Tonight Show fame) and began playing gigs all over the Northwest. The group had to remain based in Portland because George’s regular job was musical director of radio station KEX. He also served as the bandleader in the ritzy Rose Bowl room at Portland’s Multnomah Hotel and would occasionally play trombone on recordings with the Castle Jazz Band.

Image courtesy vegalleries.com

In 1949, George moved to Los Angeles craving a bigger music scene than Portland could offer. He played tuba in a jazz band (you heard that right, tuba and jazz in the same sentence), created a night club act with his wife, singer Jeanne Gayle, and got the break of a lifetime. In 1953, George was asked to write the music for a short over at United Productions of America, Little Boy with a Big Horn. His work was impressive enough to grab some attention over at the Walt Disney Studio and he was hired the same year to arrange Tchaikovsky’s ballet music and write new score for the upcoming feature Sleeping Beauty.

Image copyright Disney

During production on Sleeping Beauty, Walt discovered he had a small problem in one of the shows that was being created for the Disneyland television show. There was a three and a half minute gap in an episode about this famous frontiersman. Did George think he could maybe write a song to take care of that? So George sat down with lyricist Tom Blackburn and churned out a little ditty called The Ballad of Davy Crockett. The success of that one song would have been more than enough to cement George’s place in Disney history (it certainly was enough to make him the studio’s musical director), but it was only the beginning.

Image copyright Disney

Over the next twenty years, George would score more than forty Disney films and television shows, starting with the remaining episodes of Davy Crockett. He wrote several songs for the first two seasons of The Mickey Mouse Club, including Talent Roundup (with studio nurse Hazel George) and I Want to Be a Fireman. In one four year period, he would receive three Oscar nominations, first for Sleeping Beauty in 1959, then for Babes in Toyland in 1961 and finally for The Sword in the Stone in 1963. His most famous composition (in spite of what fans of Davy Crockett think) is hands down a song that plays on continuous loop at all times somewhere in the world: A Pirate’s Life for Me, penned with the legendary Imagineer X Atencio. His other highlights include the scores of One Hundred and One Dalmatians, The Jungle Book, The Aristocats, The Absent Minded Professor and The Love Bug. In 1973, George was nominated for an Academy Award a fourth time for a song he wrote with lyricist Floyd Huddleston, Love from Robin Hood.


After scoring Herbie Rides Again, George retired from the Walt Disney Studio in 1976. He moved back to the Portland area, became a part-time music professor at Lewis and Clark College and continued to compose and play all of the instruments in his repertoire. He did record a new album of jazz music, but it never got much more than local play time. In May of 1983, George suffered a fatal heart attack at the age of 68. In 2001, for composing a large chunk of the soundtrack guests hear snippets of all around Disney theme parks in every corner of the world, he was posthumously declared an official Disney Legend.