June 17 - Terry Gilkyson

On this day, in 1916, Hamilton Henry Gilkyson III was born in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania. Known as Terry most of his life, he grew up in a close knit family where, like many folks living through the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression, music formed the bulk of their entertainment. Terry found it interesting enough that he became a music student at the University of Pennsylvania. He chaffed under the structure of classwork, however, and dropped out after two years. He then moved out to Tucson, Arizona in 1937 and began working as a ranch hand on a friend’s big spread. In his spare time, he learned how to play guitar and write folk songs. When World War II came to America, he joined the United States Army, serving first in the cavalry then moving on to the Army Air Corps. Following his discharge at the end of the war, Terry returned to Pennsylvania, took over his father’s insurance company and got married. But the siren song of a career in music proved too strong to resist.


In 1947, Terry and his new bride, Jane, relocated to Los Angeles, California. In 1948, he landed his first professional music gig on Armed Forces Radio as The Solitary Singer. The next year he recorded The Cry of the Wild Goose, a song he also wrote. A version sung by Frankie Laine became a hit in 1950. Throughout the first half of the Fifties, Terry produced three albums for Decca Records, sang two hits with a group called The Weavers (On Top of Old Smoky and Across the Wide Missouri), wrote another hit song for Frankie (Tell Me a Story) and began appearing in small roles in movies, frequently writing the music for them as well. (1951’s Slaughter Trail).

Image courtesy allmusic.com

In 1953, he joined a group called The Easy Riders. The trio prospered in an era of political uncertainty (damn you, Joe McCarthy!) by studiously avoiding controversial topics, something most folk singers of the time (or any time really) were unable to do. The Riders released one song, Marianne, that went gold (meaning it sold over a million copies) in 1957 and wrote the song Memories Are Made of This which became a hit for Dean Martin (with backing vocals by… The Easy Riders!). Terry continued writing songs by himself throughout the decade, creating several folk standards that would be recorded by Burl Ives, The New Christie Minstrels and even Harry Belafonte. One of his last compositions with the Riders would be Greenfields, which became a hit for The Brothers Four.

Image copyright Disney

In the early Sixties, Terry dropped out of The Easy Riders and started writing songs for the Walt Disney Company. Some of his work from this period includes My Heart Was an Island from Swiss Family Robinson, Savage Sam and Me from Savage Sam (the sequel to Old Yeller), Thomasina from The Three Lives of Thomasina and the title song from The Moon-Spinners. In 1967, Terry wrote several songs for the studio’s 19^th animated feature, The Jungle Book, as did the Sherman Brothers. Only one of his actually made it into the film (Walt felt most of them were too dark), but it’s the one everybody knows and hums along with, The Bare Necessities. Terry’s song was also the only part of The Jungle Book to earn an Oscar nomination, his one and only shot at an award (he lost to Talk to the Animals from Dr. Doolittle). His final contribution to the company came in 1970’s The Aristocats with the song Thomas O’Malley Cat.

Following the success of his work in The Jungle Book and The Aristocats, Disney asked Terry to sign on with the company full time, instead of the contract work he’d been doing up to that point. He was leery of the offer, however, afraid that he would no longer have rights to his own songs. Rather than accept, Terry chose to retire altogether. He spent the remainder of his life watching his three kids build careers in the music industry. While visiting family in Austin, Texas, he passed away on October 15, 1999. He was 83.