24 Facts About Jerry Fielding

Jerry Fielding was a three-time Oscar nominee for Best Original Score, and an Emmy Award winner.

Jerry Fielding began his career as a popular arranger for radio orchestras, but was blacklisted in 1953, subsequently working in Las Vegas.

Jerry Fielding was best known for his collaborations with Sam Peckinpah, Clint Eastwood, and Michael Winner.

Jerry Fielding was noted for his work on the television series Star Trek and Kolchak: The Night Stalker.

Jerry Fielding chose the name Fielding, and he would recount this transformation with some bitterness almost 25 years later:.

In 1948, Jerry Fielding replaced Billy May as musical director on Groucho Marx's radio program You Bet Your Life.

Jerry Fielding's sin appeared to be his Radio Union membership which was in turn one of a dozen or more unions in the Hollywood Writers Mobilization which was founded in 1941 to promote show business efforts against Nazism and in support of the American war effort.

However, Jerry Fielding later joked that all the committee really wanted was to get him to name Groucho Marx as a communist, which he refused to do.

Jerry Fielding believed he was being singled out for his integrated bands, using African-American jazz performers in his radio and television music, which was carried live at the time.

Jerry Fielding took the Fifth Amendment, refusing to divulge the names of any colleagues who might be suspected of "Communism", doing so knowing that pleading the Fifth would damage his thriving radio and television career, as it did.

In Las Vegas, Nevada he led a band at the Royal Las Vegas Hotel; in addition, he toured for the only time with his name orchestra, which released several albums during this period, first for a little-known independent label, with Jerry Fielding Plays a Dance Concert, followed by Sweet with a Beat, Fielding's Formula, and Hollywoodwind Jazztet, all on Decca.

Jerry Fielding was now free to write television scores for hit 1960 shows, Mission Impossible and Star Trek in second and third seasons.

Peckinpah then asked Jerry Fielding to compose around songs by Bob Dylan, for Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.

Jerry Fielding had fruitful and rather less stressful relationships with two other leading 1970s action directors.

For Michael Winner he demonstrated his versatility through six films, from the first jazz-tinged score for a Western in Lawman to the Gothic period melodrama The Nightcomers, where Jerry Fielding delighted in creating a neo-Baroque orchestral score of which he was most proud.

Jerry Fielding presumably didn't know that the author of the original novel, Forrest Carter, was a Klansman and segregationist.

Jerry Fielding, assuming he was scoring a popular young people's Western novel, researched and included Irish folk tunes from the Civil War, creating another newly explored direction for period films and winning his third and final Oscar nomination.

Jerry Fielding combined his film scores with television work, not an unusual combination at the time, particularly since the theme song for a hit television series could go on paying dividends for years, generating royalties every time it was played on the air.

Jerry Fielding scored two episodes of the first Star Trek television series: cult classic The Trouble with Tribbles and Spectre of the Gun.

Jerry Fielding did notable work with Kolchak: The Night Stalker.

Jerry Fielding married twice, first to Kay Kyser band production assistant, Ann Parks, in December 1946 in Tijuana.

Jerry Fielding died, at the age of 57, from a heart attack followed by congestive heart failure, while in Toronto where he was scoring the film Cries in the Night.

Jerry Fielding's remains are interred in Crypt 30 at Glen Haven Memorial Park in Los Angeles.

On November 12,2009, Jerry Fielding was awarded a lifetime achievement award for his composition in The Wild Bunch which celebrated its 40th anniversary.