Background
Leigh Harline was born March 26, 1907, in Salt Lake City, Utah, the youngest of 13 children, to soldier Charles Härlin and his wife Johanna Matilda.
Leigh Harline was born March 26, 1907, in Salt Lake City, Utah, the youngest of 13 children, to soldier Charles Härlin and his wife Johanna Matilda.
University of Utah.
He was known for his "musical sophistication that was uniquely "Harline-esque" by weaving rich tapestries of mood-setting underscores and penning memorable melodies for animated shorts and features." In the United States. they changed their surname to Harline. In 1928, he moved to California working at radio stations in San Francisco and Los Angeles as a composer, conductor, arranger, instrumentalist, singer and announcer. In 1931, he provided music for the first transcontinental radio broadcast to originate from the West Coast.
He was then hired by Walt Disney where he scored more than 50 tunes, including for the Silly Symphonies cartoon series in the 1930s.
Harline, Frank Churchill, Paul Smith and Larry Morey then scored Disney"s first animated feature-length cartoon Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937. Snow White contained several classic songs, including "I"m Wishing", "Whistle While You Work", "Heigh-Ho" and "Some Day My Prince Will Come." He next later scored Pinocchio for Disney in 1940.
Harline left Disney in 1941 to compose for other studios. He died from complications of throat cancer on December 10, 1969, in Long Beach, California, and is buried in Valhalla Memorial Park Cemetery.
