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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

Capitol records, manuscripts, music, BYU

College

Fine Arts and Communications

Department

Music

Abstract

Early one morning in 1966 Billy May stood helpless and devastated on the first floor of the Capitol Records Tower in Hollywood, California. He watched as a group of men swiftly loaded a semi truck to the brim with boxes of original music scores. Somewhere in those boxes were all the original arrangements he had written for the likes of Frank Sinatra, Nat “King” Cole, Dean Martin and Peggy Lee – music that had won him Grammy Awards, Gold Records and the admiration of every arranger in the business – the entire collection of 10,000 original Capitol Records scores from 1942 to that date. He asked the men where all the music was going, and they replied, “to the dump.” The truck was filled, the music was gone, and the truck drove away. Since that day, whenever Billy May, Nelson Riddle, the Sinatra family, the Nat “King” Cole family, and hundreds more have been asked where the music is, the standard reply has been “rotting in the dump somewhere outside LA.”

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