RIP Arthur Hamilton

 

Arthur Hamilton, songwriter of ‘Cry Me a River’ torch classic, dies at 98

Mr. Hamilton’s hits also included “Sing a Rainbow,” which was written as a haunting lament of broken dreams but found a parallel life as a children’s tune.

The Washington Post

By Bryan Murphy

June 5, 2025

 

Arthur Hamilton, an Oscar-nominated songwriter who helped revive the torch singer genre in the 1950s with the smoldering “Cry Me a River” and whose “Sing a Rainbow” became a childhood staple even though it was initially crafted as a haunting lament, has died at age 98.

The death was announced in a statement on June 4 by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, but no other details were given.

Mr. Hamilton’s contributions to the Great American Songbook were greatly shaped by the cinema-driven world of his upbringing in Hollywood, where his parents occasionally collaborated on songs for movies including the vaudevillian musical “Wake Up and Dream” (1934).

As a young songwriter, Mr. Hamilton said he liked to imagine how his songs might appear on the big screen. He also studied musical mood and inflection at a club in Beverly Hills by listening to cabaret master Bobby Short do his interpretations of songs by Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin and others.

“I told people many times, ‘I never went to college, I went to Bobby Short,’ ” Mr. Hamilton said in a 2016 interview on “The Paul Leslie Hour” podcast.

Some of Mr. Hamilton’s first professional credits were for songs in a television musical on KTTV in Los Angeles in the late 1940s. He next ended up in a partnership with actor-director Jack Webb, star of the cop drama “Dragnet” during its first TV run in the 1950s. Webb needed songs for a film he was directing, “Pete Kelly’s Blues,” that also featured him in the lead role as a Prohibition-era cornet player under pressure from the mob.

The soundtrack for the 1955 movie includes two songs by Mr. Hamilton sung by Peggy Lee, who played an alcoholic jazz singer. In Mr. Hamilton’s “He Needs Me,” Lee sings about a tortured romance. In “Sing a Rainbow,” Lee’s character looks back wistfully at her diminished career and bad choices.

HAMILTON, Arthur (Arthur Hamlton Stern)

Born: 10/22/1926, Seattle, Washington, U.S.A.

Died:6/3/2025,

 

Arthur Hamilton’s western – music department:

Westward Ho! – 1960-1961