Guest post by Nathan Arizona
When producer Sheldon Leonard was making “The Andy Griffith Show,“ he didn’t want to use the typical generic production music. He wanted a theme song that evoked his idea of that particular show, which was set in a small North Carolina town. The kind of place where homespun things happen, like a father taking his son fishing.
He called Earle Hagen, who had been writing music for movies and TV for two decades. Hagen thought about it a little while and knocked out the song in 15 minutes. It became one of the most popular theme songs ever. You might be hearing it in your head right now.
Hagen didn’t spend time rounding up a big orchestra. He was his own instrument. He was a whistler. It was easy for him. All he had to do was follow Lauren Bacall’s advice to Humphrey Bogart: “You just put your lips together and blow.”
He whistled the whole song. When he decided it needed some finger-snapping he kept it in-house and recruited his 11-year-old son. Then the producer called in Andy and Opie (Ron Howard) to be filmed carrying fishing poles on a country road. It was all a perfect Mayberry thing.
“One day I got up and I just thought, here’s a guy who’s a simple character, and I started whistling a theme,” Hagen told an interviewer. “I called a bass guitar-and-drum session at a little studio on Fairfax Avenue and I just whistled. . . .That was it. And I’ve never whistled since.” But he kept writing theme songs, including the celebrated themes for “The Dick Van Dyke Show” and “I Spy.”
There was a follow-up LP of music from the 1960 sitcom that included an expanded version of the theme performed by an orchestra. And they weren’t done yet. Next came a single with Griffith singing lyrics written by actor Everett Sloane, who had been in “Citizen Kane” and other Orson Welles movies.They called it “The Fishin’ Hole.”
Here’s the familiar theme for the show’s opening credits. A slightly different version then plays under the closing credits. Howard said fans used to whistle the tune at him when he was shooting free throws in high school basketball games.
This is the one with Andy singing.
Here’s the orchestral version, Earle Hagen conducting. Hagen wrote the theme music for several TV shows, including “The Dick Van Dyke Show” and “I Spy.” He also wrote the jazz standard “Harlem Nocturne” in 1939. It was used as the theme song for the 1984 TV show “Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer.” Nobody went fishing in that one.
