Alex North: 

Music for the Movies

Music for many of the top movies of the 20th Century was composed by Alex North, a man who also mentored many composers — including John Williams.

“You’d make a hell of a composer,” North often told a young Williams.

North, who had a home on Great Hill Road for a dozen years, earned Oscar nominations for 14 of his films and in 1986 was the first composer to receive a Lifetime Achievement Academy Award for his body of work.

Born in 1910 in Chester, Pa., North studied piano at the Curtis Institute of Music, Juilliard, and the Moscow Conservancy. He also studied with Aaron Copland. 

North wrote ballet and classical music in the 30s and 40s – Benny Goodman performed his Revue for Clarinet and Orchestra. 

During World War II, he spent several years in the U.S. Army, service that included being the officer in charge of entertainment for recuperating soldiers in hospitals throughout the U.S. He also wrote music for two dozen government documentaries related to the war.

His first movie score, for Elia Kazan’s “A Streetcar Named Desire,” in 1951 won him an Academy Award nomination, and he was eventually nominated 13 more times. 

He wrote the music for dozens of leading films, including “Death of A Salesman” (1951), “Viva Zapata!” (1952), “The Rose Tattoo” (1955), “The Rainmaker” (1956), “Stage Struck” (1958), “The Sound and the Fury” (1959), “Spartacus” (1960), “Cleopatra” (1963), “Cheyenne Autumn” (1964), The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965), Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1968), 2001: A Space Odyssey, “The Shoes of the Fisherman” (1969), “Willard” (1971), “Dragonslayer” (1981), “Prizzi’s Honor” (1985), “Good Morning, Vietnam” (1987), and “The Last Butterfly” (1990).

As a young musician, John Williams played piano in North’s orchestras.  “For those of us coming of age in the 1950s, and seriously interested in film music, Alex North was an inspiration, a role model and a hero,” Williams wrote the foreword to Sanya Henderson’s 2003 biography, “Alex North, Film Composer.” “He was then and remains so today.”

North also wrote much music for TV and won an Emmy for the score to “Rich Man, Poor Man” in 1976. In 1949 he wrote the music for Broadway’s “Death of A Salesman.” He won a Golden Globe for his score for “The Shoes of the Fisherman.” 

North's song, "Unchained Melody," from the film “Unchained,” became a pop music classic. More than 1,500 different recordings of  “Unchained Melody” have been made by more than 670 artists. In 1955, when it first appeared, three versions of the song (by Les Baxter, Al Hibbler, and Roy Hamilton) made the Billboard Top 10. Probably the best-known version, however, was by the Righteous Brothers.

North may have been introduced to Ridgefield through Marthe Krueger, a noted dancer in the 30s and 40s, who in 1942 opened the Marthe Krueger School of Dance on Branchville Road. North and she had collaborated on three dance pieces, and Kruger invited him to teach at her school.

North bought a home here in 1950 and continued to use it until the early 1960s. In 1954, he made some local news when he joined his neighbor, Time magazine chief Henry Luce, and Ridgebury conservationist Daniel M. McKeon in successfully suing the town to stop a development along Great Hill Road.

He died in 1991 at the age of 80 in Los Angeles. John Williams offered a eulogy at his funeral.

Vaclav Nelhybel: 

Prolific Composer

Vaclav Nelhybel was a prolific composer — more than 400 of his 600-plus works have been published — and many of the remaining 200 are in the process of being published. Some  were composed during his five years living at the Ridgefield Lakes.

While his works have been performed by leading orchestras such as the Vienna Symphony and the Orchestra de la Suisse Romande, “Nelhybel’s passion for composing was all encompassing and left him little time for ‘marketing’ his works; for this reason, many of his compositions, though commissioned and performed, remained unpublished,” reports the University of Scranton, where he was composer in residence during his last years. 

Scranton is a Jesuit institution and Nelhybel had a fondness for Jesuits — he studied eight years at The Archbishop Gymnasium in Prague, a Jesuit school. 

Born in Czechoslovakia in 1919,  Nelhybel studied composition and conducting in Prague and Fribourg. By 1948, he’d escaped from the Communist bloc and was composing for Swiss National Radio, and in the early 50s, served as the first music director of Radio Free Europe. 

In 1957 he moved to this country, becoming a citizen in 1962. 

He composed symphonies, ballets, a ballet-opera, and hundreds of other works for orchestras and bands — even several works for handbell ensembles. He conducted music and lectured at universities and schools in more than 30 states – including at Ridgefield High School. 

More than 1,000 people attended the April 1973 Vaclav Nelhybel Festival in Ridgefield, with the composer leading junior and senior high bands. 

“Although Nelhybel wrote the majority of his works for professional performers, he relished composing original, challenging pieces for student musicians and delighted in making music with young players,” Scranton said.

In 1980, the Ridgefield Symphony Orchestra premiered his work, “Six Fables for All Time,” commissioned in honor of the 35th anniversary of the United Nations. In a review of its premiere, composer Noel Regney described the piece in The Ridgefield Press as a “monumental prayer of hope and peace, through all the ups and downs of human life.”

“De Profundis,” a demanding piece for trumpet, was premiered in 1975 by Doc Severinson and has been performed by Seneca Black, who has served as lead trumpeter with Wynton Marsalis’s Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. 

Nelhybel and his wife had a home on Lake Road from 1968 to 1973 when they moved to Newtown and subsequently to Pennsylvania. He died in 1996 at the age of 76.

Fanny Crosby: 

A Pioneering Woman of Song

Fanny Crosby was among the leading hymn-writers of all time, a blind woman who spent her formative years in Ridgefield. She wrote thousands of hymns, including “Blessed Assurance,” “Safe in the Arms of Jesus,” “Praise Him! Praise Him!,” and “Close to Thee.”

But while her production of religious music brought her fame, she was accomplished — even a pioneer — in others fields as well.

Born in 1820 in nearby Brewster, N.Y., Frances Jane “Fanny” Crosby was blinded at six weeks by a disease. A few months later, her father died, leaving his 21-year-old wife a widow. 

Fanny and her mother came to Ridgefield when she was nine, living with Mr. and Mrs. Elijah Hawley on Main Street on the south corner of Branchville Road in a house that’s no longer there. 

 “Mrs. Hawley, a kind Christian lady…who had no children of her own, became deeply interested in me, and under her supervision I acquired a thorough knowledge of the Bible,” Crosby wrote in one of her two autobiographies: “She gave me a number of chapters each week to learn, sometimes as many as five…and at the end of the first 12 months, I could repeat a large portion of the first four books of the Old Testament and the four Gospels.

 “The good Mrs. Hawley was kind in every respect and sought to teach me many practical lessons that I now remember with gratitude and affection.” 

When  Crosby was about 15, she left Ridgefield to attend the New York Institute for the Blind. Soon after graduation from the Institute in 1843, at the age of 23, she worked as a lobbyist in Washington, D.C., pleading for support of education for the blind. There she became the first woman to speak in the United States Senate. 

She later appeared before the joint houses of Congress, offering along with her oration this brief poem:

Ye, who here from every state convene,

Illustrious band! may we not hope the scene

You now behold will prove to every mind

Instruction hath a ray to cheer the blind.

Crosby soon joined the teaching staff of the New York Institute for the Blind. At this time she was beginning her writing career, producing non-religious poetry, and there she struck up a close friendship with a fellow teacher who was just 17 years old. His name was Grover Cleveland. The two spent time together after classes. and the teenaged future U.S. president often wrote down poems that Fanny dictated to him. 

She wound up publishing four books of secular poetry.

Crosby’s poetry-writing soon led to song-writing, though most were at first secular or, as she called them, “people’s songs” — probably what we’d today call folk songs. She wrote political songs, patriotic songs (especially during the Civil War), and even cantatas. During the war, she began writing religious songs, both under her own name and pseudonyms, and over her career she penned the lyrics to more than 8,000 hymns.

Crosby once said she wanted her hymns to win a million souls for Christ, and her words were certainly available to many more than a million:  Books containing her songs are said to have sold at least 100 million copies.

Many of Crosby’s hymns were published by Biglow and Main of New York City, one of the first publishers of sacred music. The “Biglow” was Lucius Horatio Biglow who, in 1889, bought an 18th century house on Main Street to create a fine retreat from the city. (When his daughter, Elizabeth Biglow Ballard, died in 1964, she bequeathed that estate to the town. Today, it is Ballard Park.)

Biglow probably came to Ridgefield because of his partner. The “Main” of Biglow and Main was Sylvester Main, born in Ridgefield in 1817 and a childhood friend of Fanny Crosby. “Among the playmates who used to gather on the village green was Sylvester Main who was two or three years older than I,” Crosby recalled.

“He was a prime favorite with the gentler sex, for he used to protect us from the annoyances of more mischievous boys.”

Sylvester Main became a singing-school teacher and wound up in New York City, compiling books of hymn music. He went to work for William Bradbury, music publisher and hymnist, and when Bradbury died around 1868, he and Lucius Biglow partnered to take over the firm, calling it Biglow and Main.

Sylvester’s son, Hubert Platt Main, was also born in Ridgefield, and composed more than 1,000 works, including the music for hundreds of popular hymns of the mid-19th century, among them “We Shall Meet Beyond the River,”  “Blessed Homeland,” and “The Bright Forever” — the words of the last two were written by Fanny Crosby.  

In the 1915 book, “Fanny Crosby’s Story of Ninety-Four Years,” she called him “one of my most precious friends.” The book includes a picture of the two, seated together, called “Fast Friends”

Fanny Crosby died in 1915 at the age of 94 and is buried in Bridgeport. She had been married for a while, but eventually separated. The couple had one child, who died as a baby. 

Hubert Main, who died in 1925, is buried in New Jersey beneath a stone that says, “We shall meet beyond the river.” —based on “Hidden History of Ridgefield”

Jim Lowe: 

The Green Door

Ridgefield once had a Green Doors motel. It also had the man who sang the number-one hit song, “The Green Door.”

That, however, was the only connection between the motel and the song.

Jim Lowe, who sang the “The Green Door,” and was a longtime New York City disk jockey, died Monday, Dec. 12, 2016, at his home in East Hampton, N.Y. He was 93 years old.

A radio personality for more than a half century, Lowe had lived at Twin Ridge in the 1970s

while he was an afternoon disc jockey on WNBC in New York.

Though he sang “The Green Door,” which became a number-one hit in 1956, he admitted in a 1971 Ridgefield Press interview, "I knew I couldn't really sing." So after his brief but successful flirtation with recording, he returned to being a disc jockey, a career he'd begun in 1948 when he graduated from the University of Missouri.

Over the years Lowe worked as a DJ on such radio stations as WCBS, WNBC and, for more than 20 years, on WNEW. Probably his most popular show was “Jim Lowe and Friends,” which lasted until 2004, although he spent many years in the 1960s hosting the popular overnight program, “Milkman’s Matinee,” on WNEW. 

Nicknamed “Mr. Broadway,” he was considered an expert on American popular music of the 20th century, especially the 1940s and 50s.

He was also a composer and wrote  “The Gambler's Guitar,” a 1955 hit sung by Rusty Draper, and “Close the Doors They're Coming in the Windows,” a million-seller country hit. 

He appeared in many commercials during the 1970s and 80s.

A native of Springfield, Mo., Lowe was born on May 7, 1923, the son of a surgeon. He served in the U.S. Army during World War II.

Hubert Main: 

Holy Music

Ridgefield has had a surprisingly noteworthy history in the world of religious music: It was childhood home of one of the world’s most prolific hymn writers, it was the adulthood home of a major hymn publisher, and it was the birthplace of a major hymn composer. Oddly enough, Fanny Crosby, Lucius H. Biglow and Hubert Main all knew each other.

Hubert Platt Main was born in Ridgefield in 1839. His father, Sylvester Main, was a music teacher who became a compiler of hymn books and eventually joined Lucius Biglow in the music publishing business. 

But Sylvester was also a childhood friend of Fanny Crosby, the blind author of more than 3,000 hymns, who grew up on Main Street. In fact, Crosby fondly recounted how Sylvester often protected her from the local bullies when she was a young girl.

Hubert displayed an early love of both music and independence. According to J.H. Hall in his book, “Biography of Gospel Song and Hymn Writers,” Main had an amazing memory of his early childhood to as far back as 1842 when he was three years old. “He hasn’t forgotten a whipping received in that year for repeatedly running off from home at evenings to the band room, hiding under the benches and listening to the music.”

As a child, he would compose tunes by speaking “do, re, mi, fa...” for the notes. “If, when walking on the street, any air came to his mind, he would apply the syllables to it, and sing away,” Hall said.
As a young man, he moved to New York City where compiled books of music, was a choir leader and organist in churches, and eventually joined Biglow and Main, the music publishing company that his father had owned with Lucius Biglow. (Biglow moved to Ridgefield in the late 1880s, buying the estate that is now Ballard Park — donated to the town by his daughter, Elizabeth Biglow Ballard.)

Over his lifetime, Main composed more than 1,000 works, including “singing school pieces, Sunday-school songs, hymn tunes, gospel hymns, anthems, sheet music songs, love songs, quartets, and instrumental pieces,” Hall reports.

He composed the music for hundreds of popular hymns of the mid-to-late 19th century, among them “We Shall Meet Beyond the River,”  “Blessed Homeland,” and “The Bright Forever”— the words of the last two were written by Fanny Crosby.    

In the 1915 book, “Fanny Crosby’s Story of Ninety-Four Years,” she called Hubert Main “one of my most precious friends.” The book includes a picture of the two, seated together, called “Fast Friends.” 

Main also collected a huge library on music — he was “a veritable antiquarian in old music books,” said Hall. In 1891, he sold 35,000 volumes to the Newberry Library in Chicago, one of the world’s leading research libraries to this day.

Main was known not only for his independent thinking but for his sense of humor. “In regard to his religious proclivities,” Hall reports, “he was brought up a Methodist, joined the church in 1854 before he came to New York but he quaintly says that he is not outrageously pious, and could laugh at a funeral, even his own, if he saw anything comical, and he could just as easily shed tears at anything tender and pathetic.”

Hall added, “He is full of sunshine and good humor. He is immensely entertaining in his conversation, and one of  the best of companions. His letters to his friends are usually full of wit and humor. He remarks that he might be more dignified, but it would increase his doctor's bills.”

Main lived his later life in New Jersey where he died in 1925. He is buried there beneath a stone that says, “We shall meet beyond the river.” 

Alec Wyton: 

Minister of Music

Alec Wyton was a musician, composer and professor whose 40-year career included two decades as organist and choirmaster at New York's Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Wyton composed more than 100 works, oversaw the rewriting of the Episcopal hymnal, and earned national recognition in the field of sacred music. 

He spent his last years with St. Stephen’s Church in Ridgefield.

Born in London, England, in 1921, Alec Wyton (pronounced WYE-ton) was raised by an aunt after his parents separated. She encourage his early musical training, which included learning the piano and organ, and performing as a boy chorister. He got his first job as an organist at the age of 11.

He earned a bachelor's degree from Exeter College, Oxford, in 1946 and a master's in 1949.  

After assignments as an organist and choirmaster in England, he came to the United States in 1950 to create a boys choir at what is now St. Mark's School in Dallas, Texas.

In 1954 Wyton was appointed organist and master of the choristers at New York's Cathedral of St. John the Divine, a position he held for 20 years. Several months after his appointment, he took on the additional responsibility of headmaster of the Cathedral Choir School, holding that position until 1962.

Wyton tried to incorporate a variety of musical traditions into the music of the church. He provided a performing platform for emerging artists as well as collaborated with such performers as Eubie Blake, Duke Ellington, Leopold Stokowski, and the cast of “Hair.”
Wyton founded the Church Music Department at the Manhattan School of Music in 1984, serving as chairman until 1990. He had also been adjunct professor of sacred music at Union Theological Seminary from 1956 to 1973. 

Wyton left the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in 1974 to become organist-choirmaster of St. James' Church in New York City. At that time he also became coordinator of the Standing Commission on Church Music that produced The Hymnal 1982 for the Episcopal Church. Complementing a new prayer book that had come out in 1979, it replaced a 1940 hymnal and has been used by Episcopalian churches across the U.S. ever since.

Wyton left New York City in 1987 to become minister of music at St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in Ridgefield, retiring in 1997 at age 75. He also made his home here. Besides playing the organ and leading the choir at St. Stephen’s, he organized concerts with many guest artists and enriched the musical life of the community.

Dirk Bollenback, who sang in St. Stephen’s Choir under Wyton, said he believed it was during Wyton's years at St. John the Divine that he first got to know Ridgefield, bringing the boys in the cathedral's choir out to sing at St. Stephen’s.

“The boys in the choir at St. John would sing at one of services on a summer Sunday and then spend the day here, out of the city,”  Bollenback said.

“He was our choirmaster for around 10 years,"  Bollenback said. "He was such a wonderful person to work for.” He recalled especially “the stories that he could tell about the various pieces of music that we sang...When we played a hymn that Martin Luther wrote, you somehow felt he knew Martin Luther when he was a boy.”

Though he was “a brilliant man," Mr. Bollenback said, he was also “one of those people who never paraded himself. He was a very quiet and unassuming fellow whose accomplishments were incredible.”

“Those of us that knew him appreciated him for all his knowledge, but also for the kindness and sweetness that was his disposition,”  Bollenback added. “He always left us feeling very good about what we were doing, even if we didn't do it terribly well.” 

Wyton died in 2007 at the age of 85. His survivors include a son, Richard Wyton, an internationally known flutist and expert on historical keyboard instruments.

George B. Leeman Sr.: 

Music for Kids and Stars

When George B. Leeman was only two years old, he astonished family members by picking out tunes on a piano. “By the time his fourth birthday rolled around,” The Ridgefield Press reported in 1962, “he was ready for a recital.” 

Born in 1907, the Oklahoma native studied music at the University of Oklahoma and went from there to RKO studios in Hollywood where he worked on RKO’s “Hollywood on the Air” radio show. 

However, he soon wound up in New York, working CBS radio and later television as a composer and arranger for the likes of Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Dick Haymes, Paul Whiteman, Andre Kostelanetz, Archie Bleyer, and, for 12 years, with Arthur Godfrey. 

For Godfrey, Leeman prepared music for the daily show, as well as Godfrey’s weekly Talent Scout program. He served on the audition committee for the latter, and was involved in the auditions of many future stars, including Eddie Fisher, Wally Cox, and the McGuire Sisters.

A Ridgefielder since 1942, Leeman was instrumental in the founding of the Ridgefield Symphonette in 1964, and aided its growth into the Ridgefield Symphony Orchestra, one of the top small orchestras in the country. (His son, George Jr., has also been a leader in the orchestra, and wrote the program notes for many years.)  When it gave its first concert in April 1965, the symphonette consisted of 24 musicians, 13 of them residents and only seven of them professionals.

“The reason for our existence is to provide the best possible entertainment for the people of Ridgefield who enjoy music of this calibre,” Leeman said in a 1972 letter to The Press.

After his retirement from CBS in 1959, Leeman gave private piano lessons to Ridgefield youngsters.  He also composed and arranged many songs and musical programs that were performed by children in the Ridgefield elementary schools, where his wife, Evelyn, taught for many years.

“Music,” he said, “is a therapy. Most children find something in music that relaxes them.” 

Leeman died in 1978 at the age of 70. Two weeks after his death, the Board of Education named the auditorium at Scotland School “the Leeman Room” in his honor.

Charles Spire:
The Music Man

“Before he arrived,” former high school Principal Joseph Ellis said of Charles Spire, “the music program was practically non-existent. With Charlie’s leadership it became one of the finest music programs of any school district, anywhere.” 

In 1973, when Spire became supervision of music, excellent programs that Dr. Robert Rowe had started in the 1940s were long gone; music education had taken the brunt of budget cuts as enrollments exploded in the 60s. 

By the time Spire retired in 1990, music was flourishing in the schools and Ridgefield students were performing both here and across Europe. 

“My master plan is to see that every child, K through 12, is touched by culture,” he once said. Charles A. Spire was born in 1929 in Gowanda, N.Y., where, during the Depression, music was one of the few diversions and outdoor band concerts were regular community events. “I saw what music did for the small town where I grew up,” he said. 

As a boy he performed on any instrument he was given with any group he could. He studied music at Boston University, and with the likes of Arthur Fiedler and Paul Hindemith. 

He made his concert piano debut with the Boston Pops and also performed at Tanglewood with the Boston Symphony. 

But after serving as an Army major during the Korean War,  Spire decided he wanted to work with children. He taught music in New York state from 1955 until coming to Ridgebury School as a music teacher in 1967. In 1971, he established the Ridgefield Youth Orchestra, which became so proficient it was invited to give concert tours in Europe in 1979, 1984, 1989 and 1991. 

Recalling the performances he’d heard or been a part of as a small-town child, Spire staged 73 concerts in Ballard Park between 1973 and 1990, showcasing hundreds of student musicians. 

A member of the board of Opera New England, he brought opera stars to the schools and took many students to Lincoln Center for great performances. In 1975, he began spring Broadway musicals at the high school. 

A year later, he staged a huge, all-day school Art and Music Festival in Ballard Park to celebrate the Bicentennial. More than 2,000 students — from kindergarten through high school — performed. “Youngsters were dipping candles, weaving baskets, working leather, and compounding medicines, much like Ridgefielders two hundred years earlier,” wrote Lois Street in a 1990 Ridgefield Press profile of Spire.

The same day, “the polls were open for balloting on the school budget,” Street wrote. “The townspeople voted it down.”

To Spire, she said, that day symbolized “23 years of teaching in a town which is enthusiastic about strong programs — and equally enthusiastic about bashing the budgets that provide them.”

For his accomplishments, Spire was named Kiwanis Citizen of the Year in 1976 and Rotary Citizen of the Year in 1993. A longtime member, he had twice served as president of Rotary.

In his spare time, he wrote for Symphony Magazine and served on the board of the Charles Ives Center in Danbury. He lived for many years on Cherry Lane where he maintained a water garden in a pond on his property. He eventually moved to Florida where he died in 2011 at the age of 82.

On his retirement in 1990, Spire reflected on the countless students he had taught and led over the years.

“Today’s children are described as self-centered, as wanting everything given to them or else they’ll drink and do drugs,” he said. “Well, not the ones I see.” Describing a recent rehearsal, he said, “the kids were doing their best, showing respect for each other and pride. I walked away with such a joy. It was so wonderful — and it’s a feeling no different than 40 years ago.”

When he retired, he received a letter complimenting him for inspiring students “to strive for excellence in all things so that, in working hard and displaying individual initiative, they will know they can make a difference in the world.” The letter was signed by President George H.W. Bush.

Spire hoped that in retirement he would be able to find time to return to composing. One of his plans was to take a march he once sold to MGM and rewrite it for orchestra. MGM used the march as the theme in the movie, “The Great Escape,” starring Steve McQueen.

When he sold the piece, Spire had not expected the film to become a classic.

“Boy, I wish I’d kept the rights,” he said with a grin.

Noël Regney & Gloria Shayne:

What They Heard

When Noël Regney and his wife, Gloria Shayne, wrote the classic Christmas song, “Do You Hear What I Hear?” they had no idea it would be a hit — or even published.

“Columbia records was doing a cute Christmas song and they asked us to do something offhand for the other side of the record,” Ms. Shayne told The Ridgefield Press in 1969. 

“This is my chance to write a Christmas song for myself,” Mr. Regney later recalled thinking at the time. “I had thought I’d never write a Christmas song: Christmas had become so commercial. But this was the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In the studio, the producer was listening to the radio to see if we had been obliterated.”  

He was walking home to his apartment on East 52nd Street when he “saw two mothers with their babies in strollers. “The babies were looking at each other and smiling, and all of a sudden, my mood was extraordinary.” He got home, sat down, wrote the lyrics, and handed them to his wife, who wrote the tune. 

“We couldn’t sing it through; it broke us up,” Gloria Shayne said.

The flip-side deal fell through, but Mercury records decided to produce the song, performed by Harry Simeone Choral, as a lead recording. A quarter of a million copies were released just after Thanksgiving 1962; they sold out within a week. 

A year later, Bing Crosby did a version, and for many years and under various artists, “Do You Hear What I Hear?” sold more than one million copies annually.  Now ranked among the 25 top Christmas songs of all time, the composition has been recorded on more than 120 albums by not only Bing Crosby, but also such other stars as Perry Como and Mahalia Jackson. The Regneys also did two other Christmas songs, still sung today: “I Sing Noel” and “Three Wise Men, Three.”

The daughter of an attorney and a professor, Gloria Shayne was born, nee Shain, in Brookline, Mass., in 1923, a next-door neighbor of Joseph and Rose Kennedy and their children—including John F. Kennedy. She earned a bachelor’s degree in music from Boston University and headed for New York City where she worked as a pianist and was an arranger for the likes of Stephen Sondheim and Irving Berlin.

In 1951 she met Noël Regney while she was performing at a hotel in New York City and the two collaborated on a number of hits, including “Rain Rain Go Away,” sung by Bobby Vinton, “Sweet Little Darlin,” by Jo Stafford, and “Another Go Around,” by Perry Como and Doris Day. Ms. Shayne also wrote the hit song, “Goodbye Cruel World,” recorded by James Darren — it was his biggest Billboard Hot 100 hit.

   The Regneys moved to High Ridge in 1969. After their divorce in the mid-1970s, she moved to Stamford, but Mr. Regney remained for many years in Ridgefield, where he was a frequent performer—often at benefits—and could also be found playing the piano at The Elms Inn. He also often made appearances in schools.

   A charming man with a deep voice whose accent reflected his native land, Mr. Regney was born in France as Leon Schlienger. He eventually took that name and spelled it backward—subtracting the LHCS and changing I to Y—to create Noël Regney. During World War II, the German army drafted him—he had grown up in Alsace near the German border and could speak German. He soon deserted, and joined the French resistance, acting as a double agent for the French, and was once wounded when he led Nazi troops into an ambush. 

After the war, he came to the United States as a working musician. After his collaborations with Ms. Shayne, Mr. Regney also wrote songs on his own, including several musicals. He also wrote the English lyrics for “Dominique,” the 1963-4 top hit by The Singing Nun. 

In 1975, he wrote the five-part cantata, “I Believe in Life.” “Writing it,” he said in 1977, “was like coming back to my first love. I began to think this would be my musical testament, something lasting.”

He died in 2002 in Brewster, N.Y. at the age of 80. Gloria Shayne Baker, who had remarried, died in 2008 in Stamford, age 84.