David Buttolph was a jazz-fluent, classically trained composer, arranger, and performer, educated in his native New York in the teens and in Germany and Austria in the 1920s. He worked in radio as an arranger and conductor, and later as a radio station music director in Schenectady, NY, from the late '20s through the early '30s, and then went out to Hollywood, joining Fox (later 20th Century Fox) as an arranger, composer, and conductor, and also composing for Paramount and later on freelancing for MGM, Warner Bros., and Columbia. Although he was a formidable composer in his own right, Buttolph also excelled as an arranger, and one of his most rousing scores -- for John Ford's The Horse Soldiers (1959) -- was made up of his arrangements of Civil War-era anthems and marching songs. His big contribution to popular culture, however, came a couple of years before that project, when Buttolph was assigned to score the offbeat comedy-Western series Maverick, created by Roy Huggins and starring James Garner. His resulting theme song, with its jaunty, upbeat melody and scoring, captured the lighthearted, ironic, often comic tone of the series, and became a one of the first popular songs associated with a television Western series; it subsequently set the tone for other Warner Bros. Western series theme songs, such as that for Bronco. Buttolph's Maverick theme song endured in popularity for decades after, so much so that it was utilized in the first television revival of the series in the 1970s. ~ Bruce Eder