Nathaniel Shilkret (1889-1992) was an American composer and conductor. For many years he was "director of light music" for the Victor Talking Machine Company. His best-known popular composition was "The Lonesome Road", which has been recorded by more than one-hundred artists, including Louis Armstrong and Benny Goodman. The Victor Talking Machine Company (1901 - 1929) was a United States corporation, the leading American producer of phonographs and phonograph records and one of the leading phonograph companies in the world at the time. ... Louis Daniel Armstrong (July 4, 1900[1] – July 6, 1971) (also known by the nicknames Satchmo for satchel-mouth and Pops) was an American jazz musician. ... Benny Goodman, born Benő Guttman, (May 30, 1909 – June 13, 1986) was an American Jazz musician of Jewish-Hungarian descent, known as King of Swing, Patriarch of the Clarinet, The Professor, and Swings Senior Statesman. // Childhood and early years Goodman was born in Chicago, the son of poor Jewish...
NatShilkret was one of the mainstays of the RCA Victor company in its early days, as an executive and as a conductor, and it is as a musician that he has managed to remain a subject of reviews and articles in the 21st century.
He studied piano with Charles Hambitzer, who also taught George Gershwin, and was a good enough musician so that he never had to rely on the civil engineering degree that he later earned in order to make a living -- rather, he played with the top orchestras in New York, including the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra.
Shilkret later joined CBS as music director, during the declining postwar years of radio.
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