In the spring of 1982, a manager's phone call reached Nelson Riddle, the Hollywood arranger whose charts had once made Frank Sinatra sound reborn. Linda Ronstadt wanted him to write orchestrations for an album of jazz standards. Riddle, then past sixty and long past the peak of his fame, did not leap at the offer. He had spent decades building lush, swinging backdrops for the biggest voices in American music, and a rock-era singer asking for old songs could easily have been a novelty act. But he agreed on one condition: this would be a full album, not a single tossed-off track. Nelson Riddle died on October 6, 1985.
From Oradell to Hollywood
Riddle had been in Hollywood since the summer of 1946, when he arrived after army service to chase work as an arranger. He was born in Oradell, New Jersey, in 1921, the only child his mother managed to raise after a string of losses. Music pulled him early: piano lessons as a boy, trombone later, and a teenage decision to become a professional. But his real gift was not playing an instrument. It was hearing how a song could be dressed up, how strings and brass could turn a simple melody into something cinematic.
That gift first paid off in the early 1950s, when Capitol Records hired him to arrange for Nat King Cole. The song 'Mona Lisa' became Cole's biggest-selling single, though the credit for the arrangement went to someone else. Then came the call that changed everything: Capitol suggested Riddle to Frank Sinatra, who initially refused, preferring his usual arranger. Their first session together happened on the last day of April in 1953. The result, 'I've Got the World on a String', became a hit and is often credited with reviving Sinatra's career.
A career that had slowed
From there Riddle became the sound of sophisticated pop. He wrote swinging charts for big bands, scored television themes, and collected awards for film music. But by the late 1970s, the work had slowed. He made his last arrangements for Sinatra in the spring of 1977, a set of songs named after women that never became an album. The phone call from Ronstadt's manager five years later arrived at a moment when Riddle could have been remembered mostly as a name from the past.
Ronstadt's proposal was not casual. She wanted a whole record of standards, and Riddle's condition matched her ambition. The first album, 'What's New', appeared in 1983 and won Riddle a Grammy. A second, 'Lush Life', followed the next year and brought another. The pairing worked because Riddle treated Ronstadt not as a rock singer slumming in jazz, but as a serious interpreter of the Great American Songbook. His arrangements gave her room to sing, and her voice gave his charts a new audience.
His arrangements gave her room to sing, and her voice gave his charts a new audience.
Seven million copies sold
The numbers were startling. The three albums Riddle and Ronstadt made together sold more than seven million copies. For an arranger whose name had rarely appeared on a record cover, this was a commercial triumph late in life. He was suddenly winning Grammys again, decades after his first one. The collaboration proved that his style, built on swing-era elegance, could still move listeners who had grown up on rock and roll.
Riddle kept working almost to the end. He died in Los Angeles on the sixth of October in 1985, at the age of sixty-four, from heart and kidney failure brought on by cirrhosis of the liver. He had already arranged most of a third Ronstadt album, 'For Sentimental Reasons', but did not live to finish it. Terry Woodson completed the final three charts, and the record came out the following year.
At the Grammy ceremony in early 1986, Riddle's third award for the Ronstadt collaboration was given posthumously. Linda Ronstadt accepted it on his behalf. The arranger who had once been denied credit for 'Mona Lisa' ended his career with his name attached to one of the most successful partnerships in American popular music.