A person's music can end up in some strange and wonderful places, and there is probably no better example of that than Buddy Baker. Whether it is heard on a Bob Hope radio show, a rerun of The Mickey Mouse Club, a ride at Disneyland, in one of hundreds of jazz tunes, or as an influence in the work of his many students, Buddy's art has taken on a life of its own.

Buddy was raised in Springfield, Illinois (you really can't get much more American than that) and learned to read music before he could read words. He started piano lessons at 4 and moved to trumpet at 11. In high school, he started his own band as well as playing in the school's and a Boy Scout band.

He studied music at Southwest Baptist University, where he became fascinated with harmony and eventually devised his own system, which intrigued no less an expert than the great Nadia Boulanger, teacher of Elmer Bernstein, Aaron Copland and Quincy Jones. Buddy soon began writing arrangements for bands, and became so busy that he gave up performing altogether.

He moved to Los Angeles in 1938, and wrote arrangements before landing a job at The Bob Hope Show, which launched his booming career in radio. He worked on several other shows (including The Jack Benny Show and The Eddie Cantor Show), all the while keeping up his arrangement work. After the beginning of World War II, he became musical director of Hope's show, and the following year brought Stan Kenton on the show. Buddy's arrangement of "And Her Tears Flowed Like Wine" became Kenton's first big hit.

Later in the '40s, he began to teach arranging and orchestration at Los Angeles City College (Jerry Goldsmith was in his first class), while keeping up a busy schedule recording with various orchestras and singers.

In 1954, a former student named George Bruns, who was working as a composer at the Walt Disney Studio, found himself overloaded with work and asked Buddy to help out with the show Davy Crockett. Buddy stayed at Disney for the next 28 years.

He soon became musical director of a new show called The Mickey Mouse Club, which ran five days a week for four years, and required new material to be written and learned in a day. His first live action feature at Disney was Toby Tyler in 1960, and subsequent film scores include The Gnome-Mobile, $1,000,000 Duck, The Fox and the Hound, and the original three Winnie the Pooh features. His work for Disney has won him several awards, including an Academy Award nomination for Napoleon and Samantha. His most widely-heard work, however, may be the music he wrote or adapted for attractions at the Disney theme parks, most notably "The Haunted Mansion," the "It's A Small World" attraction, and Epcot at Walt Disney World.

In 1984, a program in film and television scoring was launched at the University of Southern California. The following year Buddy was asked to teach a class in scoring for animation, and in 1987 took over as head of the program. Under his direction, the program has gone on to become the last word in television and film scoring education, and many students who apply are turned away each year. It is more than appropriate that Buddy's decades of accumulated wisdom have that kind of forum -- to be passed on to posterity, and thus live forever.

The ASCAP Foundation has been in existence since 1975 and is a not-for profit organization which promotes and supports charitable and educational programs in the field of music. Programs, both regional and national, include scholarships, songwriter and composer workshops in various genres, award and recognition programs for achievement in music, songwriting and composing competitions, talent development programs and support of community based music programs.