Will Hudson

Will Hudson, a composer and arranger spanning jazz and pop idioms, directed the Hudson-DeLange Orchestra during the middle and later 1930s—the same years in which he produced key works including “Moonglow,” “Organ Grinder’s Swing,” and “Hocus Pocus.” Born in California in 1908, he had settled in Detroit, MI, by high-school age. There he trained in arranging, and some of his first professional charts were prepared for McKinney’s Cotton Pickers and Cab Calloway. He soon relocated to New York and formed a partnership with Irving Mills; together they supplied swinging material to Fletcher Henderson, Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong, and Jimmie Lunceford, among others. By the mid-1930s they had also fashioned more durable compositions, among them the enduring standard “Moonglow” (1934). Hudson further contributed the early-’30s Lunceford hit “White Heat,” the widely performed instrumental “Organ Grinder’s Swing,” the classic arrangement of “Cherokee,” and additional scores for Glenn Miller. Parallel to his songwriting, he co-led a band with Eddie DeLange beginning in 1935 and took sole leadership in 1938; the ensemble remained active until 1941, after which Hudson devoted himself exclusively to arranging. Later in the decade he enrolled at Juilliard to pursue formal composition studies. Among his most lasting pieces are the pop songs “Moonlight Rhapsody,” “With All My Heart and Soul,” “Tormented,” “You’re My Desire,” and “The World Without You,” together with the jazz instrumentals “Cowboy in Manhattan,” “Monopoly Swing,” “Devil’s Kitchen,” and “Hocus Pocus.”