A soundtrack for ’70s television

For millions of Americans in the 1970s and ’80s, Charles Fox was the sound of weeknight entertainment.
You came home from work, gathered with the family in the living room after dinner, sprawled on a beanbag chair, turned on the TV and out came a song composed by Charles Fox.

“Love, exciting and new. Come aboard, we’re expecting you.”

“Schlemiel! Schlimazel! Hasenpfeffer Incorporated! We’re gonna do it!”

“Sunday, Monday, happy days.”

Fox composed the theme songs for some of the era’s biggest and most fondly remembered TV shows: “The Love Boat,” “Happy Days,” “Laverne and Shirley,” “Wonder Woman,” “The Paper Chase.” He wrote the original theme for “Monday Night Football.” With his score for “Wide World of Sports,” he made a catchphrase of “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.”

In the days before streaming or widespread cable, television was a communal experience, with an audience not yet fragmented by endless channels and choices. Much of the nation watched the same shows and heard the same theme songs, embedding them in the popular consciousness: “300,000,000 people hear his music weekly,” the headline of a trade journal cover story on Fox noted in 1979.

Fox had an incredibly varied career. He wrote the themes for popular game shows such as “Match Game,” “What’s My Line?” and “To Tell the Truth.” He composed ballets and scores for musical theater. He arranged for Latin jazz legend Tito Puente and for “The Tonight Show” band. He scored over 100 films: the Oscar-nominated drama “Goodbye Columbus,” the kitschy sci-fi “Barbarella,” the dramedy “9 to 5.” He earned Oscar nominations for his songs from the films “Foul Play” and “The Other Side of the Mountain.”

And he wrote popular hits that still resonate today — especially the classic “Killing Me Softly with His Song,” a No. 1 hit for both Roberta Flack in 1973 and, in 1996, the Fugees.

Fox didn’t work alone. He composed the music, a partner wrote the lyrics. Most often, that was Norman Gimbel, who made a name for himself in the 1960s by writing the English lyrics for Brazilian bossa nova classics like “The Girl from Ipanema.” Together, Fox and Gimbel created a soundtrack for the ’70s: among others, “Happy Days,” “Laverne and Shirley,” “Wonder Woman,” “Killing Me Softly” and “I Got a Name,” a top 10 hit for an up-and-coming singer-songwriter named Jim Croce.

Fox donated a trove of his papers to the Library, mostly consisting of works for television. The papers reveal Fox’s way of working. Elements change from draft to draft; “realizing defeat” stands in for “agony of defeat” in an early “Wide World of Sports” score. A timing sheet shows the precision required for scoring a film or TV show, denoting how the music syncs to the video second by second — the famous “cut to skier falling — agony of defeat” comes precisely 13.5 seconds into the theme.

In his 2010 memoir, “Killing Me Softly: My Life in Music,” Fox wrote that he aimed to compose music so attractive that people would hear the theme, leave the refrigerator and happily turn back to their TV sets.

“The theme,” he wrote, “should feel like a good friend, an old friend who comes back each week to entertain you.”

And were we not entertained?