Meredith Willson's career did not follow the usual pattern of Broadway songwriters. A successful musician, conductor, musical arranger, and composer of instrumental and background music, Willson did not embark on his first Broadway score until he was well into his fifties. When he did start to write musical comedies, though, his work was as fresh and innovative as any young prodigy; he brought his years of musical (and worldly) experience to his stage projects and, in the case of The Music Man (1957), created a distinctive Broadway musical.

The setting and people of his most famous stage work provide the details for Willson's early years. He was born Robert Meredith Reiniger Willson on 18 May 1902 in Mason City, Iowa, where his father, John David Willson, was a lawyer and businessman and his mother, Rosalie (Reiniger) Willson, was a piano teacher. As a boy he studied both flute and piccolo as...