Ned Washington excelled as a writer of popular songs in the 1930s, and in the 1940s he established himself as a premier writer of movie songs. Although he wrote all of the lyrics for such memorable animated Walt Disney features as Pinocchio (1940) and Dumbo (1941), his specialty was not the full score for a musical but rather the individual title or "theme" song for a dramatic motion picture. Washington was the lyricist of such motion-picture songs as "The Nearness of You" (from Romance in the Dark, 1938) and "When You Wish upon a Star" (from Pinocchio), as well as for such popular standards as "(I Don't Stand) A Ghost of a Chance" (1932) and "I'm Gettin' Sentimental over You" (1932).

Ned Washington was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, on 15 August 1901, the next to youngest of the two sons and five daughters born to Michael Washington and Catharine Stone Washington. Ned Washington was the...