Jerry Fielding (born Joshua Itzhak Feldman; June 17, 1922 – February 17, 1980) was an American jazz musician, arranger, band leader, and film composer who emerged in the 1960s after a decade on the blacklist, to create boldly diverse and evocative Oscar-nominated scores, primarily for gritty, often brutally savage, films in western and crime action genres, including the Sam Peckinpah movies The Wild Bunch (1969) and Straw Dogs (1971). Childhood and education Jerry Fielding was born as Joshua Itzhak Feldman in Pittsburgh, to Hiram Harris Feldman and Esther Feldman, both Russian-born American Jews. By1930, "Joshua Itzhak" had been discarded once and for all, as evidenced by both the 1930 US Census and the recollections, published more than seven decades later, of fellow Pittsburgher Henry Mancini. During the ensuing decade, Jerry briefly experimented with the trombone, then took up the clarinet and joined the high school band, eventually earning a scholarship to the Carnegie Institute for Instrumentalists. After a short attendance, because of ill health he was bedridden for two years with an undiagnosed ailment. While housebound, Feldman listened to the radio, and became a fan of the big band sound and Bernard Herrmann's music for Orson Welles's radio dramas. Freelance arranger Somewhat recuperated, Feldman worked at Pittsburgh's Stanley Theater (where his fellow players included Mancini, Erroll Garner and Billy May), learning composition and arranging there from the theater's pit orchestra conductor, Max Adkins (as did Mancini and another notable Pittsburgh native, Billy Strayhorn). In June 1941, shortly before his nineteenth birthday, Feldman left Pittsburgh to work for Alvino Rey's swing band. His contributions to the band's repertoire included an arrangement of "Three Blind Mice" and an original composition, "Picnic in Purgatory". This job ended when most of the band was drafted. Too frail for service, Feldman became vocal arranger for Lucy Ann Polk's Town Criers and then joined Kay Kyser's band. He became their chief arranger in 1945. In addition, he arranged for the big bands of Mitchell Ayres, Claude Thornhill, Jimmie Lunceford, Tommy Dorsey, Charlie Barnet and Les Brown. Radio work: from Feldman to Fielding Feldman arranged for the Kay Kyser's Kollege of Musical Knowledge radio program, and then became the band leader for several radio programs: The Jack Paar Program (1947–1949), The Hardy Family 1952–1953, as well as work on The Fitch Bandwagon, The Life of Riley, and the Sweeney and March Show. In the spring of 1947,