I had not forgotten about Roy Webb before Matthew Sweet belatedly got round to featuring him on Sound of Cinema yesterday. After all, his name comes up in the end-credits of virtually every RKO picture which BBC reruns (along with C Bakaleinikoff and Darrell Silvera, two other people of whom I would like to know more). As a reinforcement, Terry Teachout also wrote about Webb last Friday. It's an intriguing coincidence, because due to lead times neither article can have influenced the other.
However, I still know nothing about Roy Webb the man.
On the other hand, a reader's comment to the Teachout article gives me two new names to conjure with, Nathaniel Shilkret and Allie Wrubel:
UPDATE: A reader writes:
The melody that Roy Webb uses throughout “Out Of The Past” is “The First Time I Saw You,” a song that was written by Nathaniel Shilkret and Allie Wrubel and first performed by Frances Farmer in an earlier RKO movie, The Toast Of New York, in 1937.
Frances Farmer was the beautiful and talented actress who was too radical or demanding for her own good. I hadn't realised that she could sing as well.
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