Musician Randy Van Horne died of cancer on 26 September 2007. Born in El Paso, Texas, on 10 February 1924, his group, the Randy Van Horne Singers performed the theme songs for The Flintstones, The Jetsons, and several other 1960s’ television cartoons.
After dropping out of high school, he enlisted in the Army during World War II, and later attended the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore and the University of Texas at El Paso to study music. He started his career as a studio musician in Los Angeles in the late 1940s, and formed his first vocal group, The Encores, in the early 1950s.
Following the breakup of The Encores later in the decade, Van Horne created the Randy Van Horne Singers. They were known for their light, easy style, and occasionally appeared on television, but they were mainly a studio group. In addition to the Hanna-Barbera theme songs, they recorded commercials, station identification spots, and jingles, many of which Van Horne wrote. The group also recorded several albums, including Other Worlds Other Sounds (1958) with Juan Garcia Esquivel, the Latin musician known for his “Space Age pop” sound.
The Randy Van Horne Singers disbanded in the early 1970s, but Van Horne continued to perform in small clubs and halls around Los Angeles, and he was the bandleader of the Alumni Association—made up of about 20 musicians from the Big Band era—in the 1990s.
Van Horne married Tanya Ingwersen in the mid-1950s. They had one child, Mark, who is his only known survivor. They divorced; Van Horne later married and divorced three more times.