Why the French film composer who created The Olympic Fanfare is buried in North Carolina

Leo Arnaud had a long career as a musician in Europe and Hollywood. A blind date led him to a simpler life.

You know the fanfare you hear over and over again during the Olympics? The one that starts off with the real dramatic tympani and then hits you with a loud but simple trumpet melody? It’s called “Bugler’s Dream,” and if you’re having a hard time thinking of it, listen to the first 45 seconds of the song below:

A really big chunk of the music that we hear on TV during the Olympics was composed by John Williams during the ‘80s and ‘90s, but “Bugler’s Dream” was the song that’s been the Games’ de facto theme since the 1960s. It was created by a French-born man named Leo Arnaud who had a long career in music in Europe and Hollywood. He died in 1991 at age 86, and his final resting place is behind a small rural church in Yadkin County. So, um, how did he end up there?

The Asbury United Methodist Church in Hamptonville, North Carolina. The church graveyard is to the right of the building (Photo via Google Street View)

An aside on famous people claimed by North Carolina (feel free to skip to the next section)

A few things. First: This story isn’t some mystery that’s been magically unearthed by me, your friendly Rabbit Hole proprietor. Rather, it tends to show up, like clockwork, in Winston-Salem news outlets every two years right around Olympics time. (For reference, Yadkin County is one county over from Winston-Salem, and the graveyard where Arnaud is buried is in Hamptonville, which sits near the spot where Interstate 77 and Highway 421 meet.) I compulsively play the “Summon The Heroes” album every time the Games are on (my kids are over it). That’s how I saw Leo Arnaud’s name pop up next to “Bugler’s Dream,” which is what caught my eye when this WXII-TV story popped into my social feed. Arnaud’s biography largely comes from a dissertation written decades ago by a student at UNC Greensboro. More on that later.

Second: A fair amount of well-known artists and celebrities end up spending their later years in rural North Carolina. Frances Bavier, who played Aunt Bee on The Andy Griffith Show, retired to Siler City, where she’s buried. You can now spend the night in her former home, which one news outlet referred to as “Aunt Bee’s B&B.” Another Andy Griffith alum, Betty Lynn, was encouraged to move to the Griffith’s hometown of Mt. Airy by the local arts council and made appearances at the local museum into her 90s. In the non-Andy Griffith category, André the Giant moved to a ranch in Ellerbe in the 1970s. His ashes (which weighed 17 pounds, three times the weight of a normal man’s) were scattered there after he died at age 46. And Gladys Knight, who is very much alive, lives in the mountains west of Asheville, which means the woman behind “Midnight Train to Georgia” is actually a Very Famous North Carolinian.

Lastly: The thing that Arnaud is most famous for has nothing to do with North Carolina. Yes, it’s easy to stake a claim to notable folks who were born here. North Carolina is the birthplace of three presidents, James K. Polk, Andrew Johnson, and (mayyyybe) Andrew Jackson, all of whom left this state and moved to Tennessee to kick start their political careers. John Coltrane was born in Hamlet and grew up playing the saxophone in then-segregated High Point. He moved to Philadelphia after he graduated from high school in 1943 and never visited High Point again after 1945. Selma Burke, whose work (mayyyybe) inspired the image of FDR that appears on the dime, grew up in Mooresville and came back to this state to visit and unveil her art. But she spent most of her adult life outside of North Carolina. Even Gallagher didn’t smash his first watermelon until long he’d left his birthplace of Fort Bragg in the rear-view mirror.

Arnaud did the opposite. He was legendary among his peers by the time he moved to North Carolina. He ended up here thanks to fate. And a blind date.

Arnaud’s life in music

Leo Arnaud

Leo Arnaud was born near Lyon, France in 1904. He began to study music at age 4, and got his first professional gig at 8-years-old when he played drums in his father’s band. Two years later, he wrote his first score for that band. “It stayed with me because it’s only four notes,” he said in an interview. It’d be forty years before that piece, which eventually became known as the Olympic Fanfare, would be published.

Arnaud always thought he’d grow up to be a famous composer. He was best at playing trombone and cello, but could handle nearly any instrument. He worked as a musician at a burlesque house at age 14 (until his father found out), left home for good at 16, and went on to immerse himself in the Paris jazz scene. He studied at musical conservatories, and played for the biggest celebrities of the day, including Cole Porter, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the king of Spain. He was friends with Maurice Ravel, and was said to have inspired the trombone solo in Boléro.

Still, Arnaud had his eye on the American music scene. Various groups and orchestras invited him to come to the United States in 1928, but there was a three-year wait for a labor visa for French citizens at the time. Finally, in 1931, Arnaud moved to America and became a composer for a touring group of musicians headed up by Fred Waring. Three years later he met and married Blanche Bow, a Broadway actress whose dancing was used to create the movements for Betty Boop. “[Her] body was my wife's body,” he said, before noting that his wife’s head did not resemble Boop’s oversized noggin.

In 1936, Arnaud’s wife helped him land a job as a musical performer, composer and arranger for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in California, and he stayed in that position for the next 30 years. He became an American citizen in 1939, served in the military during World War II, and never again considered himself French. He’d later pester his friends to come to his house and look at his American passport.

During his time with MGM, Arnaud was involved with more than 150 films including Gone With The Wind, The King and I, and Dr. Zhivago, and was nominated for an Academy Award for his work on The Unsinkable Molly Brown. He helped create what was known as the “MGM Sound.” He also conducted several symphony orchestras, and was knighted three times, by Spain, Finland, and France. He was okay with other people calling him Sir Leo. “If you’ve got it,” he said of his title, “use it.”

How the Olympic Fanfare was born

In the 1950s, a conductor named Felix Slatkin asked Arnaud to compose several pieces for his upcoming military-themed album called Charge! For a section of “The Charge Suite” entitled “Bugler’s Dream,” Arnaud pulled inspiration from a song he’d composed at age 10 for his father’s band. That composition was based on an obscure fanfare from Napoleon’s era named “Salut aux étendards,” which had been composed by Frenchman Joseph-David Buhl. One composer and historian would later point out that Arnaud’s piece was almost identical to Buhl’s, calling it “pure larceny.”

Charge! was released in 1958. Several years later, legendary ABC Sports director Roone Arledge was looking for music to set the tone for his network’s coverage of the 1964 Winter Olympics in Innsbruck, Austria. An engineer brought Arledge six albums, including Charge! Arledge listened to “Bugler’s Dream” and picked it on the spot.

The music was so popular that ABC kept using it over and over again (and paying Arnaud $20,000 in royalties every four years as a result). Fast forward to 1984, when the legendary John Williams was commissioned to create new music for the Olympics in Los Angeles. Williams was reportedly friendly with Arnaud and knew how beloved “Bugler’s Dream” was, so he created a fanfare that would complement it.

Eventually, when NBC took over broadcasts of the Olympics, they decided to use both Arnaud’s and Williams’s songs together, and they’ve been doing so ever since.

How he got to North Carolina

A feature story on Leo Arnaud from the Greenboro News & Record, written during the Olympic Games in 1984.

Arnaud and Blanche Bow had been married for 42 years when she died in 1976. Eighteen months later, a mutual friend set up a blind date between Arnaud and Faye Brooks, who lived in Hamptonville, North Carolina but was visiting friends in California. They hit it off, and got married two months later in Las Vegas. In 1981, Arnaud finished one last project, retired from the motion picture industry, and moved back to Faye’s hometown in Yadkin County to be closer to her family. “I had nothing in common with the whole place,” he told the Winston-Salem Journal about his time in Hollywood. “The people are just unbelievably good here.” The only thing he didn’t like was the dust from the farms nearby.

For years, Arnaud and “Lady Faye” flew an American flag on a pole in front of their home in Hamptonville with the French tricolor below it. Leo also stayed active musically, occasionally conducting the Winston-Salem Symphony, working with local bands and choirs, and judging contests at the North Carolina School of the Arts. He loved talking about music with the people who visited his home, but didn’t go out much at night since he didn’t like to drive after dark. After Arnaud’s death after a stroke in 1991, some of his music was played at his funeral. Faye was buried next to him behind the Asbury United Methodist Church in Hamptonville after she died in 2007.

Arnaud was, by most accounts, a lovely presence in Yadkin County, but his fame in the music industry began to fade after he left Hollywood. That’s what inspired a doctoral student at UNC Greensboro named Michael Kolstad to write his dissertation on Arnaud’s life (most of the information in this story is based on that dissertation, which Kolstad successfully defended in 1996). “The hope is that this study will become a catalyst to provide integral information about the incredible life of Leo Arnaud and reacquaint audiences with his music,” he wrote in his conclusion.

Arnaud was fairly low-key about “Bugler’s Dream,” the song he’s most associated with. He had no association with the Olympics, he told the Greensboro News & Record in 1984. He didn’t even know who’d selected his composition for the Games. “Four notes. People remember it because it’s only four notes,” he told a reporter. “I learned that from Fred Waring. Keep it simple and make sure they remember it at intermission.”

As for the song’s legacy? It was only one piece from Arnaud’s long career. “I’ve written a lot of symphonic music,” he said. “Who cares.”