Henderson, Lyle Russell Cedric (“Skitch”)

(b. 27 January 1918 in Halstad, Minnesota; d. 1 November 2005 in New Milford, Connecticut), popular pianist, bandleader, and orchestra conductor who directed bands on The Tonight Show and founded the New York Pops.

Henderson was the youngest of the six children of Joseph Henderson, a farmer, and Josephine Henderson, a homemaker. Sources disagree as to various aspects of his early life. Official biographies indicate that he was born in Birmingham, England, and immigrated to the United States as a youth. However, the 1920 U.S. Census indicates that Henderson’s family lived in Halstad, Minnesota, and that the two-year-old Lyle was indeed a Minnesota native. According to the New York Times, Henderson averred that he took piano lessons at the age of six from his mother, a church organist, but Minnesota death records show that Josephine Henderson died when he was two.

Henderson attended school in Halstad until at least 1930. By 1933 he had decided to try to earn a living through music, early on by playing piano at roadhouses in Minnesota and Montana. While still in his teens, he moved to Hollywood, where he attended the University of California, Los Angeles. He stated that he also studied at the Juilliard School, in New York. During the 1930s, Henderson met the actress and singer Judy Garland while playing a hotel engagement. In 1937 he accompanied her and the actor Mickey Rooney on a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer tour, and the following year he played piano on a radio show for the comedian Bob Hope.

Henderson was reportedly using his nickname, Skitch, by 1940, but accounts about its origin vary. Henderson himself noted in 1953 that he did not recall where the name came from. Years later, it was widely attributed to Bing Crosby, who supposedly suggested it because Henderson could so rapidly produce piano sketches in various keys for arrangers.

According to various official biographies, Henderson enlisted in the Canadian Air Force in 1940 and became a pilot for the U.S. Army Air Forces the following year. Other sources contend that it is more likely that Henderson was an instructor pilot with the U.S. Army Air Corps’ Aviation Cadet program. After World War II Henderson first arranged and played piano for RCA Victor recordings, including with the young Frank Sinatra, and then organized a dance band and toured the United States for about two years, conducting from the piano. The band included saxophones, trumpets, trombones, two French horns, and a rhythm section. By 1949 business had gotten so bad that Henderson was glad when Sinatra called to offer him his old job as the vocalist’s music director.

On the radio, Henderson worked with Sinatra on The Lucky Strike Show and with Bing Crosby on The Philco Hour. Henderson was also employed as a disc jockey on New York’s WNBC radio; for the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), he was the master of ceremonies of Talent Search and filled in conducting the house orchestra when the music director Arturo Toscanini was on vacation. During the 1950s Henderson worked with seventy members of the New York Philharmonic on various popular programs. The experiment did not last, but it paved the way for the later inception of the New York Pops.

On 12 December 1950 Henderson married Faye Emerson, a stage and screen actress as well as a television talk show host; the two divorced in 1957 (some sources say early 1958). On 7 February 1958 Henderson married Ruth Einseidel Michaels, a fashion model. They were married for forty-seven years and had a son and a daughter. In 1954 Henderson became a staple on NBC’s long-running television program The Tonight Show, leading the house band and chatting up the host, Steve Allen, until 1956.

During that time Henderson began sporting the Vandyke beard for which he became known. He was replaced in 1957, but he returned to the show to work with the new host, Johnny Carson, in 1962, remaining until 1966. Henderson had a reputation for hiring gifted sidemen on The Tonight Show, among them the trumpeter and scat singer Clark Terry and the trumpeter Doc Severinsen, who took over as bandleader in 1967.

In 1963 Henderson received a Grammy Award for a recording of selections from George Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess, featuring the soprano Leontyne Price. Through the years, Henderson was a frequent guest conductor at popular and classical concerts. He served as the music director of the Tulsa Philharmonic, in Oklahoma, from 1971 to 1974. By 1972 Henderson and his wife owned and operated the Silo, a cooking school, art gallery, and country store at Hunt Hill Farm, in New Milford, Connecticut. They cowrote two cookbooks.

On 3 July 1974 the New York Times published a pageone account of Henderson’s indictment on tax-evasion charges. He had donated a collection of music scores to the University of Wisconsin and had estimated their worth at $350,000. The Internal Revenue Service alleged that the musician had attempted to avoid paying more than $40,000 in taxes. He was acquitted of some charges but was convicted of filing false income-tax returns.

In 1983 Henderson founded the New York Pops, which he served for years as music director. According to liner notes for the orchestra’s Christmas in the Country album, the New York Pops has focused on an American popular and symphonic repertoire, performing pieces by Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, and Gershwin, as well as producing folk music, film scores, and jazz. During the early 1990s Henderson was also the music director of the Virginia Symphony Pops and the Florida Orchestra.

Even late in life, Henderson remained a popular figure in New York. During the summer of 1997, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani awarded him a top municipal honor, the Handel Medallion, and in 1998 he was given an eightieth-birthday tribute at Carnegie Hall. Henderson was eighty-seven years old when he died of natural causes at his home in New Milford. On 6 February 2006 the conductor was honored with a memorial service, again at Carnegie Hall, with eulogists including the broadcast journalist Mike Wallace, the mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne, and the veteran actress and singer Kitty Carlisle Hart.

Henderson’s band is mentioned in George T. Simon, The Big Bands (1981), 4th ed. Obituaries are in the Los Angeles Times (2 Nov. 2005) and New York Times (3 Nov. 2005).

Whitney Smith