When asked about how he created The Music Man, Meredith Willson would always speak of his hometown: "I didn't have to make up anything. I simply remembered Mason City as closely as I could." Years later, writing the musical that would become his best-loved work, creating River City and that rascal Harold Hill, he would draw on these memories and the power of music he had learned as a boy.
As much as he loved Mason City, Willson's talent and ambition pushed him out of his Midwestern nest. At 17, he moved to New York City where he studied at the Institute of Musical Art. During the 1930s, he was a musical director on many national radio shows. He wrote many memorable standards, such as "It's Beginning to Look Like Christmas," "May the Good Lord Bless and Keep You" and "'Till There Was You," which became a big hit for the Beatles in 1963.
In 1949, many people suggested that Willson write a musical about his early life in Iowa. So using his memories of Mason City, Willson created The Music Man. Each character in The Music Man's River City is based on someone he knew from Mason City. Marian Paroo, the famous librarian from the song "Marian the Librarian" and the show's female lead, is based on Willson's mother, complete with her music lessons and love of knowledge and culture. Marian's mother in the show is based on a German woman who would come to clean the Willson's house every Saturday, and the boy Winthrop who solves his lisp problems with the song "Gary, Indiana" is Willson himself as a ten year old. And the lovable con man, "Professor" Harold Hill? Before the opening of The Music Man in 1957, Willson wrote in The New York Herald, "Harold Hill...is so many people that I remember different ones every time I see the show."
Willson wrote two more Broadway musicals after The Music Man (The Unsinkable Molly Brown and Here's Love) but he will always be best known for the musical recreation of his boyhood. "The attributes and the ideas in The Music Man are exactly as I remember them from my childhood," he said, "And if it had been overly romanticized, if there were notes in it not in keeping with the times and the place, I don't think people would have responded so warmly to it. The innocent Iowa of 1912 is part of our heritage."
