Tupper Saussy

Frederick Tupper Saussy III (July 3, 1936 – March 16, 2007) was an American composer, musician, author, artist, and conspiracy theorist. His contemporaries describe him as a self-styled theologian, restaurant owner, ghostwriter of James Earl Ray’s biography, King assassination conspiracy theorist, anti-government pamphleteer, and radical opponent of the federal government’s taxation and monetary authority. He was born in Statesboro, Georgia; grew up in Tampa, Florida; and graduated from the University of the South at Sewanee, Tennessee, in 1958. His jazz combo there put out a university-subsidized album, Jazz at Sewanee, which included several original compositions. Thereafter Saussy taught English at Montgomery Bell Academy in Nashville, Tennessee, co-founded an advertising agency, McDonald and Saussy, and kept his musical career alive with recording dates and club sessions. With the Nashville Symphony, he composed a work called The Beast with Five Heads (1965/66), based on "The Bremen Town Musicians", designed to replace Peter and the Wolf as a work to teach schoolchildren about orchestration, which continued to be used for the next fifteen years. For its 1968/69 season, the Nashville Symphony commissioned him to write a piano concerto for Bill Pursell; it was performed by the Symphony on January 14, 1969, with Thor Johnson conducting.

Tupper Saussy was perhaps best known as the songwriter and keyboardist for the psychedelic pop band The Neon Philharmonic, whose vocalist was Don Gant. The Neon Philharmonic's single "Morning Girl" rose to Top Twenty status and was nominated for two Grammy awards in 1969. Earlier in Saussy's career, Monument Records had released several albums of his jazz compositions: "Discover Tupper Saussy," "Said I to Shostakovitch," and The Swingers' Guide to Mary Poppins (this last featuring songs from the Disney movie). In the 1960s and 1970s, he composed works for the Nashville Symphony Orchestra and the Chattanooga Symphony. Saussy also composed two pop songs for The Wayward Bus, "The Prophet: Predictions by David Hoy" and "Love Hum". He also worked with Chet Atkins and Ray Stevens, and wrote arrangements for Mickey Newbury's Harlequin Melodies, as well as arrangements for Boudleaux Bryant, Bobby Bare, and Roy Orbison. The Neon Philharmonic's two albums, The Moth Confesses and The Neon Philharmonic were released by Warner Brothers in 1969. The group disbanded in 1972, but producer David Kastle bought the name and used it on recordings until 1975, even recording one of Saussy's songs, "Making Out the Best I Can".

...
Wikipedia