TV Show Theme Songs

An identifying characteristic of many of the most popular TV shows in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s was having a distinctive theme song. Not only was the music itself lively and memorable, it had accompanying lyrics. And those lyrics told, in a nutshell, the story of the show’s characters. Consider the following examples:

77 Sunset Strip – a detective show about private eyes operating from an office on Hollywood’s famed Sunset Strip

Rawhide – a western about cowboys driving a herd of cattle to market

Surfside 6 – a detective show where the private eyes had their office on a houseboat

The Beverly Hillbillies – a comedy about a group of hillbillies who move to Bevery Hills after finding oil on their property

Sugarfoot – a western about a tenderfoot making his way across the west

The Mary Tyler Moore Show – a comedy about a single woman working at a Minneapolis TV station

All in the Family – a comedy about a working class family in Queens, New York

In each instance, the show’s theme song provided viewers with a quick overview of the context of the show’s storylines. Additionally, the songs often became popular in their own right.

Frankie Laine sang Rawhide’s theme song. The famous opening line– head ’em up! move ’em out! –became a part of the working vocabulary of many people. In the movie The Blues Brothers , John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd parodied it.

Coming as it did during the early years of the feminist movement, Mary Tyler Moore’s theme song became something of an anthem for working women, especially those who were single and attempting to make it professionally in the workplace.
Assuring the show’s lead character that you’re going to make it after all, the song provided inspiration to many female viewers.

At the beginning of every episode of All in the Family , the characters played by Carroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton–Archie and Edith Bunker–were singing Those Were The Days . With Edith playing the piano, they sang about an idealized world in the past, one markedly different from the chaos and upheaval they were experiencing in the 1970s.

Aside from the shows with lyrics to the theme songs, there were shows with exceptional instrumental themes. Most notable were Henry Mancini’s jazz theme for the detective show, Peter Gunn and Lalo Schifrin’s jazz-flavored theme for Mission: Impossible . Both earned praise for their composers, as well as the TV shows themselves.

Given all the changes in the TV world in recent years, it’s very probabe that memorable theme songs for TV shows will remain a thing of the past, when the broadcast networks ruled and cable channels were unknown.