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Nelson Smock Riddle Jr. (June 1, 1921 – October 6, 1985) was an American arranger, composer, bandleader and orchestrator whose career stretched from the late 1940s to the mid-1980s. He worked with many vocalists at Capitol Records, including Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, Judy Garland, Dean Martin, Peggy Lee, Johnny Mathis, Rosemary Clooney and Keely Smith. He scored and arranged music for many films and television shows, earning an Academy Award and three Grammy Awards. He found commercial and critical success with a new generation in the 1980s, in a trio of platinum albums with Linda Ronstadt.

Riddle was born on June 1, 1921, in Oradell, New Jersey. He was the only surviving child of Marie Albertine Riddle (a native of Mulhouse, France, whose father was Spanish) and Nelson Smock Riddle, who was of English-Irish and Dutch descent. His mother had suffered six miscarriages and one stillbirth in her lifetime. It was his mother's second marriage. The family later moved to nearby Ridgewood.

Following his father's interest in music, he began taking piano lessons at age eight and trombone lessons at age fourteen. He was encouraged to continue his musical pursuits at Ridgewood High School.

A formative experience was hearing Serge Koussevitsky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra playing Maurice Ravel's Boléro. Riddle said later: "... I've never forgotten it. It's almost as if the orchestra leaped from the stage and smacked you in the face ..."

By his teenage years, Riddle had decided to become a professional musician; "... I wanted to be a jazz trombone player, but I didn't have the coordination." So he began to turn to composing and arranging.

The Riddle family had a summer house in Rumson, New Jersey. Riddle enjoyed Rumson so much that he convinced his parents to allow him to attend his senior year in high school there (1938).

In Rumson while playing for trumpeter Charlie Briggs' band, the Briggadiers, he met one of the most important influences on his later arranging style: Bill Finegan, with whom he began arranging lessons. Despite being only four years older than Riddle, Finegan was considerably more musically sophisticated, and within a few years Riddle was creating not only some of the most popular arrangements from the swing era, such as Glenn Miller's "Little Brown Jug", but also great jazz arrangements such as Tommy Dorsey's "Chloe" and "At Sundown" from the mid-1940s.

After his graduation from Rumson High School, Riddle spent his late teens and early twenties playing trombone in and occasionally arranging for various local dance bands, culminating in his association with the Charlie Spivak Orchestra. In 1943, Riddle joined the Merchant Marine, serving at Sheepshead Bay, New York for about two years while continuing to work for the Charlie Spivak Orchestra.

Riddle studied orchestration under his fellow merchant mariner, composer Alan Shulman. After his enlistment term ended, Riddle traveled to Chicago to join Tommy Dorsey's orchestra in 1944, where he remained the orchestra's third trombone for eleven months until drafted by the Army in April 1945, shortly before the end of World War II. He was discharged in June 1946, after fifteen months of active duty. He moved shortly thereafter to Hollywood to pursue a career as an arranger, and spent the next several years writing arrangements for multiple radio and record projects. In May 1949, Doris Day had a No. 2 hit, "Again", backed by Riddle.

In 1950, Riddle was hired by composer Les Baxter to write arrangements for a recording session with Nat King Cole; this was one of Riddle's first associations with Capitol Records. Although one of the songs Riddle had arranged, "Mona Lisa", soon became the biggest selling single of Cole's career, the work was credited to Baxter. However, once Cole learned the identity of the arrangement's creator, he sought out Riddle's work for other sessions, and thus began a fruitful partnership that furthered the careers of both men at Capitol.