Marl Young, a musician who was instrumental in the merger of the all-black and all-white musicians unions in Los Angeles in the early 1950s and two decades later became the first black music director of a major network television series, “Here's Lucy," has died. He was 92.
Young, a recently retired longtime member of the board of directors of Professional Musicians Local 47, died Wednesday in a medical rehabilitation center in Los Angeles, said his granddaughter, Audrey Jackson. Young had prostate cancer, she said, but the exact cause of death has not been determined.
A pianist and arranger who arrived in Los Angeles from Chicago in 1947, Young became involved in the efforts of the black musicians union in L.A., Local 767, to unite with the white Local 47 in 1951.
“Segregation was a way of life," Young, who joined the all-black local in Chicago in 1933 at age 16, recalled in a recent interview with Overture, the Local 47 newspaper. “It was just the way things were."
But times were changing.
“There was a group of us that got together and said we wanted to end segregation in Local 47," Young said. “The purpose of each union, as stated in the bylaws, was to unite all the professional musicians of the Los Angeles area.
“To unite the two organizations would be proper, because it would live up to that portion of the bylaws."
Young was “one of the key figures in moving from segregated unions into an integrated American Federation of Musicians," said Steven Isoardi, who interviewed Young for Central Avenue Sounds: Jazz in Los Angeles, a 1998 book published by the University of California Press.
