Gaylord Carter      Pianist, organist    - 1905 - 2000.

When the classic film epic Ben­ Hur opened in 1926 in Los Angeles it ran continuously for six months. Gaylord Carter, who has died aged 95, was there every night playing the score, which he knew by heart, at the console of one of 7,000 organs that prolifer­ated across America during the silent film era. Only about two survive today, many as unplayed curiosities. At the keyboard in 1927 for Ernst Lubitsch’s The Student Prince, Carter nimbly handled the Sigmund Romberg music to fit the jerky movements on screen. He also played the score when the first Phantom of the Opera opened in California in 1925.
             He visited Australia, Europe and Britain, played the famous Wurlitzer at the Forest Lawn cem­etery and at some of the famous resorts of the 1920s and 1930s.
            Carter often composed his own background music to the early silent films — he could sound a bugle call, imitate a gong, strike a percussive note for a comedian’s pratfall and conjure up ominous chords for villains, heroic music for battles, and dreamy passages for love scenes. “At its best, the music is felt but not noticed,” he said. “When it’s right, you should lose yourself in the picture.”
           He was born in Weisbaden, Germany, and emigrated to Wichita, Kansas, with his parents as a child.
He took six months of piano lessons and another six at the or­gan and by the age of to was ac­companying the services at his local congregational church. At 14 he began playing in a cin­ema for children’s matinees. In 1922 Carter’s family moved to Los Angeles and he quickly be­gan earning pocket money by playing for the films. Two years later he was accompanying a Harold Lloyd comedy, ‘The Kid’, when the legendary actor and producer came to see how the film was doing. Impressed by Carter’s playing, Lloyd hired him as his personal organist and re­commended him for a job at the Million Dollar theatre. It paid $US 110 a week, an astronomical wage for the time. Carter gave up his law studies at the University of California, using the money to put his sister and brother through college.
                     During one of Lloyd’s most famous scenes, when he is hanging off the hands of a clock high above a city street in ‘Safety Last’, Carter swung into the popular number ‘Time On My Hands’. Lloyd was not amused and told him: “Gaylord, I do the jokes.”
                     When the silent movie era ended, Carter switched to radio. For seven years he played the in­troduction to television’s ‘Amos ‘n’ Andy’ show. In later life, he was redis­covered and played at dozens of silent movie revivals.
He never married.                 Christopher Reed The Guardian, London