Cool New Feature Over At LA Times Website!

In a superb obit notice for an ex-La notable, songwriter Ray Evans, the LAT's website also has MP3's of three top songs Evan collaborated on. Go take a listen!

And from the very start of the very complete obituary:

Hit songwriter Ray Evans dies at 92
By Dennis McLellan
Times Staff Writer

1:27 PM PST, February 16, 2007

Ray Evans, whose long collaboration with songwriting partner Jay Livingston produced a string of hits that included the Oscar-winning "Buttons and Bows," "Mona Lisa" and "Whatever Will Be, Will Be (Que Sera, Sera)," has died. He was 92.

Evans, who teamed up with Livingston in the late 1930s, died of an apparent heart attack at UCLA Medical Center on Thursday evening, Frederick Nicholas, Evans' lawyer and the trustee of his estate, said today.

Considered among Hollywood's greatest songwriters, Livingston and Evans wrote songs for dozens of movies, most of them at Paramount, where they were under contract from 1945 to 1955.

With Livingston providing the melodies and Evans writing the lyrics, the team wrote 26 songs that reportedly sold more than 1 million copies each.

"Ray Evans, along with his late partner Jay Livingston, gave us some of the most enduring songs in the great American songbook," lyricist Alan Bergman told The Times today. "We will miss him but know that his songs will live on."

In addition to their three Oscar-winning songs, Livingston and Evans earned four other Oscar nominations — for "The Cat and the Canary" from "Why Girls Leave Home" (1945); "Tammy," sung by Debbie Reynolds in "Tammy and the Bachelor" (1957); "Almost in Your Arms" from "Houseboat" (1958), and "Dear Heart" from the movie of the same name (1964)....