T. K. Ramamoorthy

Who was T. K. Ramamoorthy?

Tiruchirapalli Krishnaswamy Ramamoorthy, known as T. K. Ramamoorthy, was a popular South Indian Tamil music composer and violinist. Ramamoorthy was born in Tiruchirapalli into a family that was very much musically inclined. Both his father, Krishnaswamy Pillai, and grandfather, Malaikottai Govindasamy Pillai, were well known violinists in Tiruchirapalli. Ramamoorthy gave several stage performances along with his father in his childhood. C. R. Subburaman noted the young boy's talent and hired him as a violinist for HMV when he was only fourteen years old. Ramamoorthy in 1940's worked in Saraswathi Stores where AVM Studo's boss, Avichi Meiyappa Chettiar, was a partner – which lead him to play the violin for AVM's music composer, R. Sudarsanam, in some films. By the late 1940s C. R. Subburaman was a rising star in the South Indian film music world, and Ramamoorthy rejoined him as one of his violinists in his musical troupe. There, he met violinist and composer T. G. Lingappa, as well as M. S. Viswanathan, with whom he became a partner in later years.

Ramamoorthy, along with M. S. Viswanathan, are popularly known as Mellisai Mannar. His major works are in Tamil, Malayalam and Telugu films. He and M. S. Viswanathan, as the duo Viswanathan Ramamoorthy, composed musical scores for over 100 films in the South Indian film industry during the 1950s and 1960s. The duo parted amicably in 1965 and since then they both composed for films individually but Ramamoorthy could not achieve success as an individual composer and composed music only for 19 films between 1966–1986. The duo rejoined in 1995 after 29 years for Engirundho Vanthan.