Ray Lawrence Linn Jr. was born in Burbank and grew up in Long Beach,
California. While a student at California Christian College in Los
Angeles (now Chapman University in Orange, California), he began his
media career singing bass in a male quartet on a religious radio
program. He subsequently was cast as one of the singing Seven Dwarfs in
Disney's Snow White. (Which dwarf? Hard to say: Unlike the voice
actors, individual singers were not identified with individual
characters.) After army service in World War II, he worked as a
Hollywood musician from the late 1940s through the 1970s, contributing
to numerous feature-film, cartoon, and television soundtracks, and
occasionally appearing on camera, usually uncredited. He also composed,
arranged, conducted, and performed in many popular signing commercials
of that era.
He was not related to his near-contemporary near-namesake, trumpeter Raymond Sayre (Ray) Linn.
Arranged, conducted, and/or performed much of the recorded vocal music used in popular touring ice shows - Shipstads & Johnson Ice Follies, Holiday on Ice - in the 1950s and 1960s.