Roger Edens was born in Hillsboro, Texas. His parents were of Scots-Irish ancestry. He worked as a piano accompanist for ballroom dancers before going to work as a musical conductor on Broadway. He went to Hollywood in 1932 along with his protege Ethel Merman, writing and arranging her material for her films at Paramount. In 1935, he joined MGM as a musical supervisor and occasional composer and arranger, notably of music for Judy Garland. He also appeared on screen opposite Eleanor Powell in a cameo in Broadway Melody of 1936. Arthur Freed, producer of musicals at MGM, was impressed by Edens and soon made him integral to his production team, which was rapidly growing and featured many of the greatest talents, recruited by Freed himself. Freed built a cabinet around himself, and in the early 1940s made Edens associate producer. The unit made dozens of popular and extremely successful musical films in the 1940s and into the 1950s, including Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), Easter Parade (1948), On the Town (1949), Show Boat (1951), An American in Paris (1951), Singin’ in the Rain (1952), and The Band Wagon (1953). Roger Edens eventually separated from the MGM unit in the mid-fifties, when the musical film’s days of glory were coming to an end. He had his own office, and worked on such projects as Funny Face (1957) with Audrey Hepburn, Fred Astaire, and Kay Thompson at Paramount.

Roger Edens is considered to be an important creative musical figure from the end of the 1930s until the beginning of the 1960s. His career at MGM allowed him to work with the top musical performers including Judy Garland, of whom he was the original trainer and overseer, and a lifelong friend. He wrote special material for Garland, including the famous Dear Mr Gable – You Made Me Love You (1937),Our Love Affair (1940) for Strike up the Band – which received an Oscar nomination for best song of that year – and the music for the “Born in a Trunk” sequence in A Star Is Born (1954). Edens was responsible for writing It’s A Great Day for the Irish to showcase Garland’s powerhouse voice in 1940. This became one of Garland’s biggest hits and an Irish-American anthem played by military and marching bands every St. Patrick’s Day world over. He continued to compose, score, and arrange MGM musicals throughout the 1940s. He also produced a number of films after the mid-1950s and wrote special material for Garland’s Palace Theatre debut in 1951 and for her London Palladium concerts the same year. It was Roger Edens, along with producer Arthur Freed, who was the real guiding force behind M-G-M’s 1951 screen version of Show Boat. Edens headed the search for the right singer-actor to play Joe, the key supporting character who sings “Ol’ Man River”, and he discovered William Warfield after reading a rave review of his performance in a New York song recital. Edens also supervised cuts to the film after it was felt by the producer and director that the original cut was too slow. Roger Edens died of cancer in Los Angeles, California on July 13, 1970.