Born in St. Louis in 1925, Tommy Wolf began playing piano at age three. A few years later, he took accordion lessons, outstripping his teacher by the time he was ten. Following high school graduation, he started college in Columbia, Missouri, only to be drafted in to the army. A sensitive young man torn from the security of his family at the age of 18, he fought in the Battle of the Bulge and was deeply marked by the experience. His wife Mary who had known him since kindergarden, recalls that he was a "basket case" when he returned from Military service. In 1948, at the age of 23, Wolf attended St. Louis Institute of Music and appeared on a daily television show with his trio and female vocalist. The same year, he married Mary, who was employed as a secretary. The couple shared a split level house with Wolf's parents and several years later had a daughter Jan.

One evening when Wolf was playing piano at the Jefferson Hotel antique dealers Jay and Fred Landesman and their wives, Fran and Paula, dropped in for drinks, requested a series of esoteric show tunes and were delighted by Wolf's interpretations. Frustrated by the lack of hip hang-outs in St. Louis, the Landesmans rented a store front on Olive Street, stripped the interior to its brick walls, painted them black, decorated the room with chandeliers and antiques, and hired Wolf as house pianist. Their club, The Crystal Palace, quickly became the watering hole of choice for local artists and sophisticates.

One fateful Saturday night in 1951, Fran slipped a poem into Wolf's pocket as he was leaving the bar. He was so impressed by its freshness and wit that he felt compelled to set it to music before he went to sleep. The resulting song "This Little Love Of Ours" began a collaboration that continued for more than a decade. Wolf sang and played their compositions, which he dubbed "American Lieder", at the Crystal Palace, and performers passing through St. Louis, notably jazz singers Jackie Cain and Roy Kral, added these "show tunes in search of a show" to their repertoires.

In 1956, Wolf went to Chicago to record "Wolf At Your Door," an album of 11 songs for Fraternity Records. (This material was reissued on the CD by Fresh Sound in 1990). "Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most", released by Fraternity the following year, contained 13 more songs, with Wolf backed by bassist Monty Budwing and drummer Shelly Manne. The Crystal Palace flourished, occasionally showcasing young singers and comedians. Overworked, Wolf relocated to The Other Room, a small bar owned by Fran's brother, Sam Deitsch. While on vacation in Southern California he, Mary and Jen fell in love with the beach and, on impulse, rented an apartment in Playa del Ray. They returned to St. Louis and stunned everyone by packing up their belongings and heading west.

Under then-prevailing rules, Wolf had to establish California residency for six months before he could join the Musicians Union and accept union jobs. He supplemented his money ($35 Army checks) by playing hush-hush gigs passed on to him by fellow pianists Jimmy Rowles and Russ Freeman. (One of these was backing Lenny Bruce at a strip joint). During this period Jay Landesman was preparing the book for a musical, "The Nervous Set", with Fran writing the lyrics. Wolf collaborated with Fran by mail and returned to St. Louis to rehearse the show, which opened in March in 1959 at the new, larger Crystal Palace, a cabaret theatre located on Gaslight Square. Critics and audiences embraced "The Nervous Set", a satirical comedy based on Jay's experiences as editor of the iconoclastic literary quarterly "Neurotica", and within a few weeks, the show was opened on Broadway. The New York production, weakened by ill-advised recasting and an altered ending, opened on May 12, 1950 and ran 28 performances. Wolf appeared on stage with his jazz quartet (including guitarist Kenny Burrell), an innovation at the time.

Although "The Nervous Set" flopped, its original cast album attracted a cult following; one reviewer compared the Wolf-Landesman musical, based on Nelson Algren's earthy novel, "A Walk On The Wild Side", to .... It faltered after its troubled genesis at the Crystal Palace, and a third show, "Molly Darling," a turn of the century piece about suffragettes and the automobile industry, was produced by the St. Louis Municipal Opera. In the early '60's, the Landesmans moved to London, where Fran continues to write poems and lyrics and Jay ran a publishing house. Wolf remained in LA. where, recommended by drummer Jackie Mills, he was hired as a rehearsal pianist at 20th Century Fox. His first assignment was teaching Jimmy Van Heusen & Sammy Cahn's "Let's Make Love" score to Yves Montand and Marylin Monroe.

He soon became the most sought after and highest paid rehearsal pianist in town, working on the Andy Williams and Reed Skelton television shows, and numerous musical specials, most memorably the award winning Fred Astaire "Evenings." With Mills and Astaire, he founded Choreo (later Ava) Records, functioning as producer and A&R man on albums by, among others, Irene Kral, Carol Lawrence, Charles Cochran and Ruth Price which included Wolf compositions. Plagued by distribution problems, the label expired after limping along for several years.

With the mid-'60's arrival of the rock era, Wolf decided that his style of music was outdated and switched to lyric writing, collaborating with Astaire on "Life Is Beautiful" and Victor Feldman on "A Face Like Yours". With bassist/composer Alf Clausen, he wrote "When Jeremiah Sang The Blues" an oratorio for orchestra and chorus that was performed at several California colleges, and another piece, Joan Baby, a musical allegory that interwove the life of Joan of Arc with a contempoary story of a young woman who, disguised as a man, plays quarterback on a football team. He continued to work on television shows and, following a series of exhausting rehearsal sessions with Donnie and Marie Osmond in Utah, was diagnosed with an inflammation of the pericardium. He died a year later on January 9, 1979. Mary Wolf Davidson remembers him as a man of unshakeable integrity, a stubborn workaholic who compulsively pushed himself without regard for his health. 'We survived a lot of hungry years," she recalls, "but the music made it all worthwhile. It fed my mind and soul".