Bennett remains best known for his theater work, and his 1981 obituary's headline in the New York Times is unsurprising: “Robert Russell Bennett, 87; Orchestrated Top Musicals.” His earliest attention in the national press, however, had trumpeted his own compositions: prizewinning orchestral successes in the late-1920s contests sponsored by Musical America and Victor Records. Over the ensuing half-century, news features regularly marveled at Bennett's wide-ranging creative activity. He brought his gifts, training, and experience to every endeavor—whether a composition for a friend, Broadway orchestrations ground out against exhausting deadlines, or one of the great musical challenges, satisfactions, and triumphs of his lifetime, Victory at Sea.

Bennett was born in Kansas City in 1894, but a polio affliction at the age of four prompted his family's move to the unspoiled air of the country—Freeman, Missouri, about thirty-five miles to the south. His early musical instruction was piano study with his mother May Bennett and both trumpet and violin lessons with his father George. The latter was also a bandleader during what was the heyday of America's amateur and professional concert bands, when the record industry was young, commercial radio and sound film still in the future, and live music was the norm at civic and social events. Young Bennett learned to play most of the instruments in his father's civic band well enough to capably substitute for missing players, offering invaluable experience for the future composer and arranger.

In 1911, aged seventeen, he relocated to his hometown and was accepted for study by Kansas City Symphony conductor Carl Busch, himself an accomplished composer and onetime pupil of Humperdinck. Forty years later, the New Yorker's Bennett portrait—published just two months before he joined Victory—whimsically recapped this early part of his career, when future president Harry Truman was another working pianist in the city: