After military service as a bandsman with the United States Marines during the Second World War, Beadell enrolled in the music program at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where his clarinet teacher, Dominick DiCaprio, encouraged him to study composition.
At Northwestern his composition teachers were Robert Delaney and Anthony Donato, and he later studied with Leo Sowerby at the American Conservatory in Chicago, and with Darius Milhaud at Mills College.
[1] He died in 1994, at age 68 Beadell is best known for his choral compositions and arrangements, and music for jazz ensemble.
He also wrote two symphonies, five film scores, song cycles, piano pieces, chamber music, and five stage works: an operetta, The Kingdom of Caraway (1957), a musical, Out to the Wind (1979, based on Willa Cather's short story "Eric Hermannson's Soul"), and three operas, The Sweetwater Affair (1960, produced 1961), The Number of Fools (1965–66, rev.
It was premiered on November 21, 1967, by the Lincoln Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Leo Kopp, in a concert of American music to mark the beginning of Kopp's 22nd year as conductor of the orchestra.