Little House theme song was a David Rose composed cue from the 1971 Bonanza episode, "Top Hand".
David Rose is one of my favorite TV composers. He scored Little House but the popular western, Bonanza before it. He took a composed cue from a 1971 episode, "Top Hand", slightly reharmonized and gave it a steady uplifting beat to introduce Little House on the Prairie. Here it is in its original form on Bonanza:
https://youtu.be/TfblInpD18E?si=hr5O1CfTP79F72kN
When people say Star Wars wouldn't be Star Wars without John Williams, David Rose gives Little House the same orchestral identity. Rose is Little House. The brass fanfare makes heroes out of those pioneers, the strings pull at our emotions like a Romantic symphony, the woodwinds add various emotions from humor to sorrow, and the percussion adds small accents of action to all of this orchestrated music.
It's incredible how much music he could write at such a fast pace. This style of writing might now been seen as antiquated in favor of a rhythmic percussive track, augmented by mostly computer generated orchestral sounds.
There are so many reasons to like Little House. Another shout out for composers, live musicians, and David Rose, who got his inspiration from his own writing from Bonanza.