EPISODE 919: ONE MOON AND ONE GOLDEN SUN
Rest in Peace, Richard Sherman.
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
Hi and welcome back to Pop Culture Spirit Wow, the newsletter that is unexpectedly obsessed with musical theater songwriters this week!
Last month I had the great pleasure of talking to Alan Schmuckler and Michael Mahler, the songwriting team behind the musical Diary of a Wimpy Kid, which is just finishing a run in Milwaukee. It’s a great show, and the three of us had a wide-ranging conversation about its origins, development, and my favorite song from the show. Paid subscribers will get to hear a lot about all this and more later this week!
But as it turns out today is another day for musical theater songwriters. Richard M. Sherman (top left), who died over the weekend served with his brother Robert as Disney’s in-house songwriting team in the 1960s. Over the course of their careers they wrote the songs for such films as Mary Poppins, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, The Jungle Book, Winnie the Pooh, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, The Aristocats and Charlotte’s Web. They also wrote “It’s a Small World (After All),” which according to Richard has always made people “either want to kiss us or kill us.”
All together they wrote more motion picture musical scores that any other writing team in history.
The two first became songwriters on a bet from their father, a songwriter himself, who was watching the two of them do little in a West Hollywood apartment on his dime and bet them they couldn’t sell a song. It took them six months, but it got them started. A big hit for Mouseketeer Annette Funicello eventually put them on Walt Disney’s radar.
In an in-depth 2014 interview with Performing Songwriter, they described their father’s secret to creating a great song, which is so clear in their work: “You’ve got to have them Simple, Singable and Sincere. And they should have a special sound to them.”
But for them the “hinge” upon which the song hangs was the concept. “We don't try to fit a tune to words or words to a tune,” Richard told an interviewer in 1967. “We start with an idea and kick it back and forth…and then try to work it out musically.”
Part of what made their music so distinctive was its creativity. They loved to invent words. Snoopy, Come Home has “Fundamental Friend-Dependability.” Bedknobs has “Treguna Mekoides Trecorum Satis Dee.” And Mary Poppins has both “Chim Chim Cher-ee” and the most famous of all, “Supercalifragalisticexpialadocious”.
Robert’s son Jeff said of him, “Words were like his religion. He brought Word Builders on my mom and dad’s honeymoon…He wanted to just know words and he loved the sound of words and how they felt on your tongue.”
The other thing that really distinguished their music was its hopefulness. Leonard Maltin called them “professional optimists.” Even their more solemn tunes like “Feed the Birds” have tremendous heart and a positive message.
In honor of Richard’s passing, here are behind the scenes stories from the creation of some of the Sherman Brothers’ most famous songs. Hope you enjoy it.
I Wanna Be Like You (The Monkey Song), The Jungle Book
Sherman says they were hired to “find crazy ways of having fun with” Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book. And the thing that unlocked the song for them was the fact that apes swing on vines. “When we first got an idea for ‘I Wanna Be Like You,’ we said an ape swings from a tree, and he’s the king of apes,” said Sherman. “We’ll make him ‘the king of the swingers.’ That’s the idea, we’ll make him a jazz man.” [Metro News, 2016]
The brothers wanted jazz great Louis Prima to do the role; Sherman tells the story of flying to Las Vegas, where Prima and his band were playing, and sitting through session after session of his show until finally they were able to play him the song at 4 in the morning.
Sherman said as he played it, “I’m singing and playing ‘ooh ooh ooh…’, grunting away like an ape and they were just listening like a couple of university professors.
“And when I was through he said, ‘Are you trying to make a monkey out of me?’ And I said, ‘No, you’re the ape, these guys are the monkeys,’ and they all started to laugh. They loved it, they were just putting a joke on us.”
It’s A Small World (After All)
Sherman said that creating “It’s a Small World” was the most difficult assignment he and Robert ever had. Disney was putting together a ride for the 1964 World’s Fair called “Children of the World.” “The concept was that these little groups of animatronic dolls would sing national anthems of the various countries, and unfortunately that is on paper very brilliant and in actuality terrible.”
Realizing this cacophony of anthems was not working, Disney went to the brothers and told them, “I need a simple little song that talks about how children of the world are the hope of the future and I don’t want it to preachy, I just want it to be kind of a fun song.”
The challenge was enormous: Write a catchy song that can be heard over and over—the ride is 14 minutes—sung in different languages and musical styles, and deliver it fast. The first thing they came up with was “a little song that was too simple,” Sherman recalled. “It was very sweet, a nice little song, but we were writing it under terrible pressure because they kept calling to ask if we had anything written yet.” So they wrote other versions—more sophisticated, more balladic.
Finally, Sherman recalls, “We heard him [Disney] hacking and coughing down the corridor, coming towards us and we both looked at each other and said, ‘Let’s do the simple one.’” That song was “It’s A Small World.”
Disney’s response upon hearing it: “That’ll work.”
Sherman has long talked about “Small World” as a song of peace. “I hope the message comes through, because it is a small world after all, so we should live together in peace and harmony.”
[KVCR, 2015; Performing Songwriter, 2014]
“Mother Earth and Father Time,” Charlotte’s Web
I couldn’t find much about this song, other than the fact that it was the Sherman Brothers’ father’s favorite. But it’s such a beautiful song about appreciating life while we have it. (And supposedly Debbie Reynolds brought everyone in the cast to tears when she sang it.)
“Feed The Birds,” Mary Poppins
The Sherman Brothers’ most celebrated work was for Mary Poppins. They actually spent two and a half years writing 34 songs for the show, most of which did not get used, because for a long time the project had no clear plot or direction.
It was their idea to give the father figure flaws and a chance to grow. The book’s author P.L. Travers absolutely loathed this idea. “She was a walking icicle. She didn't like anything we did,” said Sherman. “In the two weeks we spent with her, she managed to destroy all the dreams, hopes and love we had built up.”
“Feed the Birds” was the very first song that the two wrote for the film. Sherman said, "Walt didn't give us an assignment. He gave us the books. He said, 'Read these books and tell me what you think.' So we went off and read the books, trading them off by chapters…[and] we seized on one incident, in Chapter 7 of Mary Poppins Comes Back, the second book—the bird woman. And we realized that was the metaphor for why Mary came, to teach the children—and Mr. Banks—the value of charity.
"So we wrote the song and took it up to Walt's office and played it and sang it for him. He leaned back in his chair, looking out the window, and he said: 'That's it, isn't it? That's what this is all about. This is the metaphor for the whole film.’”
That song became Walt’s favorite song. “Every so often Walt would call us up to his office on a Friday afternoon. We knew what he wanted. When we got there, he would say, 'I just wanted to know what you boys were up to these days.'
“Then he would turn around in his chair and stare out the window, like the first time we played it for him, and he would say, 'Play it.' And we would.
“And you could just see Walt thinking, 'That's what it's all about, everything we do at Disney.'" [The Guardian, 2013; Cleveland Plain Dealer, 2009]
“Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” Mary Poppins
The song “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” came about out of the idea that the children should have some kind of keepsake to take home with them after traveling into that fantastical world they go to with Mary. “We wanted a souvenir that Mary Poppins could give to the children that would come out of this wonderful make-believe experience they had by jumping into the chalk drawing picture,” Sherman explained. “In the book, Mary Poppins didn’t go in with the kids, she went in on her own on her day off and had tea with Burt, then she left.”
A word seemed like a great idea, because it was something that would last. “A word would never change,” said Sherman. And as it so happened, in their childhood the brothers had created the perfect word: “As kids,” said Sherman, “we were in summer camp in the Adirondack Mountains in New York state. And there was a contest in our camp about the biggest word in the world. Anybody who could say ‘antidisestablishmentarianism’ was a super-genius. But if you could make a bigger word than that you were a super super-genius. We started working on one and it wasn’t very smooth, but it was something like the one we ended up using.” [Performing Songwriter, 2014]
“A Spoonful of Sugar,” Mary Poppins
The Sherman Brothers had actually written a different song, “The Eyes of Love,” that Poppins’ star Julie Andrews was meant to sing. The problem was, Andrews didn’t like it. Disney asked them to come up with something that better captured Mary Poppins’ philosophy of life, but nothing they came up with seemed to work. “They were both really depressed,” Robert’s son Jeff remembered years later.
What broke the song open for them was a story Jeff told his father about school.
I was at school, I was about six years old, and they were giving us the oral polio vaccine. You know, it wasn’t the shot. So I, you know, stood in line with all my friends and we all just took this thing. And then I got home and my dad looked depressed. And all the shades were closed, it was very dark in the house.
And I said, “Oh, we had the polio vaccine at school today.” And he looked at me, he goes “You let someone give you a shot at school? Did it hurt?” And I said, “No, no, no. They took out this little cup and put a sugar cube in it and then dropped the medicine and you just ate it.” And my dad looked at me and started shaking his head. And he went over to the phone and he called Dick and told him that he had something, and the next day they wrote “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.”
They had this little recording studio. My uncle usually would play and sometimes my dad would sing backup. And so they would bring home the songs and I would hear all these songs before anybody else. And he played “Spoonful of Sugar.” And he said, Thank you for that song.
I think that the love of his family and each of us kids inspired different things all the time for him. It was kind of like that was his yarn and he could make it into the most beautiful afghan. He could take something mundane like that and see the magic in it.” [StoryCorps, 2021]
Richard said of making Mary Poppins: “The best moment came when I first heard Julie Andrews singing ‘A Spoonful of Sugar.’ I was crying because she was articulating the whole essence of the movie – which was about the power of love.” [The Guardian, 2013]
“Chim Chim Cher-ee,” Mary Poppins
The Sherman Brothers won an Oscar for this song, which was inspired by a drawing of a chimney sweep the two saw as they were developing music for the show. They tell the story:
Bob: One day, Don Dagrati, this marvelous [Disney] writer and artist, had a little 8 x 10 sketch in charcoal, a little chimney sweep with his brooms over his shoulder and he was whistling with his cheeks puffed out. And Dick and I looked at each other and said, “That’s a song.” But there was no chimney sweep in our treatment so far.
Dick: So we said, “We’ll write a song about chimney sweeps that Mary Poppins can sing to the kids.” Initially, that’s the way we were going, but Walt in his incredible showmanship—he had a genius for these things—he listened to the song in progress . . .
Bob: . . .Walt said, “You know, we have this guy that draws pictures on the pavement and we have a one-man band and we have a fellow who flies kites—why don’t we make them all one fellow and call him Burt, and he’ll be the chimney sweep too?”
Dick: So he’s everything, a jack-of-all-trades. That character didn’t exist in the Mary Poppins book. He evolved from all those story meetings we had.
The title of the song came from playing with the word “chimney,” which they found ugly and tried to make sound prettier. Getting the melody right took time: “It was very heavy, almost with a Middle Eastern sound, and both of us started disliking it,” said Sherman. “We thought, ‘We’ve got to lighten this thing up. It’s English, it isn’t Russian.’”
They also only came up with 16 bars, nowhere near enough. “But then we thought, ‘Maybe a folk song is about repetition.’ So what we did was change the treatment, so sometimes it’s a recitative, sometimes it’s sung. The lyrics change every time around. It became a running theme in the movie, taking on different guises.”
MOMENT OF WOW
There’s a lot of clips of Sherman performing. If you need a little moment of joy this week, this one’s for you.
Coming Up: Schmuckler & Mahler!
Such a fun way to great this morning! Thanks, Jim!
What a lovely piece!!