#mary sherman | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

nathancone · 4 months

Text

Richard M. Sherman, 1928-2024

Richard Sherman, who died today at age 95, wrote along with his brother Robert some of the most memorable melodies of the 20th Century, including songs from “Mary Poppins,” “The Jungle Book,” and one of the biggest earworms of all time, “It’s a Small World.” (I happen to love it.) Sherman was one of the last living links to Walt Disney himself, and in 2023, got to revisit Walt’s old office as part of a Disney 100 special film, “Once Upon a Studio.”

youtube

In 2011, I was overjoyed to have an opportunity to interview Sherman by phone as part of the advance promotion for a touring production of “Mary Poppins” on stage. Today I listened back to my interview and smiled all over again. After our talk, Sherman asked if I’d send him a copy of the produced interview on CD, which I did. Then HE wrote me a thank you note, complimenting me! What a wonderful person he was.

Below is the transcript of my interview.

*****

Nathan Cone: This is an honor and a privilege to talk to you. Because I've been a big Disneyphile and Disney fan since I was a young boy.

Richard Sherman: That's nice. Thank you for saying that. That's very sweet of you.

Yeah, my wife asked me this morning, she said “You have your interview today, don't you?” And I said, “yeah, I do.” And she said, “are you ready?” I said, “I've been ready for 35 years.”

Oh my God! [laughs] Well, I'm thrilled to be giving you an interview. So ask away and I'll be happy to tell you anything you'd like to know.

Thank you so much. I wanted to know, first, when you and your brother Robert began writing songs for Mary Poppins, there was no script, only the stories by Pamela Travers. And in some ways, I think your songs helped shape the story, I guess. How do you see Mary Poppins?

Well, it's an interesting thing you used the word story, because if you read the books that Mrs. Travers wrote, you'd find a brilliant character and a lot of wonderful adventures and absolutely no story whatsoever. There is no storyline in her books. There's only adventures with a magical nanny. And what we did was we superimposed a story, a need for Mary Poppins to come. In other words, there was the original book, the original story that we came up with for when our first meeting with Walt was... We said there was no story. We just said there was a definite need because chaos was reigning in the house and, Mary Poppins came in and straightened out and gave life lessons and and that. And then, of course, in the development of the story, which in large part was due to a gentleman by the name of Walt Disney and his two of his finest talents, and that was Bill Walsh and Don DiGradi, these people, and my brother Bob and I shaped a story, and it evolved that the Banks family was, in a kind of a discordant position. And, that's the whole thing. I mean, I'm waffling away, but basically, we cobbled together a story. Walt bought the concept, and he liked the ideas of the songs we had. Mrs. Travers wrote the books in the period of 1934 through 1939-40. And it was depressing. England. It was a very drab period. And, it was an arbitrary decision on my brother's and my part to set the story back at the turn of the last century so that we'd have the English music-hall style music, and it would be very special. And you could believe that a nanny would come flying out of the air. And so basically, these are the things that we contributed to Mrs. Travers' great stories, because she had wonderful stories. There's no question about it. But they didn't have any way to hold an audience in their seats for 2.5 hours? No way.

And you alluded to this, that she was reluctant to allow her books to be made into a film. And I understand she had some reservations about this. What kind of feedback did you and your brother get from her when you were presenting songs?

She didn't understand why we were doing songs at all. She said, what's the point of this? You know, we had this Admiral Boom, and we had a little song for him. She said, "Why don't you use ‘Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay?’ You have the word 'boom' in it.” And I said, “because it's an original musical we're trying to write.” And then she says, “Well, I love ‘Greensleeves.’ Why don't you use Greensleeves?’” I said, “Because it's hundreds of years old and everybody knows it. We want to do something fresh and original.” And she just didn't get the idea. She was anything but showbiz, if you follow me. She had no concept of what we were going for, and that was a piece of entertainment for the world and for posterity, inspired by her books. But she, Mrs. Travers, was difficult. And to say it… I'm being very kind about that!

I love hearing you tell stories about how, with Feed the Birds it was Disney's favorite song, and how he felt it was the key to the to the story itself.

Yeah. Well, when we were working on developing an idea for how to do Mary Poppins, we came across this one story in Mrs. Travers first book, and it was about this lady who sat on the steps of Saint Paul's Cathedral and sold bread crumbs. She didn't explain what that story was all about. She just said, this lady sits on the bread on the steps of Saint Paul's and says, “feed the birds, tuppence a bag.” And that was all there was in it. And when we read the story we said, “My God, that could be... That could be the key to this whole thing.” It doesn't cost very much to buy some breadcrumbs to feed birds, but that's not what it's about. It's not about the cost of breadcrumbs and birds. It doesn't take much to give a kindness, to give love. And we got very excited. And by getting excited about this one thing, we said, this could be the key to this whole damn story, Mary Poppins comes in and teaches a family a lesson in giving, in giving love and giving a little extra dimension. And that's what she does. And she all of her little life lessons are involved in feeding the birds. In other words, giving that smile, giving that hug, giving that love, giving that extra little something that doesn't cost you anything. And so basically, we wrote this song. We were very inspired by it. And I remember we didn't know much about England or Saint Paul's Cathedral. We got pictures and there were pictures of the saints and apostles standing around on the top of the trellis on the top of the building there. And we said, okay, all the all around the cathedral, the saints and apostles look down as she sells their wares. I mean, we just made it up as we went along. And my God, it was such a good song. We got very excited about it. Now, we didn't make a big to-do when we played it for Walt the first time, but he listened to it along with some other stuff we had written, and he said, “That's the key to this whole story, isn't it?” We said, “yes, yes it is.” And that's when he said, “How’d you guys like to come and work here?”

Of course, he knew that we were thinking story and he was a storyteller. He was the master storyteller of the last century, God knows. And he knew that Bob and I were story writers. We didn't just write jolly tunes and stuff. We tried to say a lot more with our music than just, yeah, little carry tunes.

We have a stage musical now that is different from the movie... How does it differ from the movie?

Well, it differs in only this regard. The basic thrust of the story is exactly the same as the movie. The difference is the fact that there are new stories added. There are new dimensions to the characters. There's more knowledge of what the mother was all about. And we made her a suffragette. And, in the new incarnation on stage, she's a frustrated actress. She had been an actress, and she married Mr. Banks. And also there's new material in this play about Mr. Banks, his background, the reason why he became such a sort of a stiff, tight, restricted, thwarted individual was because he had his horrible nanny, Miss Andrew, who was a terrible nanny and, he was, like, thwarted in life. He didn't show emotion. He didn't show anything. And so, Mary Poppins comes and corrects all that. She comes in and does wonderful things for the whole family. And that's using a lot of the adventures and stuff that Bob and I had done in the original. The story basically is Mary Poppins comes in and straightens out a dysfunctional family. And you could say that about both the film and the play. The play goes a lot deeper. Julian Fellowes, who was a brilliant writer, wrote the book and he's wonderful. And Stiles and Drewe, the two wonderful English songwriters, added quite a number of good songs, new songs, along with the material that Bob and I had written. Because, basically the backbone of the story is still the same, and we have Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, Spoonful of Sugar Chim Chim Cher-ee, all of the songs are still in there and beautifully done, by the way.

And were you and Robert consulted for, the project or asked to, contribute in any way to, new aspects?

Spiritually! [laughs] No, actually, the project was mounted in England with as a joint project with Cameron Mackintosh and Tom Schumacher, who is the head of Disney Theatrical. And between Tom Schumacher and Cameron Mackintosh, this story was developed and evolved. The stage story. And the stage story is wonderful. And they did incorporate much of our music. I was in a sense, let's say a spiritual guru. I, I was consulted a bit on it so but basically not officially. So I didn't want to say I was officially involved in it.

Well, you and your brother Robert wrote many, many songs for the film that never made it into the picture, some of which you can hear on the DVD releases of Mary Poppins. So, you know, y'all must have a tremendous backlog of great music from Mary Poppins and dozens of other projects. What happens to those songs?

Well, you see, Bob and I were staff writers at the studio. So in all truth, when you write for a studio and you're a staff writer, it belongs to the studio. Many of the songs that we wrote for Poppins wound up in other Disney projects, and I'm happy to say a lot of them had very big, responses in different ways. A couple of examples of that are, let's see, The Beautiful Briny Sea, for example, was in a compass sequence in Mary Poppins, which was abandoned. And so The Beautiful Briny Sea was a big featured number in Bedknobs and Broomsticks seven years later, where Angela Lansbury, as this magical witch, takes these people on an adventure under the water. And it was very nice. Originally it was Mary Poppins that was going to do it, but that sequence was left out. And so we just took the song lock, stock and barrel and used it in a different picture. Then it was like a very beautiful, haunting theme that we had written for another adventure with Mary Poppins. It was called The Land of Sand. And they went to the Sahara Desert, and they were seeing, visions rising out of the sand, you know, images. And so we changed the words and it became Trust In Me, the song that the vicious snake sang, Kaa, in The Jungle Book. So the melody was the same, but the words are different. But that haunting, theme was used and it was very successful. So we've had a number of things where we've taken songs. Songwriters call it the trunk. It's something you've written but never used. It never had a home, so you can't necessarily use it exactly as such. But you can take the spirit of a piece or a melody and use it again. And that's what we do.

Well, Sterling Holloway did such a great job with that Trust in Me song. He's got such a unique voice. I'm wondering on films and working on projects. Do you like to write for a voice like Phil Harris or Sterling Holloway or David Tomlinson or Angela Lansbury better, or do you just hope that they find life in a picture somewhere? How did it work?

No, we write for character. It's always story and character. We never think about who is going to sing it. I think, once I think one time, twice, twice... Because we were on staff, we knew that Walt wanted to use Burl Ives in this picture was Summer Magic. So we thought of burrow when we wrote On the Front Porch and a song called The Ugly Bug Ball. We did a novelty and we did a very pretty song, old fashioned song that we knew this was a wonderful folk singer and he knew exactly how to handle this kind of material. So we wrote that for him. In the case of, we did three pictures starring Maurice Chevalier. The first one was, In Search of the Castaways. And then I think we did. Let's see, we did. The Aristocats was another one, and Monkeys Go Home, three pictures for Disney and all three, we knew it was going to be Chevalier, and we directly wrote this material for Chevalier. But other than that, we only wrote for characters. We never wrote for Julie, we never wrote for Dick Van Dyke, we never wrote for Angela or any of these people. We just wrote for the characters. And these wonderful, wonderful, talented ladies and gentlemen came in and interpreted the music. So basically, no. And Bob and I, I can say honestly, have always written 99% of our material for the character in the story and not for a star.

Well, you know, besides writing for the movies, you've also written songs for several of Disney's theme park rides, including a It's a Small World in the Carousel of Progress.

Ah, you did your homework!

Yeah, I love these rides. I love them… and Magic Journeys.

Oh yeah, thank you! That's one of our favorites.

I love this music. And Disney famously conceives of their rides as stories in and of themselves. And so....

Yes, they are. You have to you have to tell a story, and you have to get the mood and the feel and the chemistry of the event, of course. For example, the very first song ever written for, a theme park, what was In the Tiki Tiki Tiki Room, which is the Tiki Room, right? I mean, there's not a ride, it's an experience, you know, you see the audio animatronics, flowers and dolls and birds and tiki torches all singing and chanting, and it's amazing. It's an amazing thing. But when that was first created way back in the early 60s, Walt had a mockup of it done in one of the soundstages out in the studio, and he'd bring his guests to see it. He was very proud of this thing, and it didn't have a song, but it had a lot of music in it because all this thing would come alive, and then they would sing, Let's All sing like the Birdies Sing and the Hawaiian War Chant and all these delightful classic songs. And people would say to him, “Walt, what the devil is this? What's this all about? What is it? What is it?” And so one day, as again as staff writers, we were called down to this meeting, where we saw this experience for the first time, and the same thing came out of mouth. “Walt, what the hell is this?” And he looked right at us and said, “You're going to write a song is going to explain it!” Oh, oh, that's why we're here, I see. [laughs] Okay. And so we wrote the song called In the Tiki Tiki Tiki Room, which was a calypso which tells the story of who they are and what they are and why they're singing. All the birds sing words. And the flowers croon in the tiki tiki tiki room.

It was just a cute little statement, but all of a sudden you could understand what it was and it was a magical place. And so Walt got the idea, hey, the Sherman brothers are pretty good for this. And then we started writing Carousel of Progress, and we did Small World, all in that short period of about a year. We had done a number of things, and over the years we've done at least 15 songs for the parks and the rides and the things.

So as staff writers on the lot in the ‘60s, then, what was a typical day like? How many different projects were you working on?

Oh, you know, you could actually be assigned to do several things. And always on the back burner was a major project like Poppins. For two years we were working on that while we were doing all these other pictures and all these other projects. We'd have maybe 5 or 6 things going at the same time, but we didn't, you know, just apportion our hours. We just wrote what was the deadline we're going to have a meeting on Sword in the Stone, we're going to have a meeting on Jungle Book. So you better get this sequence written. So we would do it sequence at a time, and we come up with, I Wanna Be Like You for the ape, for example. We'd have that for a project in mind, or we'd have, the Colonel Hathi's March where they wanted to have a character number for the elephants, and so we'd have a meeting on it, and then five months later we do another one. It was just, constantly being involved, and we were involved in many things at the same time. But it didn't always happen simultaneously.

You know, until I saw a documentary, about your life and your brother Robert's, The Boys, that y'all's sons had produced… I had no idea that as brothers, that you didn't always get along. And I want to know if those personal differences ever affected your working relationship.

No. The fact of the matter is that that Bob and I didn't really have any angry animosity, it's just that we went our separate ways for lots of personal reasons, and we just said, let's keep the work separate. And so it was sacrosanct. We'd walk into the studio, we'd walk into our offices (years later when we were working independently), and work came first. We didn't get into the personalities because there's always problems with personalities. So we just kept that out of the room and we would just be concerned with this is a stuffed teddy bear who was stuck in a hole or something. We didn't we didn't worry about ourselves. And it was very clever to do that because, when we first began, I mean, you saw the thing, our dad put us together. Our dad said, you know, together you'll be strong. If you separate and start figuring out who's going to do what and who did what and why did you do this? You're going to have battles and you're going to never succeed. You have to think about the fact that your success will hold you together. And that's exactly what happened. We were very successful. And so that held us together. And that was like an understanding. We said, let's not get anything in the way of our work, our character, what we do as writers. And so our personality and our personal bits are private. Frankly, my son and my nephew who did that... I said, I don't want to get into our personal stuff. It's nobody's business. And, we kept it private. We always did. So, the fact that they said was that. But that was the amazing part about it because we did overcome that. So I said, well, you guys are making your picture, so go ahead and make your picture. But basically, I don't think it was necessary to tell all that, but it never would have been made if they didn't have a hook. And you're a writer, you know what it is, you have to have that little hook to grab people, to make them-- that headline, that, that opening sentence, to grab hold of their interest. And they had this thing about the two brothers who really went separate ways. But we always worked together well.

The last Disney project you and Robert officially worked on, I guess, was The Tigger Movie. Is that correct?

Yeah, I think so.

Would you like to do any more with him?

Well, you know, if it came up. Bob lives in London now and he's off in his own world. He paints and he does his own thing, and I'm happy, I'm doing my own thing, independently. So I'm happy. I just did a picture a couple of years ago called Iron Man 2. I wrote a special song for it, and it was Make Way for Tomorrow Today. And I do a lot of instrumentals. I created a lot of instrumental music that's been published. So I'm very pleased with what I'm doing. And Bob's happy with how he's doing. And we're we have our career, which is, we're both proud of. So, you know...

I did like that, piano work that you play early on in the documentary in The Boys as well. The solo piano...

Oh, yeah. Well, there's about six of my pieces in there where I play piano. Actually, my son Greg is the one that said, “Hey Dad, can you record some of these things? I think they're great. I could use them and background fillers and stuff like that behind some of the sequences,” and so, sure! And that one that I play in person in the very beginning is, it was just an Improvisation we had been talking about the years gone by and, and what we had been doing, and I just got nostalgic and I came up with his piece and he said, great. So that was one of the pieces that this record producer fell in love with, and he had collected 15 of my pieces that I had written, and I recorded them. And, it's out on an album called Forgotten Dreams. It's the things that I've written over the years that I never did anything with.

What do you think of the, for example, Mary Poppins, some of the interpretations that have been done of the songs over the years. What are some of your favorites? I know that, I'm a big jazz nut, and so I really wigged out and loved hearing John Coltrane do Chim Chim Cher-ee, for example.

Oh, did you ever did you ever hear the entire album that Duke Ellington did with... oh my God, it's fantastic. It's on Reprise Records, and I think it's out on CD. It's an incredible jazz interpretation. Every number in Poppins, they are just wonderful. I think Count Basie did an entire album on The Happiest Millionaire. I'm trying to think we got a lot of people that did jazz versions of my music. The Coltrane is fantastic because everything he plays is great! First of all, it's very flattering to have these greats, interpret your music. I mean, that's number one. And number two is it's also fascinating to hear how they were inspired to play with it. Because it's a theme and variations, really. They take your music and then they interpret it in their own language. And it's amazing. I've been very lucky to get a rather wonderful array of jazz artists who've done our stuff.

Do you still play any of the songs from Mary Poppins for yourself or to remember Walt Disney?

Oh, sure! I do a lot of fundraisers. I play them all the time for people. They love to hear it! In my croaky voice I sing them and they love it, you know? So I'm happy to do it. I do a fundraiser now and again for, you know, for AIDS and things like that. And it's a nice thing to be able to play them. And people like to hear the original, the version done by the writers, you know. So that's kind of fun. And I've always been the interpreter of our songs. I was always the musical one who played. So, you know, that was it.

Oh, man. Well, this that's a great place to, I guess in the official part of the interview. So thank you so much, Richard Sherman. I really appreciate it.

Thank you! You sound like a very nice young man. I hope I'll meet you one day.

#disney music #disney #Richard Sherman #mary poppins #the jungle book #Youtube

15 notes · View notes