Good Ol’ Charles Schulz

The most famous music from “A Charlie Brown Christmas” was originally written for a different project

Snoopy in the birdbath

By Liz Fields, December 3, 2020, American Masters, PBS

Even if you’ve never watched the 1965 animated television special, “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” based on Charles Schulz’s beloved comic strip, “Peanuts,” chances are you’ve heard songs from the film’s soundtrack of the same name — likely in a department store, some Hollywood holiday rom-com or around a family dinner table — without even knowing it.

The album, which includes jazzy renditions of classic Christmas songs such as “Greensleeves,” “O’Tannenbaum,” and “What Child is This,” also features original songs written and performed by pianist Vince Guaraldi, including, “Christmas Time is Here,” and “Skating.” But one song, “Linus and Lucy,” which stands out in particular as an instant modern classic, was actually originally written for another project.

In 1963, Lee Mendelson, executive producer of “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” had just finished filming a documentary on Schulz and his “Peanuts” strip, and knew he needed to add music.

“I had always been a great fan of jazz,” Mendelson muses in his book, “A Charlie Brown Christmas: The Making of a Tradition.”  “And while driving back from [Schulz’s] over the Golden Gate Bridge I heard a song called, ‘Cast Your Fate to the Wind.'” Mendelson said it was like nothing he’d ever heard before. “It was jazz, but it was melodic and open and came like a breeze off the bay.”

That song turned out to be the Grammy-winning tune written by Guaraldi for the album, “Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus.” Mendelson immediately reached out to the fellow San Franciscan to help score parts of the documentary. After working on the score for a few weeks, Guaraldi phoned him up, “very excited,” said Mendelson.

“He said he wanted to play something he had just written,” Mendelson recalled. “I told him that I would prefer to come hear it at his studio rather than over the telephone, but he said he couldn’t wait, ‘I’ve got to play this for someone right now or I’ll explode!’ he said. I told him to go ahead, and what I heard over the next two minutes stunned me. It was perfect for the Peanuts characters! When he returned to the phone, I asked him what he was going to call it. He said, ‘Linus and Lucy.’ Little did we know that years later this piece would become a jazz standard throughout the world.”

As fate would have it, the documentary did not sell to a major network at the time, but it did catch the attention of an advertising agency, whose client, Coca-Cola, were looking to make a Christmas special. The agency asked Schulz and Mendelson to come up with something pronto. After pairing up with animator Bill Melendez, whom they’d worked with before, the trio got to planning. It was Schulz who decided that the score to “A Charlie Brown Special” should “mix some of that jazz music with traditional music,” recalled Mendelson, who immediately commissioned Guaraldi once more to re-work some of the tracks from the documentary as well as score new songs for the Christmas special.

Guaraldi, who used to call himself a “reformed boogie-woogie piano player,” was a “high-energy guy with a great sense of humor,” Melendez remembered of the jazz legend. “He was very contemporary and very improvisational, which gave ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas’ and the other shows a hip sound.”

Mendelson described Guaraldi’s music as “bright” and “childlike.”

“The same way Bill kept the animation simple, Vince kept the music simple. This was jazz that appealed to both kids and adults, that captured the spirit of the characters. The music helped make the shows, and the shows helped make the music,” he said.

Mendelson also recalled that Schulz wanted to create a scene especially to showcase Guaraldi’s “Linus and Lucy” theme, which would eventually become the famous dance segment in the Christmas special.

As production was wrapping up on the film, Guaraldi presented the team a beautiful instrumental song he had recorded with his trio (consisting of bassist Fred Marshall and drummer Jerry Granelli) to open the show with. But Mendelson remembers that everyone felt the song needed lyrics, so he stepped in. “Because we were running out of time, I wrote some lyrics in about fifteen minutes on the back of an envelope,” he said. “The song became ‘Christmas Time Is Here,’ which has become a holiday standard covered by dozens of recording artists. Who knew?”

When “A Charlie Brown Christmas” aired in December 1965, it subverted expectations in many ways, including by omitting the standard “laugh track” which was popular in television at the time, and also by featuring voices of real children to play Charlie Brown, Linus, Lucy and the rest of the gang. The children’s chorus who sang on the tracks, “Christmas Time is Here” and “Hark the Herald Angels Sings,” were also volunteers from a church choir in the Bay Area.

Because of these unique features and the show’s understated tone, CBS executives watched the 30-minute film and immediately assumed it would be a flop. Everyone, including the creators, were surprised when the special received a record 36 million viewers when it aired December 5, 1965, and then went on to win an Emmy and a Peabody. Today, the special is still broadcast every year to millions — and many believe the music was a huge part of the show’s popularity and lasting impact.

The soundtrack has since hit Quadruple Platinum (over four million copies sold) and has been added to the American National Recording Registry’s list of “culturally, historically, or aesthetically important” sound recordings. Over time, Guaraldi’s songs from the album have also been recorded by many artists including Dave Brubeck, Wynton Marsalis, George Winston and David Benoit, who credited “A Charlie Brown Christmas” for sparking his love of playing jazz piano.

“That was the first time that jazz piano has been used in animation, which helped make it a really groundbreaking show,” Benoit recalled in Mendelson’s book. “I agree with a lot of people who believe that a big part of the success of ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas’ was Vince’s music.”

Christmas Time Is Here for Charlie, Vince and Ralph

© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

Christmas time is here.

Both the preparations for this festive time of the year and the song with that title which the late pianist Vince Guaraldi wrote in celebration of it are once again ubiquitous.

Department stores, car radios, television commercials - one can’t go anywhere without hearing some or all of the twelve [12] tracks for the CBS television special “A Charlie Brown Christmas” that pianist Vince Guaraldi laid down on October 26, 1964 at Glendale, CA Whitney Studios with his reunited “classic trio” of Monty Budwig, bass [whom he’d worked with during a stint with Woody Herman’s band in the mid-1950’s] and drummer Colin Bailey.

The full details of how Vince’s role in the television special came about and what went into the development of his score for it can be found in Darren Bang’s masterful biography - Vince Guaraldi at the Piano.

Another perspective on the artistic value of what Vince achieved from the music he wrote for the television program can be gleaned from the following excerpts from the liner notes that respective Jazz columnist RJG wrote for the original Fantasy LP - A Charlie Brown Christmas: Vince Guaraldi Trio.

For those of you who may not be familiar with Ralph and his accomplishments, Ralph along with San Francisco Jazz radio DJ Jimmy Lyons, was the co-founder of the Monterey Jazz Festival which began in 1958.

A long-time Jazz columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle Ralph also covered Rock ‘n Roll for the paper when the “San Francisco Sound” first appeared in the 1960’s. He was the founding editor of Rolling Stone Magazine and authored books on both Jazz and Rock. His work was honored with three Deems Taylor Awards for excellence in music journalism, two Grammy nominations for liner notes and two Emmy nominations for his documentaries on Duke Ellington. He died in 1975. He was only 59-years old at the time of his death.

The note Jazz author and critic Ira Gitler said of Ralph: “... he was both avuncular and avant-garde. He was the younger brother of one of your parents who talked to you about things that they didn't, took you places they wouldn't, and brought you presents other than socks or underwear. I didn't have an uncle like that.”

RALPH J. GLEASON - “The hardest task an artist faces is not just to achieve self-expression; that almost comes by definition even if it's difficult to hone that self-expression into something good enough to be art.

It is another kind of thing altogether (and it strikes me as more difficult) to look at, hear, feel and experience somebody else's artistic expression and then make something of your own which shows empathy, which relates to the other but which still has your own individual artistic stamp.

This is what, is seems to me, Vince Guaraldi achieved with his scores for Charlie Brown. He took his inspiration from the creations of Charles Schultz and made music that reflects that inspiration, is empathetic with the image and is still solidly and unmistakably Vince Guaraldi.

It was natural for him to do this — he's been reading Peanuts for years, as who hasn't? — but he brought some very special talent along to the process.

Vince has big ears, a wide range of feeling and a poetically lyrical manner of playing and of writing jazz music. Off stage he's flip and funny, salty and serious and sometimes stubborn. At the piano, he's all music, all lyricism and all jazz.

In the Educational Television three-part film, "Anatomy of a Hit," Vince was shown as a sensitive introspective little man whose dreams became music. This is true. Ever since he was a student at San Francisco State College he has dreamed music and music has been his dream. In the years of apprenticeship he spent with Cal Tjader and Woody expressed only in their own playing. With Vince, the personal sound, the personal voice and the individual musical personality is expressed not only in his playing but in his composing as well.

All the characters in Peanuts are artists confronted with the illogical, blind and mechanistic world. It was natural that Vince Guaraldi's music should fit so well.

Incidentally, “The Hit” that’s referenced in the title of the 3-part film refers to Vince’s 1962 recording of Cast Your Fate to the Wind from the movie Black Orpheus. Vince was awarded a Grammy for this recording in 1963

It was this tune the producer Lee Mendelson heard on his car radio one day while crossing the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, CA that prompted him to hire Vince to write the music for the TV Special - A Charlie Brown Christmas.  The hiring would begin a long collaboration between Guaraldi and Mendelson that would see Guaraldi compose for numerous Peanuts television specials until his death in 1976.

On the off-handed chance that you haven’t heard the Guaraldi-Peanuts-Christmas music in a while, you can listen to the entire album on YouTube via this link [and skip the commercials rather quickly].

A Charlie Brown Christmas - The Vince Guaraldi Trio

© -  Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“The hardest task an artist faces is not just to achieve self-expression; that almost comes by definition even if it's difficult to hone that self-expression into something good enough to be art.

It is another kind of thing altogether (and it strikes me as more difficult) to look at, hear, feel and experience somebody else's artistic expression and then make something of your own which shows empathy, which relates to the other but which still has your own individual artistic stamp.

This is what, is seems to me, Vince Guaraldi achieved with his scores for Charlie Brown. He took his inspiration from the creations of Charles Schultz and made music that reflects that inspiration, is empathetic with the image and is still solidly and unmistakably Vince Guaraldi.

It was natural for him to do this—he's been reading Peanuts for years, as who hasn't?—but he brought some very special talent along to the process.

Vince has big ears, a wide range of feeling and a poetically lyrical manner of playing and of writing jazz music. Off stage he's flip and funny, salty and serious and sometimes stubborn. At the piano, he's all music, all lyricism and all jazz.

In the Educational Television three-part film, "Anatomy of a Hit," Vince was shown as a sensitive introspective little man whose dreams became music. This is true. Ever since he was a student at San Francisco State College he has dreamed music and music has been his dream. In the years of apprenticeship he spent with Cal Tjader and Woody Herman and with his own group (until he hit the big time with "Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus" and "Cast Your Fate to the Wind"), Vince has learned the hard lesson of how to transmit those dreams from his mind through his hands to the keyboard.

Jazz is a music of individualism. As such it is truly a music of people, not styles. Each person develops his own sound, his own voice, his own musical personality which, with some, is expressed only in their own playing. With Vince, the personal sound, the personal voice and the individual musical personality is expressed not only in his playing but in his composing as well.

All the characters in Peanuts are artists confronted with the illogical, blind and mechanistic world. It was natural that Vince Guaraldi's music should fit so well.”

• RALPH J. GLEASON