I found the article a bit short, so took my encyclopedia of stage and film musicals to refresh my memory. I didn't realise he wrote so many songs. What an impressive career
Okay, your mum is very personal to you, like mine is to me and would be very sad day for both of us, when they move on. I would be sad for you if your mum did move on to new pastures as I know you well through this board as it is personal to you. We only knew Robert Sherman through the work he did and not on a personal level of family or friendship and he did go on to the age of 86 and was very wealthy, which enabled him to lead a very full and I hope a happy life.
When I think it is sad when someone dies, is when they have died prematurely, before their time, e.g. Gary Coleman, Steve Jobs, Heath Ledger, Freddie Mercury, Michael Jackson and David Carroll, or anyone elso who has died young. But when someone reaches a certain age, it ceases to be sad and there life then becomes a cause of celebration.
But if what I said came across as callous I whole heartly apologise.
Songwriter Robert Sherman, who composed classic Disney tunes including 'It’s a Small World' and 'Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious', died in London yesterday at the age of 86.
Robert Bernard Sherman, who was born in New York on 19 December 1925, won two Oscars, a Grammy and was honoured with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1976.
He co-wrote for most of his life with brother Richard, 83, who were both graduates of Bard College in New York. They were the sons of Russian-Jewish immigrants and their father, Al, was a Tin Pan Alley songwriter who wrote hits for Tommy Dorsey, Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong. Their grandfather had been a court musician to Emperor Franz Joseph.
The Sherman Brothers were challenged to write songs by their father, who told them: "Look at you two college graduates. I'll bet you can't write a song that kids would be willing to spend their lunch money on." They took up the gauntlet and had a first top 10 hit in 1958 with Tall Paul (He's My All). Robert later joked: "If it weren't for our father's challenge, we would have had a great big hole in the ground!" After forming the Wonderland Music Company, they took a stream of commissions to write for Disney and other film companies and among their famous compositions, from more than 200 in all, are 'Chim Chim Cher-ee', which won an Oscar, 'Feed The Birds', and 'Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious'.
They wrote major scores for the films 'Mary Poppins', 'The Sword In The Stone', 'The Jungle Book', 'Chitty Chitty Bang Bang', 'The Aristocrats', 'Bednobs and Broomsticks', 'Charlotte's Web', 'The Slipper And The Rose', 'Winnie The Pooh And A Day For Eeyore' and 'Little Nemo'. The brothers also co-wrote the music for Disney Parks.
The brothers won two Oscars and were nominated a further seven times.
President George Bush presented them with the National Medal Of Arts in 2008.
Their autobiography, called Walt's Time: From Before To Beyond was published in 1998.
Robert Sherman's son Jeff - along with cousin Gregory - produced a documentary film about the father/uncle and their unfortunate estrangement in later life. Robert was once asked the secret of his songwriting and replied simply: "Your sensitivity is based on your experiences. When you're writing a song, your sensitivity and your experiences dictate how you think and how you write."
His son Jeff posted a note on Facebook last night saying: "Hello to family and friends, I have very sad news to convey. My Dad, Robert B. Sherman, passed away tonight in London. He went peacefully after months of truly valiantly fending off death. He loved life and his dear heart finally slowed to a stop when he could fight no more. He wanted to bring happiness to the world and, unquestionably, he succeeded. His love and his prayers, his philosophy and his poetry will live on forever. Forever his songs and his genius will bring hope, joy and love to this small, small world."
Fortuitously in tonight's Evening Standard which I read on the way home from work, the article pertains to my last post and is not on the online edition as yet. I bring it up as it is theatre related and relates to my last post poignantly, but I wouldn't want to bring this up on a separate thread.
The article is a interview with the mum of Charlotte Leadbarrow, the young girl who performed in Billy Elliot and who was sadly killed by a bus at the age of 12. This for me and I am sure for everyone also on here really pulls at my heart strings and find this so very sad.
I will post a link if or when one comes available.
Robert Sherman obituary Film songwriter known for Mary Poppins and The Jungle Book by Michael Freedland
The Guardian
Robert B Sherman, who has died aged 86, was part of one of the most unusual songwriting teams of all time. He and his younger brother Richard may not be as well known as other pairs of composers and lyricists, but they will for ever be remembered as the writers of Mary Poppins, The Jungle Book and a swath of other productions from Walt Disney Studios.
Their score for Mary Poppins (1964), the movie that introduced Julie Andrews to filmgoers, secured them a place in popular musical history and made them multimillionaires. Featuring songs including Jolly Holiday, Let's Go Fly a Kite and Feed the Birds, it won them two Oscars. It also included the classic A Spoonful of Sugar and the song with the one-word title that they used when they accepted the Academy awards: "All we can say is 'Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious'."
The Shermans were the sons of a Tin Pan Alley songwriter, Al Sherman, who, although he had written for Broadway shows including the Ziegfeld Follies, had found it difficult to make a living. When Robert was born, Al's biggest problem, he would say, was finding the money to pay his doctor's bill, but as he was contemplating the problem, he opened an envelope containing a large royalty cheque for the song Save Your Sorrow.
The two brothers were born in New York, but the family moved to Beverly Hills in 1937, and the boys attended the Beverly Hills high school. There, Robert began writing and producing radio programmes that were highly acclaimed by broadcasting professionals. At 16, he wrote a stage play, Armistice and Dedication Day, which generated thousands of dollars for war bonds. The US war department awarded him a special citation in gratitude.
He joined the army in 1943, at the age of 17. Two years later, he led a squad of men into the Dachau concentration camp, the first Americans to stumble on the horrors there, only hours after the Nazis had fled. During war service, in April 1945, he was shot in the knee, as a result of which he walked with a stick for the rest of his life. He spent much of his service in Britain, where he was stationed in Bournemouth and Taunton. It was this experience, he would say, that got him interested in British popular culture.
After the war, he attended Bard College in upstate New York, where he studied English literature and painting, wrote two novels and graduated in 1949.
The two brothers always worked as a team, sharing between them the job of writing both music and lyrics. Their first hit was the rock'n'roll single Tall Paul, sung by Annette Funicello, in 1959. Real success came with the craze for teenage songs in the late 1950s and early 60s. Their number You're Sixteen was a huge hit in 1960 for one of the short-lived idols of the time, Johnny Burnette. The same year they were taken on by Walt Disney as staff songwriters.
The first films they worked on were "live action" movies (as Disney films without cartoon characters were then called) including The Parent Trap (1961), In Search of the Castaways (1962), Summer Magic (1963) and The Sword and the Stone (1963). They also wrote It's a Small World After All, for the 1964 New York world's fair, which became the Disney "national anthem" and is now played regularly at Disney theme parks.
The Shermans were the obvious choice for scoring Mary Poppins. The film was to be acclaimed as "the best live action film in Disney's history" – although it did include some animation. The music was its best publicity vehicle. The soundtrack album reached number one in the US and stayed in the charts on both sides of the Atlantic for 18 months. The brothers won Oscars for best original soundtrack and best song, for Chim Chim Cher-ee, with the film winning three other awards, including Andrews for best actress.
In 1965, Robert and Richard were recruited to work on The Jungle Book (1967), Disney's animation inspired by the Rudyard Kipling stories. They replaced the original songwriter, Terry Gilkyson, whose songs Walt Disney considered too close in mood to the dark tone of Kipling's work. The Shermans produced seven new songs, written as "character numbers" to set each creature's place in the story, including Trust in Me (for Kaa, the serpent), That's What Friends Are For (sung by the moptop barbershop vultures), and I Wan'na Be Like You (for King Louie, the orangutan). Disney retained Gilkyson's The Bare Necessities, which was nominated for an Oscar. The Jungle Book was the last film produced by Walt Disney, who died before its release.
The Shermans stayed on with the studio for a few other projects, including Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971) which, like Mary Poppins, combined live action with animation, and The Aristocats (1970). Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (196 was their first non-Disney film and in 2002 also became a long-running stage show at the London Palladium, for which the brothers wrote several new songs. The film, for the James Bond producer Albert R Broccoli, won the pair their third Oscar nomination. There would be six more.
They also provided scores for Charlotte's Web (1973), Tom Sawyer (1973), The Slipper and the Rose (1976) and The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977), among others. In 1974, they wrote the Broadway hit Over Here!, a show about troop entertaining, using the music styles of the 1940s. It ran for a year, and starred the then two surviving Andrews Sisters, Patty and Maxene. They returned to Disney in 2000 after 28 years to score The Tigger Movie.
Sherman, who lived in London from 2002, married his childhood sweetheart Joyce Sasner in 1953. She died in 2001. He is survived by his four children.
Robert Bernard Sherman, songwriter, born 19 December 1925; died 5 March 2012
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Robert Sherman
The Daily Telegraph 6 Mar 2012
Robert Sherman, who has died aged 86, co-wrote, with his brother Richard, many of Walt Disney studios’ most unforgettable songs, from I Wanna Be Like You in The Jungle Book to A Spoonful of Sugar and the rest of the Mary Poppins score. Robert Sherman
During their tenure at Disney, the Shermans wrote some 150 songs featured in 27 films, including Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971) and The Aristocats (1970). They also wrote the music to non-Disney films such as Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (196; The Magic of Lassie (197; Tom Sawyer (1973); The Slipper and the Rose (1976); and Charlotte’s Web (1973). Their nostalgic Second World War musical Over Here!, starring two of the Andrews Sisters, premiered on Broadway in 1974 to enthusiastic reviews.
The Shermans were called in at the last minute to work on The Jungle Book (1967) after Walt Disney scrapped most of Terry Gilkyson’s original songs, other than The Bare Necessities. He told the brothers to do a complete rewrite and to make the music “fun and upbeat”. They came up with a barbershop quartet of vultures with Liverpool accents, made the terrifying King of the Apes a “king of the swingers”, and included a memorable scat “conversation” between the King of the Apes (Louis Prima) and Baloo the Bear (Phil Harris).
It was Mary Poppins (1964), though, which established their reputation. Robert Sherman recalled the day when Disney called them into his office to discuss an idea he had had: “You guys know what a nanny is?” he asked them. “We said, 'A goat!’” Disney asked them to read PL Travers’s book and to tell him what they thought. “One of the first things we noticed was that it was set in the Depression between the two World Wars,” Sherman recalled. “If we were going to make this a musical, we wanted to go back to around 1910 when the world wasn’t quite so unglued and people still believed anything could happen. That was a better setting for a story about a flying nanny.”
Taking their inspiration from the English music hall, the Sherman brothers set to work composing Chim Chim Cher-ee; A Spoonful of Sugar; Let’s Go Fly a Kite; Supercali-fragilisticexpialidocious and other songs, including Disney’s own favourite, Feed the Birds. While the Shermans won Oscars for best song and best score in 1965, their irrepressibly upbeat approach was said to have infuriated the book’s author who, according to The New Yorker, wept in frustration at the film’s premiere. When Cameron Mackintosh subsequently persuaded her to allow the book to be made into a stage musical, she insisted that no Americans be part of the creative team.
The brothers always put on a united front during interviews, claiming theirs was a “constant collaboration”. Yet according to a documentary made by two of their sons, The Boys: The Sherman Brothers’ Story (2009), the two men got on so badly that, even as they composed jolly music for Disney, they would quarrel and throw typewriters at one another. Indeed, their relationship deteriorated to the point where their families would sit on opposite sides of the theatre during premieres.
The son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Robert Bernard Sherman was born in New York City on December 19 1925; his brother Richard arrived in 1928. Their father, Al Sherman, was a Tin Pan Alley songwriter who wrote hits for Tommy Dorsey, Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong. Their grandfather had been a court musician to Emperor Franz Joseph. The brothers were brought up in Beverly Hills.
Al Sherman encouraged his sons to be “always together, always one”; but the two-and-a-half year age gap and Robert’s harrowing experiences during the Second World War apparently created a temperamental gulf between them that would never be bridged.
As an 18-year old soldier in the US Army, Robert was part of the first squadron to enter the Dachau concentration camp, and he later lost a kneecap to a Nazi bullet; his younger brother, meanwhile, would serve in a non-combat role in Korea. As Robert put it, he “never killed anybody”.
The brothers never intended to collaborate. After the war, as Robert recalled: “I was trying to write the great American novel, and Dick was trying to write the great American symphony.” In 1950, however, their father challenged them to write a popular song. The result, Gold Can Buy Anything (But Love), was recorded by Gene Autry in 1951. Between films, the Shermans continued to write pop songs, including You’re Sixteen (1959), which was recorded by Johnny Burnette and later by Ringo Starr. It became their biggest pop hit.
These compositions brought them to Disney’s attention, and he put them to work on The Parent Trap (1961) . Soon the Shermans were the only songwriters Disney had under contract.
Robert and Richard Sherman worked directly for Walt Disney until Disney’s death in 1966, after which they went freelance. As well as their Academy Awards, they had nine Oscar nominations and won two Grammys. They had 23 gold and platinum albums. In 2008 they received the American National Medal of Arts.
Robert Sherman married, in 1953, Joyce Sasner, with whom he had two daughters and two sons. After his wife’s death in 2001, he moved from Beverly Hills to London, which he had got to know and love while recuperating in hospital from his wartime injury.
Robert Sherman, born December 19 1925, died March 5 2012
Oh boy, but my heart's heavy. I listened to the soundtracks to all of these films as a kid over and over again. I'm one of the biggest Disney fanatics out here; when I heard he was gone, I actually cried. We've lost one of the greats of our time.