The Associated Press is reporting that Robert Sherman, one half of the legendary Sherman Brothers, passed away Monday in his home in London.
The Sherman Brothers were “unknown heroes” to me as a child. I knew their songs by heart, sang them relentlessly, and wore new grooves in my Disney LPs, listening to their music over and over again. But I didn’t know who they were until much later. They wrote nearly two hundred songs for Disney, including music for Mary Poppins (for which they won two Academy Awards for Best Score and Best Song for “Chim Chim Cher-ee”), The Sword and the Stone, The Parent Trap, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, The Jungle Book and The Aristocrats. They also earned twenty-three Gold and Platinum albums and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Their music, including their vast collection of Disney classics as well as their pop songs (you’re welcome Annette Funicello) and non-Disney fantasmagorical numbers like those in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, kept me entertained and helped instill a life-long love of showtunes which, no doubt, led me to my career working with Broadway shows. I owe a tremendous thank you to both the Sherman Brothers.
I need to get hold of the documentary The Boys, which the Walt Disney Studios call “an intimate journey through the lives of Robert and Richard Sherman, the astoundingly prolific Academy Award-winning songwriting team.” It must be a glorious Valentine to the two men who crafted so much of my love for musicals.
VIDEO: Maybe their most famous work, “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” took me weeks to learn but I’ve never forgotten a single word from it.
Tommy Karr 