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'Tis the Season for Charlie Brown

Enduring appeal of Peanuts special is in the music

by: Gil Kaufman | from: Concord Music | December 8, 2011

The return of A Charlie Brown Christmas on TV, DVD and CD every November is as regular as Black Friday sales and multi-colored lighting displays. Pretty ironic, considering that the show is all about the beloved cartoon character's dismay over the commercialization of the holidays.

Listen to Charlie Brown music on the Holiday Music Channel on AARP Internet Radio.

More than 45 years after it first aired, Peanuts creator Charles Schulz's widow agrees that the 1965 Emmy and Peabody Award-winning holiday special just wouldn't be as endearing and enduring without the iconic, toe-tapping jazz score by Vince Guaraldi.

"I think it's hand-in-glove," Jeannie Schulz says of the seamless interplay between Guaraldi's music and Schulz's characters. In fact, anytime the Schulzes walked into a restaurant or a party, the band would start playing "Linus and Lucy" — the bouncing, upbeat piano tune that would become the indelible soundtrack to the Peanuts TV canon.

Jeannie Schulz didn't marry the man friends called "Sparky" until eight years after the Christmas special hit the air, but once they were a couple, she quickly realized how integral the music was to the show. "You can imagine how difficult it is now to try to find something that speaks about the cast of characters the way that did," she says from her home in Santa Rosa, Calif. "It's almost a complete mystery to me how [Guaraldi] could have come up with that music ... it's a small piece of magic."

But the magic almost didn't happen.

"I was doing a documentary in 1963 on Charles Schulz and halfway through I was thinking about the music we should use," says Lee Mendelson, the Emmy-winning executive producer of more than 40 Peanuts specials. "We reached out to Dave Brubeck, but he wasn't available. And he suggested Cal Tjader. They both mentioned a Vince Guaraldi, who I didn't know."

Mendelson soon heard Guaraldi's Grammy-winning "Cast Your Fate to the Wind" while driving across the Golden Gate Bridge and set up a meeting with the pianist to discuss the project. "Two weeks later, he [Guaraldi] called me and said, 'I have to play something for you before I forget it.'"

The song was "Linus and Lucy," of course. "That first time I heard it I thought, 'This is absolutely perfect for the documentary,'" says Mendelson. "Then I had a second odd sensation and I remember thinking: 'This music will somehow affect my life.' It was something that was more important than a song for the show." The documentary never happened, but it morphed into A Charlie Brown Christmas."

Guaraldi came up with most of the music for A Charlie Brown Christmas very quickly, which led to collaborations on 16 more shows and a movie before the pianist's untimely death at age 47 in 1976. But the key, Mendelson says, was the then-unique combination of jazz and the beloved comic strip characters that gave the cartoons their timeless quality. The improvisational quality of Guaraldi's jazz chops gave Mendelson and the creative team a freedom they didn't have in traditional cartoons, which often relied on well-known classical music or innocuous background soundtracks.

"It had to appeal to adults because adults know jazz, but the way he played and the way he wrote it was very kid-like, youthful," says Mendelson about Guaraldi's whimsical score, which is like an unseen Peanuts character in the shows. "The music has its own personality and it may be the most important character of all, because the music made it different from all the other cartoons on TV."

As for what Guaraldi captured in his music that continues to fascinate and amuse audiences more than four decades later, Mendelson thinks it comes down to the way the musician tapped into the complex spirit of lovable sad sack Charlie Brown.

"Although Charlie Brown is often beaten down and negative, he always gets up again and survives ... the reason he's so enduring is that we all go through struggles in life and people admire in his character that he keeps fighting," says Mendelson. "The music emphasized that survival mode or that positive mode to keep trying."

"The reason for the success of the show was the brilliance of Charles Schulz," he says. "But I think the music put it over the top. Without that music we would have maybe only done one show. Charles agreed with that."

The proof is in the Christmas pudding. A Charlie Brown Christmas has re-run on TV every holiday season for the last 45 years. And now may be just the right time to help your grandchildren discover it for the first time.