Richard Sherman, Songwriter of Many Spoonfuls of Sugar, Dies at 95
He and his brother, Robert, teamed up to write the songs for “Mary Poppins” and other Disney classics. They also gave the world “It’s a Small World (After All).”
Richard M. Sherman, the younger brother in a songwriting team that won two Oscars and two Grammys, brought Disney movies to musical life and gave the world numbers like “A Spoonful of Sugar,” “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” and the ubiquitous, multiply translated “It’s a Small World (After All),” died on Saturday in Los Angeles. He was 95.
The death, in a hospital, was announced by the Walt Disney Company.
The careers of the Shermans — Richard and Robert — were inextricably linked with Walt Disney. Their Academy Awards were for “Chim Chim Cher-ee,” a chimney sweep’s alternately cheerful and plaintive anthem from “Mary Poppins” (1964), and for the film’s score. Their Grammy Awards were for “Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too,” shared in 1975 for best recording for children, and the “Mary Poppins” score.
“It’s a Small World” was written for the Disney theme-park ride of the same name. The song plays as guests in boats pass among 240 dolls of many nations with identical faces — tiny can-can and folk dancers, mermaids and mariachi bands — plus Big Ben, the Taj Mahal and grinning farm animals.
“People want to kiss us or kill us,” Richard Sherman said in a 2011 video interview about the song, which he said was “the biggest hit of the World’s Fair,” where it was introduced in 1964.
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The Shermans brought a musical-theater sensibility to movie songwriting. The question was never which came first, the music or the words; what came first was the idea.
The framework of “Mary Poppins” did not exist until the Shermans got their hands on P.L. Travers’s beloved books about a magical nanny, a series of adventures in 1930s London with no discernible conflict or resolution. In the movie, the problem is the children’s behavior, brought on by a neglectful father. It also seemed like bad taste to employ live-in servants during hard economic times, so they moved the Banks family to the Edwardian era.
The making of “Mary Poppins” was dramatized in the 2013 movie “Saving Mr. Banks,” which starred Emma Thompson as P.L. Travers and Tom Hanks as Walt Disney. “The script is ghastly,” Travers says early in the film. Although the movie’s version of Travers never learns to love the dancing cartoons, she becomes quite taken with the Shermans (Jason Schwartzman as Richard, B.J. Novak as Robert) and their songs. “Those Sherman boys,” she tells Disney — “they have quite turned my head.”
After Mr. Disney’s death in 1966, the Shermans wrote for others.
“Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” (1968), a fantasy film based on a children’s book by Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, starred Dick Van Dyke as an early-20th-century inventor and was produced by Albert R. Broccoli, who also produced the Bond films. The Shermans’ memorable score included a lullaby, “Hushabye Mountain”; a novelty number, “Chu-Chi Face”; and the title song, a tribute to a car (“our fine four-fendered friend”).
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“Snoopy, Come Home!” (1972), a feature film featuring Charlie Brown and the Peanuts gang, was “enhanced by some really nice tunes,” The Times’s critic Howard Thompson wrote. They included “No Dogs Allowed,” “Best of Buddies” and, with the Shermans up to their old word-inventing tricks, “Fundamental-Friend-Dependability.”
“Charlotte’s Web” (1973), the animated film based on E.B. White’s tale of a likable pig and a highly literate spider, was a Hanna Barbera and Paramount production. The songs included “Mother Earth and Father Time” and “Chin Up,” both sung by Debbie Reynolds.
Back at Disney, the Shermans wrote the songs for two animated features, “The Jungle Book” (1967) and “The Aristocats” (1970), and for the largely live-action “Bedknobs and Broomsticks” (1971), starring Angela Lansbury.
Richard Morton Sherman was born on June 12, 1928, in Manhattan, the younger son of Al Sherman, a Jewish immigrant from Russia who became a Tin Pan Alley songwriter, and Rosa (Dancis) Sherman, an actress.
When Richard was 9, the family moved to Southern California. He graduated from Beverly Hills High School, where he studied piano, flute and piccolo, and then from Bard College in upstate New York, where he was a music major.
In 1951, Richard and Robert’s father bet them that they couldn’t write and sell a song. Accepting the challenge, they wrote “Gold Can Buy Anything (but Love),” which was recorded by the cowboy star Gene Autry.
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In 1960, their “You’re 16 (You’re Beautiful, and You’re Mine),” recorded by Johnny Burnette, became a Top 10 hit. (Attitudes toward the lyrics later changed when listeners no longer automatically imagined a 17-year-old boy singing to a peer.)
A year earlier, the brothers had their first big hit when Annette Funicello, who had been a Mouseketeer on Disney’s “The Mickey Mouse Club,” recorded “Tall Paul” (1959), which reached No. 7 on the Billboard singles chart. Their work for Ms. Funicello led to a meeting with Walt Disney himself, and that day he asked them to write a song for the movie that would become “The Parent Trap” (1961).
They delivered: “Let’s Get Together” sung by Hayley Mills in the dual role of spunky adolescent twins, was their third Top 10 hit. Disney soon put the brothers under contract.
In their first decade with the studio, the Sherman brothers wrote music for almost a dozen features, including “The Sword in the Stone” (1963), an animated tale of Merlin and King Arthur; an Oscar-winning short cartoon, “Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day” (1968); and the television series “The Magical World of Disney.”
They also wrote the screenplays for four live-action Disney films, including “Tom Sawyer” (1973) and “The Slipper and the Rose” (1976), a musical version of the Cinderella story.
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The Sherman brothers made their Broadway debut in 1974 with “Over Here!,” a musical pastiche of World War II nostalgia (“Buy a Victory Bond,” “Where Did the Good Times Go?”) starring Patty and Maxene Andrews, two of the original Andrews Sisters. Clive Barnes, reviewing it in The Times, called it “preposterously bad, but also preposterously engaging and, in its way, devilish clever.”
The show was a box-office success but closed after a 10-month run. Some said the problem was a salary dispute.
The Shermans had theater hits on both sides of the Atlantic. The stage version of “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” opened in London in 2002 and ran for three years. “The great joy of the show,” a review in The Guardian said, “is the way it returns the Sherman brothers’ excellent tunes to their theatrical origins.”
The Shermans had written new songs for the show. Ben Brantley, writing in The Times when it opened in New York in 2005, did not care for them. The numbers, he wrote, were “adhesively rhythmic, repetitive and chipper, not unlike what you might hear in singalong hour in a pre-K class.” “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” closed eight months later.
Then came the stage version of “Mary Poppins.”
“Joyous, spectacular and heart-tugging,” said The Independent in London, where the show ran from 2004 to 2008. “Handsome, homily-packed and rather tedious,” Mr. Brantley wrote in The Times when the show opened in New York.
Mr. Brantley did, however, admire the elegant stage set: “A spoonful of spectacle,” he observed, “helps the medicine go down.” Audiences were fine with that, and the show, which opened in 2006, ran until 2013.
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But all was not harmonious with the Sherman brothers. Over the years, sibling rivalry developed into serious tensions.
Some suggested that the men’s military experiences were a factor. In 1945, Robert Sherman was one of the first American soldiers to enter Dachau, the brutal Nazi death camp. A few years later, Richard Sherman served stateside, leading the Army’s glee club and orchestra.
“Bob and I are two and a half years and about five eons apart,” Richard Sherman said in “The Boys: The Sherman Brothers’ Story,” a 2009 documentary about their careers.
They presented a united front in interviews, but at screenings they sat with their families on opposite sides of the theater. They never saw each other socially.
In 1948, Mr. Sherman married Corinne Newman. They had a daughter and divorced in 1956. He married Elizabeth Gluck in 1957; they had two children.
Information on survivors was not immediately available.
Robert Sherman died in 2012.
Richard Sherman’s later work included songs for the film “Christopher Robin” (2018), a combination of live action and animation starring Ewan McGregor as the grown-up human protagonist of the Winnie-the-Pooh books. They were sung by the Pooh characters and by Mr. Sherman himself, who was the piano player on the beach in the end credits.
That same year, a soundstage at Disney Studios was renamed the Sherman Brothers Stage.
“I always wanted to be a songwriter,” he said in a 2014 video interview, recalling his early days. “It was a calling for me.”
