Disney A to G(#) — Part One
A Riverboat Mouse.
On November 18th, 1928, an animated short, the first to feature fully synchronized sound, premiered at the Colony Theater in New York City. The director of the short, Walter Elias Disney, had bet the proverbial farm on this film. It was an insane thing to do.
After having failed to sell the first Mickey Mouse short, Plane Crazy, and while deep in the work on a second, Walt saw the world change when Al Jolson sang on screen in The Jazz Singer (1927). Disney, with next to no money in the bank and no realistic idea of how to pull it off, decides that his team should immediately start working on an animated Mickey short with fully synchronized sound. The story of the making of this short is a well-trodden path: how a sheet and some filmic trickery allowed Walt and some of his team to perform a rough version of it, with sound, live in front of spouses and friends; how the first recording session, which the Brothers Disney could barely afford, was a complete failure and they had to take out large loans to finance a second shot at it; how Walt had made foolish deals with sound-film pioneer Pat Powers that would bind him financially for years; and how a simple bouncing ball system that Walt had devised saved the second recording session.
This is all well documented; so instead of rehashing these stories — stories that now feel like mythology — I’d like to spend time, here and in the rest of this series, by focusing on the music and musicians themselves. For our purposes, let’s circle around the fringes of the film, and later the theme park, production drama and focus instead on the songs and their players and composers; and, in doing so, finds some insight into how these influences changed the work of Walt Disney and how Walt Disney changed the way that music is used in art.
The Prelude — The 1920s and Before
Earlier in 1928, Buster Keaton co-directed and starred in a feature film, Steamboat Bill Jr. which was such a massive flop that Keaton was forced to move to a new studio and lost much of his creative control over his own films — one film later he would lose all of it. Keaton’s film was, very loosely, inspired by the lyrics to the song Steamboat Bill a sort of John Henry-esque play on a sailing story.
Four of the biggest musical hits that year were Anything You Say, I Can’t Give You Anything but Love, Me and the Man in the Moon and Singin’ in the Rain, all sung by a young man named Cliff “Ukulele Ike” Edwards.; he’s gonna come up a little later in this series, a lot.
In the early-1920s a young Walt Disney was so impressed by a silent film organist named Carl Stalling that he offered him a job. In 1928 Stalling left Kansas City to take him up on it and two of the most important men in the history of animation became a team, albeit briefly.
In 1916, a young and extremely talented composer and xylophonist named George Hamilton Green formed a band with his two brothers. We’ll get back to him in just a second.
That should be enough to get us going on this extended look at the history of music at the Walt Disney Company. Along the way, you’ll meet several of the most important and biggest-selling musical artists of the first half of the twentieth century. You’ll hear about a few tragedies, a lot of triumphs, and a musical lineage based on constant evolution.
This is Disney A to G(#). I hope you’ll sing along.
The First Movement — George Hamilton Green
George Hamilton Green was passionate about the xylophone. On his own and with his brothers, he was one of the biggest acts of the 20s. His compositions like Ragtime Robin, Cross Corners, Charleston Capers, Rainbow Ripples, Log Cabin Blues, and The Whistler are still played today; from jazz clubs to classical halls, Green is still respected. He also wrote one of the seminal xylophone instructional books and jazz legends Lionel Hampton and Red Norvo both are said to have taken his xylophone playing correspondence course.
In 1927 Green and a gentleman named Henry Shulter took an earlier novelty instrument and altered it in substantial ways to create the instrument now known as the vibraphone. Quickly adopted as a jazz instrument after Lionel Hampton began experimenting with it and a classical one when Ferde Grofé used it in his Grand Canyon Suite; the vibes have since become a fundamental piece of western instrumentation.
So, why are we talking so much about George Hamilton Green? Because he and his brothers were the band that made Steamboat Willie sing. And, to an extent, swing. For Steamboat Willie, they were the “effects men,” which meant that they played the drums, whistles, and, most importantly, xylophone. They are the musicians who took these two drippy songs played by an uninterested 19-piece orchestra and brought them to life.
Evidently thrilled with the partnership between himself and the Greens, Walt wrote his brother Roy:
These Green Bros. are familiar with what is necessary for recording. The trouble before was that the drummers were familiar with what would sound good from an orchestra pit and not familiar with how it would reproduce through the mike. There is a lot of difference…The Green Bros. have twenty thousand dollars worth of special built effects for recording. (They invented them themselves and hold the patents.) They are going to use them on this picture. They are experts at recording. Don’t do anything else. Have been doing this for about fifteen years. They should be good. They are also xylophone recording artists. All the Victor Records that have effects in the music have been done by them. — Letter from Walt Disney to Roy Disney and Ub Iwerks, September 23, 1928, Disney Animation Studio Archives
As has been described elsewhere, Walt Disney spent a lot of his career reassuring his brother Roy that everything was going to be alright while they were teetering on the brink of total financial collapse. That seems to be exactly what’s happening here with Walt, perhaps, exaggerating the truth of the situation; there is no record of the Green Brothers having patented anything having to do with special effects production and $20,000 worth of equipment seems like a stretch. Nonetheless, the Green Brothers certainly did pay off.
Here is Walt describing the actual recording session that produced the film as we hear it today:
Well, we finally recorded the picture this morning. Everything went great. It worked like clock works. The orchestra kept perfect synchronization throughout the entire picture. It didn’t get off one beat. This was a big help to the effect men and the result was they all hit on the dot. I am sure happy over the whole affair because it proves absolutely that it can be done. There were just a few effects that didn’t quite satisfy me, but as a whole I would say that it was damn near perfect.
We started rehearsing the orchestra at 10 a.m. and had all the stuff set by 11 a.m. (including the placing of the different instruments in front of the mikes which consumed most of the time). We started shooting a few minutes after 11 and made 2 different recordings of the film; both of them were very good. Then we had to completely change the orchestra around for the wax recording. We were all finished by 1:00. — Letter from Walt Disney to “Dear Gang,” September 30, 1928, Disney Animation Studio Archives
A few things of interest are happening here. Walt Disney is referring to The Green Brothers as “effects men” which is likely how they were sold to him by Pat Powers. Walt is also aware that they are successful Victor recording artists which he mentions elsewhere in his letter. It’s important to note that he sees nothing strange about hiring musicians to do effects in front of other musicians and to devise a method — remember the aforementioned bouncing ball — to treat those effects as music itself. What they are doing here is no mere foley. He is paying two bands, one classical and the other jazz, to play at the same time in synchronization with a medium that was, up until this point, deaf. It is hard to overstate the innovative and counterintuitive leap that is being taken here. It is important to remember that not only is Walt Disney not a musician, but he is also not that much of an animator, but he is stretching, out of both necessity and vision, to put these mediums together as an aesthetic whole.
He goes further with this:
These Green Bros. were good. But I contend that we can get just as good results with any good drummer if we write everything in the music and not let them catch them from the screen. In order to do this it is necessary for the effects to hit on the notes of the music and not in-between. We will have to work out the effect music just like any part in the music. — Letter from Walt Disney to Roy Disney and Ub Iwerks, October 6, 1928, Disney Animation Studio Archives.
His motivation here is financial — the three Green Brothers were paid more than the entire nineteen-piece orchestra had been for the film — but what is particularly interesting is that Walt Disney, through some trial, error, and financial desperation, has discovered that not only can all sound be treated as music, but that he can animate musically. (Very shortly he will begin working with a man that believes the same thing in reverse, that all music can be used as sound effects, but more on Carl Stalling in the next part.) He is so confident in his ability to produce an animation that adheres to a musical structure that he expects that his sound performers will be able to do it without seeing the screen! Walt is envisioning a rhythmic language that can be communicated across mediums — musical or visual, it is as a whole. We will see this interdependence deepen as this series goes on.
As for The Green Brothers, in spite of Walt being reticent to pay their fees, they also served as the effects men/musicians for the Mickey Mouse short The Opry House and the first Silly Symphony, The Skeleton Dance, both recorded in the same session according to Carl Stalling. Potentially they may have played for Plane Crazy and The Barn Dance, but this is less clearly documented. To consider their importance, particularly the importance of George Hamilton Green, it is worth considering how fundamental the instance of the xylophone in Steamboat Willie and The Skeleton Dance is. One would be hard-pressed to avoid these examples when describing the nature of music in animation. What we know, though, is that when Walt and his “gang” had originally mocked-up Willie for a trial run, that effect would’ve been played with a piece of percussion as they had nothing but a harmonica and rhythm devices. Imagine if the bull’s teeth sounded like a snare drum. Can you? It feels wrong, doesn’t it? Now extend that to The Skeleton Dance; what would it be like if those bones sounded like a cymbal instead of the melodious xylophone? The xylophone is fundamental.
We cannot know who picked the precise instrument or device to achieve each effect in Steamboat Willie, but it is hard to imagine that the introduction of the world’s most prominent xylophone player didn’t influence some of the decisions. Disney describes working with the Green Brothers on the arrangement, which implies some give and take, and, ultimately, we must wonder what the sound of animated films would be like today if George Hamilton Green and his brothers had not walked into that recording studio in 1928.
The Second Movement — Turkey on a Steamboat
Let’s talk about the two (and, almost, three) songs used to propel this short forward.
First, the title song, Steamboat Bill. It was written by vaudeville and minstrel performers, The Leighton Brothers (who also wrote the song Frankie and Johnny) and Ren Shields (who later wrote In the Good Ol’ Summertime). The song was a parody of the best-selling The Ballad of Casey Jones. The Leighton Brothers often also claimed credit for writing Casey, but it was actually by T. Lawrence Seibert and Eddie Newton. The authorship becomes even less straightforward, though, when we discover that Seibert and Newton may have based their Casey on a traditional folk song that had been popularized by the Leighton Brothers in their vaudeville/minstrel act. Confused yet?
Truth be told, there’s nothing particularly special about Steamboat Bill other than questions of its authorship and its durability in the early 1900s. It’s a pleasant enough piece of nostalgia but was probably chosen at the time due to its connection with the Buster Keaton film, public domain licensing status, and amiability towards the cartoon’s subject matter more than anything special about the song itself.
Mickey Mouse whistling the song, in a clip from this short, has been the production logo for Walt Disney Animation Studios since 2007 and the Disney company has tried to assert trademark status over it for some time, though it seems hard to imagine anyone bothering to challenge them over it.
The second, and far more interesting song in Steamboat Willie is that old chestnut, Turkey in the Straw. Even if you don’t know it from the film, my guess is that you know some variation of it. Its origins trace back to Ireland in the late 18th century where a song known as The Old Rose Tree is a likely antecedent. From there the tune takes off in a number of different directions finding itself landing in the 1820s as a popular, proto-bluegrass, country dance piece.
It is with this tune that the integration between the Green Brothers and the animation really takes off. The true joy of Steamboat Willie is the point at which Mickey, far more of a scamp than the corporate icon we know today, and Minnie conjure up this tune out of found objects: a goat, pans, a washboard, a trash can, a cat, a duck and — most famously — a bull’s teeth. It’s a sudden, surprising, explosion of music that doesn’t come until almost halfway through the short. The goat in the film swallows a fiddle as well as the song’s printed sheet music with such gusto that notes fly through the air and pepper the floor. It is undeniable, at this point, that Disney has fully embraced the concept of sound in film. Walt knows that he must move with confidence and in the film he’s not only adding music but also saturating the visuals with more evidence of the music than even the synched sound itself. The Jazz Singer seems tentative, even shy, compared to this.
Quite a bit of controversy exists about the roots of Turkey in the Straw once it lands in America. It holds a prominent position in the history of the minstrel show as an introductory number for a clearly racist stereotype. It also seems to have arisen in parallel versions with far more innocent corn pone novelty-comic lyrics. And, perhaps most popular by the time that Walt Disney was working on Steamboat Willie, it was a famous instrumental fiddle tune. Un-teasing which of these versions pre-dates or potentially influences the next is a subject of lively debate amongst folk music scholarship, but the idea that all the versions of the late-19th and early-20th centuries are variants developed in parallel from a common ancestor song, is broadly accepted.
There are many forums in which it is useful to break down and examine historical racism in music and I strongly encourage that exploration, but that is not my goal here. I do, however, want to trace the evolution of the music that is used in these pictures. It is extremely likely that Walt would have heard the racist variant of this song at some point or another, but the far more prevalent version, at least at the time at which he was working on Steamboat Willie, would’ve been the instrumental fiddle-based version. Like many of the decisions that he made about this film, it is most probable that the use of Turkey in the Straw was simply one of finance. It was public domain and thus he didn’t have to pay for it. It was simple and easy for musicians. It was popular.
All that said, the minstrel show version will return in a more troubling way later in this series as evidenced by its chorus which, to many Disney aficionados, might seem familiar:
O Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
O Zip a duden duden duden duden duden day.
O Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
We’ll be revisiting that chorus again when we reach the year 1946 in our discussion.
It is interesting to note that Disney revisits Turkey in the Straw a few times, most notably in The Band Concert. In Disney animation, the song is treated as something edgy, as if to signal a break from the normalcy of the situation. In Steamboat Willie, Mickey and Minnie play the song through various means in order to rebel against the duties assigned by the bully, Pete (pre-Pegleg). In The Band Concert, Donald uses the piece to disrupt Mickey’s more formal classical concert. In both cases, it is an act of rebellion. Later, in Warner Brothers cartoons, Carl Stalling will turn the meaning of the song 180 degrees to indicate a kind of country-hick stupidity in a character. Stalling’s interpretation will ultimately stick, but here, in 1928, Turkey in the Straw is the first shot in an artistic revolution.
There’s one more song we might want to talk about. Interestingly, the parrot, in the film, does not appear in Walt’s original script for the cartoon. Walt provided the voice for the parrot, and most texts refer to its final words: “Man Overboard!” However, the parrot taunts Mickey twice during the cartoon, with “Hope you don’t feel hurt, big boy!”
Mark Kausler tells Jim Korkis over at mouseplanet.com about doing some digging and discovering Ida Cox and her 1927 hit Worn Down Daddy.
In it, a floozy insults her beau for having lost his potency: ‘You ain’t young no more… your loving is weak… you’re just an old has-been… like a worn-out old joke…’ And after each volley of insults, the recurring tag line is a sarcastic ‘I hope you don’t feel hurt.’ In ‘Steamboat Willie,’ read ‘I hope you don’t feel hurt’ as shorthand for the insults that come before it in the song, and the parrot as a female (she calls Mickey ‘big boy’) — and then you can see why Mickey reacts to her not just with anger, but with offense (communicating insult to us and swelling his chest indignantly).” — Mark Kausler via Jim Korkus, https://www.mouseplanet.com/10157/Secrets_of_Steamboat_Willie
So that gives us a third song, with Walt, seemingly late in the process, squeezing an one more reference to a popular song, but not pushing it so much that he’d have to pay for it. Real soon in this history, when Carl Stalling gets involved, the songs will be packed so tight that it gets hard to tease them all out.
And there we have some of the music and musicians involved in taking this leap forward in animation. Songs with murky and mysterious histories; musicians developing a new vocabulary of filmic sound; Walt Disney changing the landscape of how the art he does, is done. He will continue to do this, to bet the proverbial farm on something that is new. It won’t always pay off — occasionally it will brink his company back to the brink of bankruptcy — but it will always be interesting.
Stay tuned for Part Two of Disney Music A to G(#) — Carl Stalling.
Exit Music
Steamboat Willie opened in 1929 in front of the main feature, Gang War which, incidentally, had a score by Alfred Sherman, father of the Sherman Brothers. We will be talking about them perhaps more than anybody else in this series.
The Grand Canyon Suite, the first classical piece written for George Hamilton Green’s invention, the vibraphone (now often called “vibes”), is the piece of music you hear when the Disneyland Railroad enters the Grand Canyon Diorama just past the Tomorrowland Station in Disneyland.
In Disney’s classic film Dumbo (1941), an anthropomorphised, childlike, steam engine train named Casey Jr. appears with his own theme song. This character was a direct reference to Casey Jones, the famous railroad engineer who had lost his life in a train collision in 1900 and who was the subject matter of The Ballad of Casey Jones out of which came Turkey in the Straw. For such a small role, it is surprising to note that Casey Jr. is the basis for three separate theme park attractions!
The Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco has a wonderful interactive exhibit where you can attempt to add musical effects in time with a screening of Steamboat Willie. It is sobering to experience how difficult it is, and we know that it’s possible; the Disney brothers didn’t even have that assurance.
In 1993 Warner Brothers' animation found its way back to Turkey in the Straw.
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Kelly McCubbin is a columnist for the Boardwalk Times
