An Interview with the Sherman Brothers
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Richard at the Marc Davis tribute sitting next
to Ward Kimball and Kathryn Beaumont, the voice
of Alice and Wendy from Peter Pan

Richard Sherman

Doobie Moseley: How did you and your brother come to become a songwriting team?

Richard Sherman: Actually Bob and I both went to college in New York state, Bard College, and Bob was an English major and I was a music major actually but I fell in love with the theater, musical theater, and I was very very involved in that. I started writing lyrics and music for shows in college and Bob was writing poetry and stories. When he got out of college he wanted to write the great American novel. That was his big interest and I was going to write the great American musical and we were rapidly digging the great American hole in the ground. Nothing was happening to either of us. We lived in a little tiny apartment above a cleaning store and our father was a very famous songwriter. His name was Al - not Alan - but Al Sherman, and Al Sherman wrote many great classic American hits like You’ve Got to be a Football Hero and Potatoes are Cheaper, Tomatoes are Cheaper for Eddie Cantor, and No, No a Thousand Times No, the great vaudeville hit, and he wrote many many big pop songs. One day he came to our little rooms were we were quartered and he said, "I bet you guys, with your college education, couldn’t knock out a simple popular song that some kid would give up his lunch money for." It was like a challenge. He threw the gauntlet down and so Bob and I said, "oh sure, we can write that." "I’m talking about a good idea" he said, "a good strong idea that has a catch phrase and something that people will listen to."

This is the early 50s and at that time Country Western Music was dominating the scene and so we decided to write a little Country Western song and so we came up with a song called Gold Can Buy Anything But Love and thought that was a clever idea. We played a lot of the songs to Dad and he would say they were corny. They’re old fashioned. They’ve been done before and all the things that new tune writers are always doing. They’re always writing stuff that everybody’s done. Then finally came out this one phrase and he said "now that has a good catch to it." He said gold can buy anything, and everyone said what does that mean? But love, you can’t buy love, and that was a strong idea. So he said, "yeah, that’s a good country title. I think you can work with that."

So we finished it and brought it to a publisher, a little publisher, dad had suggested we go to. He named a few and that was the one that was really interested in it and by a great deal of good fortune we wound up with a record by Gene Autry, and he was a big star back in the 50’s and the record started taking off as a huge hit. The only trouble was luck was against us because about the time our song was starting to climb the hit charts, General Douglas MacArthur made a speech. He said, "old soldiers never die they just fade away." That was his farewell speech to Congress when he stepped down out of his generalship because he was called back by Truman. It’s a historical fact. So overnight the song Old Soldiers Never Die was put out by Gene Autry in place of the song we did. He recorded that song. So we were just displeased and put out. It was horrible. Our dad said to us that day, he said, "that’s what you call a curve and if you can’t take a curve you get out of the game" and we said we’re not getting out of the game.

We stayed in the game and we decided it was kind of a joy to write songs together and we shared ideas and Bob came up with good solid ideas and I came up with solid ideas and we came up with melodies together. We worked together on both ends of the song thinking in terms of three units. There was the idea which is the most important thing in any song to us,  the idea behind the song. Then the words and the music have to fit and sound natural. Dad gave us three S’s to live by, simple, singable and sincere. If you can be original and simple, singable and sincere you’ll have the trick to writing a good song. Dad really was the original formative personality in our lives and that’s the answer to that question.

Q: It’s a wonderful answer.

A: A little wordy one, but that’s it.

Q: You mentioned that your dad gave you three S’s to live by in songwriting and that’s been very influential to you. Can you point to one particular thing that Walt Disney gave you that was very influential for your career?

A: Yes, he said to us at one point early on, he said, "what’s happening while the song goes on?" He was very very involved in visuals. He didn’t want to just have singing heads singing at each other. He wanted to have action, something taking place, business, important things. So we constantly had to come up with almost scene ideas to make it work for him. So if we did a Spoonful of Sugar we had to say that’s when she is snapping her fingers and things are happening and then the kids try to snap their fingers. All these things are happening while she is singing the song, and he loved that. Then he gave that to his story people and they draw it up and make it happen on the screen. Basically we’d have to come up with ideas constantly. We never just came up with a song that they could sing. That was one of the greatest things that Walt gave us.

By the time we got to Walt Disney we had been writing for ten years, nine years actually. From 1951 till 1960, we were writing popular songs, either together or with other people because I was in the service for a while. Bob was in the service during the Second World War and I was in the service during the Korean thing. So we didn’t write together for about five years but then we got together again in ‘58 and we started writing constantly, constantly, constantly and we had a lot of rock-and-roll songs and things like that, but Walt came into our lives in 1960.

So by the time we got to Walt Disney, we were really seasoned songwriters. We'd had a number of big hits and everything. We had written a lot of songs for Annette Funicello, that’s what brought us to Walt. She is our lucky star. She sang Tall Paul, Pineapple Princess, JoJo the Dog Faced Boy, Wild Willie, all these never to be forgotten songs. But they all were big hits for her and then we did albums like Hawaiiannette, Italiannette and Dance Annette. We just did song after song for Annette and Walt caught on. He listened to everything that she did. He was crazy about his girl. She was his little girl star and he was nuts about her. He said, "who are those guys that are writing the clever songs for Annette? I’d like to meet them." That’s how we got to meet Walt Disney. He brought us in to do assignments for her and one thing led to another and.

In our rock and roll years we had some big, big songs. I think our biggest rock-and-roll hit was You’re 16, You’re Beautiful and You’re Mine. That was originally Johnny Brunett and was number one, and then Ringo Starr did it about 15 years later and it also became a number one hit all around the world. But that was our rock-and-roll years so by the time we got to Disney we had written just about everything we could write and then he started giving us assignments that we never dreamed of. We were writing Italian songs and German songs, Mexican songs. We did everything in the world for him.