ROBERT B SHERMAN: ROBERT B SHERMAN, who has died aged 86, was part of one of the most unusual songwriting teams of all time.
He and his younger brother Richard may not be as well known as other pairs of composers and lyricists, but they will forever be remembered as the writers of Mary Poppins, the Jungle Book and a swath of productions from Walt Disney Studios.
Their score for Mary Poppins (1964), the movie that introduced Julie Andrews to filmgoers, secured them a place in popular musical history and made them multimillionaires. Featuring songs including Jolly Holiday, Let’s Go Fly a Kite and Feed the Birds, it won them two Oscars. It also included the classic, A Spoonful of Sugar and the song with the one-word title that they used when they accepted the Academy awards: “All we can say is Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.”
The brothers were born in New York, but the family moved to Beverly Hills in 1937, and the boys attended the Beverly Hills high school. There, Robert began writing and producing radio programmes that were highly acclaimed by broadcasting professionals. At 16, he wrote a stage play, Armistice and Dedication Day, which generated thousands of dollars for war bonds. The US war department awarded him a special citation in gratitude.
He joined the US army in 1943, at the age of 17. Two years later, he led a squad of men into the Dachau concentration camp, the first Americans to stumble on the horrors there, only hours after the Nazis had fled. During war service, in April 1945, he was shot in the knee, as a result of which he walked with a stick for the rest of his life. He spent much of his service in Britain, where he was stationed in Bournemouth and Taunton. It was this experience, he would say, that got him interested in British popular culture.
After the war, he attended Bard College, wrote two novels and graduated in 1949. The two brothers always worked as a team, sharing between them the job of writing music and lyrics.
Their first hit was the rock’n’roll single Tall Paul, sung by Annette Funicello, in 1959. Real success came with the craze for teenage songs in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
In 1960 they were taken on by Walt Disney as staff songwriters. For the 1964 New York world’s fair, they wrote It’s a Small World After All, which became the Disney “national anthem” and is now played at Disney theme parks.
The Shermans were the obvious choice for scoring Mary Poppins. The brothers won Oscars for best original soundtrack and best song, for Chim Chim Cher-ee.
In 1965, Robert and Richard were recruited to work on The Jungle Book (1967),
The Shermans stayed on with the studio for a few other projects, including Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971) and The Aristocats (1970).
Sherman married his childhood sweetheart Joyce Sasner in 1953. She died in 2001. He is survived by his four children.
Robert Bernard Sherman: born December 19th, 1925; died March 5th, 2012