Composing 'A Charlie Brown Christmas'

The making of a classic score.

A still from A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965)

Happy Thursday! Hope you’re doing well. Today’s issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter is all about the music of A Charlie Brown Christmas.

This is the ultimate Christmas special for many — thanks in no small part to its wonderful soundtrack. Running beneath the show is the jazz of Vince Guaraldi, which drew attention from the first airing of A Charlie Brown Christmas on December 9, 1965. A critic at the time wrote of the “lovely, gentle, mood-setting score … [that] helped give the half-hour an unexpected and attractive contemporary tone.”¹

Its soundtrack album turned into a giant hit. Today, with five platinum plaques in America, it ties Kind of Blue in the history of jazz.²

Nobody expected that — and certainly not the band. Guaraldi’s biographer, Derrick Bang, has gathered as much from the raw session recordings (listen). He noted a few years ago:

It’s clear, from the lively banter exchanged during the studio sessions[,] ... that these musicians assumed A Charlie Brown Christmas was just another gig: a bit unusual, perhaps, but certainly nothing remarkable.³

In fact, Guaraldi’s involvement in the special could almost be called an afterthought. Yet it would shape the rest of his career: he kept working on Peanuts shows until his death in 1976 — and his best-known songs appear in A Charlie Brown Christmas.

The Vince Guaraldi Trio playing in 1962 — Guaraldi is on the left. Courtesy of the book A Charlie Brown Christmas: The Making of a Tradition.

Guaraldi was kind of famous when the Peanuts offer arrived. He was a jazzman in the San Francisco area — and, during 1963, one of his songs entered the top 40. It was a bright, catchy piece called Cast Your Fate to the Wind, similar in tone and style to the Peanuts music we know today.

He’d done that song live since the late ‘50s, in different forms. “Every time I play the tune I really get a reaction,” Guaraldi said. He finally recorded it for his album Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus (his interpretation of an existing movie soundtrack), and it blew up from there. In his words, the success was “like building a rocket in your basement, setting it off and then getting your tie caught in it.”⁴

The Vince Guaraldi Trio was now a known quantity. Observers started to chatter about its chances of ever getting a second hit.⁵

In 1963, a television producer heard Cast Your Fate in his car on the Golden Gate Bridge. His name was Lee Mendelson — and he was making a TV documentary about the creator of Peanuts, Charles Schulz.

Mendelson had settled on a jazz soundtrack (Dave Brubeck of Take Five fame had already turned him down), and this song spoke to him. “It was melodic and open, and came in like a breeze off the bay,” he remembered. So, he and Guaraldi had lunch. Here was a “very short fellow with very stubby fingers,” Mendelson later said, who’d become a star pianist despite the limited reach of his hands across the keys.⁶

They clicked, and a deal was made. “It was a natural [fit],” Guaraldi told the press. “I had been reading the comic strip for years and felt that I knew Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus — even Snoopy — personally.”⁷

By this point, A Charlie Brown Christmas wasn’t even an idea. Mendelson was trying to make a live-action Schulz special with just a handful of cartoon sequences. Those were overseen by an ex-UPA guy, Bill Melendez, whose team animated Peanuts spots for Ford. He recalled how Mendelson sold him on Guaraldi:

… he sent me a disc of Vince’s music. Now, I’m not a jazz fan, but I did like the relationship — you know, the scale — of that music to our kids. It was perfect. ... You know, they’re a certain size, and this is how the world is. ... We took it to Sparky [Schulz]. Now, he’s like me: he’s not a jazz fan that I was aware of. He’s more a fan of classical music. And I thought we were dead when his wife hated it. “What kinda music is that?!” ... Sparky said, “Well, you know, we think that that would fit the show.”⁸

Guaraldi wrote his most iconic Peanuts song for this documentary: the driving Linus and Lucy (listen), which reappeared in A Charlie Brown Christmas. He called Mendelson after thinking it up. “I gotta play something for you; it just came into my head,” he said, and then performed it over the phone. Mendelson recalled, “It just blew me away. It was so right.”

From left: Lee Mendelson, Charles Schulz and Bill Melendez in 1966, shortly after their Emmy win for A Charlie Brown Christmas. Courtesy of New York Magazine.

The Schulz documentary was completed — but, in the end, not sold. American networks didn’t want it. Yet Guaraldi now had an album of Peanuts music in his hands, and he knew there was something unique about it. “I think it’s potentially another Orpheus album,” he said in mid-1964.

Soon after, it dropped as Jazz Impressions of A Boy Named Charlie Brown (listen) — and it did pretty well. By January 1965, there were newspaper reports on Guaraldi’s Peanuts-themed live concerts.⁹

The Christmas project began a few months later, when Mendelson lied his way into a Coca-Cola sponsorship. Ad people called about a possible Peanuts Christmas show — and he replied that he was already planning one. Then it was a matter of throwing together an outline with Charles Schulz and Bill Melendez as quickly as possible.

Like Mendelson wrote:

… the show would include winter scenes, a school play, a scene to be read from the Bible and a soundtrack combining jazz and traditional music. … We also wanted to create a scene that could feature the Vince Guaraldi Linus and Lucy theme from the 1963 Schulz documentary — a scene that eventually became the dance segment that viewers remember so vividly.¹⁰

By this point, the Schulz doc hadn’t aired, and Guaraldi’s Peanuts album hadn’t quite matched the popularity of Cast Your Fate. But he was hired again, along with his band, for the Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack. Included were new takes on old songs (like O Tannenbaum) and original pieces (like the beautifully cascading Skating).

Although Guaraldi was a strong composer, he couldn’t really read music, and other people often notated his songs. He wrote the Christmas show’s score by playing it and recording it. After going over the storyboards of a given section, he’d ask Melendez, “How many yards of music do you want for this scene?”

One of Melendez’s storyboard pages for A Charlie Brown Christmas, courtesy of A Charlie Brown Christmas: The Making of a Tradition

Bill Melendez and Lee Mendelson examining a storyboard circa 1966. Courtesy of Newsweek.

Their collaboration was smooth — and “very close,” Melendez said. But they built a score that isn’t rigidly linked to the characters’ movements: there’s no “Mickey-Mousing.” It sets a tone without dictating the action. This is a looser, more contemporary style that A Charlie Brown Christmas didn’t invent, but uses brilliantly.¹¹

The band refined each song in the sessions through mistakes and retakes. At the 11th hour, Mendelson put lyrics to Christmas Time Is Here, having a children’s choir sing atop the instrumental. The show’s tight schedule didn’t seem to bother Guaraldi. “He was always writing and never had a problem with deadlines,” Mendelson said. “If I called him up one day and asked for a piece, he’d bring something over the next day.”¹²

The music they made tends to be light and clear in its vibe — and “touching without being overly sentimental,” said Dave Brubeck, who later praised Guaraldi’s work here. As Derrick Bang has noted, the style suits the subject matter. You find music ranging:

… from straight-ahead, to swing, blues and (a Guaraldi favorite) bossa nova. Given that this is a Christmas special, we wouldn’t expect Guaraldi’s trio to deliver a hard bop or fusion rendition of Christmas Time Is Here; the theme is better suited to gentle swing and bossa nova, which is what you’ll hear most often [in the soundtrack].

Sheet music for Skating, courtesy of the book The Charlie Brown Collection. The song is embedded below:

We’ve explained before that A Charlie Brown Christmas was a rush job — and lovably flawed for that reason. The studio had a small budget and just a few months to make it. Most of the team expected it to flop, as did CBS, the network that aired it.

“When we finished the show, we thought we had killed it,” Melendez said. “It had so many warts and bumps and lumps and things. A year later we fixed up a few things, but we never completely re-created the show.”

The first version was a big, big success regardless. It was a little different, though, from the one we know today — and that included its soundtrack. Bang has compared the two versions on his blog, and his conclusion is that the music “changed quite a lot.”

You can hear those changes yourself. A print of the 1965 Charlie Brown Christmas has emerged online in recent years — watchable on the Internet Archive. It’s still charming, and the music is still great. But there’s less music: minutes pass with nothing in the background, and several songs in the current version don’t appear.

It’s not clear who made those calls. Mendelson once wrote that Guaraldi “knew when not to have music” — he was willing to leave silence in his Peanuts work.¹³ Still, whatever the case, more songs were added when the special reaired in following years. Bang spotted a track from Charlie Brown’s All-Stars (1966) among them, plus three from Jazz Impressions of A Boy Named Charlie Brown. Many are upbeat, which further lightens the feel of the show. It’s a bit more fun than the 1965 version.

Not that this takes away from Guaraldi’s achievement in the beginning. Melendez saw the band’s work as “quite a breakthrough” — something different for the medium. “Up to that time,” he argued, “most cartoon music was not very distinctive. Vince brought a whole new dimension to music for animation.”¹⁴

The soundtrack album was out a few days before the special aired. Sales were strong — and, like the special’s ratings in the years ahead, they stayed that way. Linus and Lucy came to eclipse Cast Your Fate as Guaraldi’s best-known song. By 1970, he was playing these compositions for live audiences in the tens of thousands.¹⁵

It was Guaraldi’s work, Mendelson believed, that helped to make A Charlie Brown Christmas so impactful in the first place. “Without the music, I don’t know if we would have done more than one show,” he said. It’s a core part of the simple, subtle magic of this thing — still felt by so many people each year.

Until next time!

1. From the Princeton Daily Clarion (December 16, 1965).

2. As pointed out in this article. See the RIAA listings for Kind of Blue and the Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack album here and here.

3. From Derrick Bang’s liner notes for A Charlie Brown Christmas: Super Deluxe Edition, an important source today.

4. The Guaraldi quote about getting a reaction comes from The Peanuts Illustrated Songbook, used several times, while the one about rockets and ties appears here. About the evolution of Cast Your Fate, someone who knew Guaraldi said, “I heard it lots of different times live, and it was never the same way twice, except that he’d always come back to the theme.” (Quoted in Vince Guaraldi at the Piano by Derrick Bang, one of our major sources.)

5. As explored in the third episode of the TV series Anatomy of a Hit.

6. Mendelson’s quote about hearing Cast Your Fate is from the liner notes to A Boy Named Charlie Brown: The Original Sound Track Recording, while the one about Guaraldi’s fingers is from a Television Academy interview. Both sources were used throughout.

7. See the Richmond-Times Dispatch (April 9, 1972).

8. From Melendez’s interview with the Television Academy, also used throughout. The topic is A Charlie Brown Christmas, but he seems to flash back to the first pitch of Guaraldi’s music, which would’ve been for the documentary.

9. Reviews for this first Peanuts album were good. One critic mentioned Lucy and Linus as a standout; another wrote that the band had “done a kicker of a job” overall. See The Sunday Oregonian (December 27, 1964) and the Daily Independent Journal (May 1, 1965). For the points about the Peanuts live shows and “another Orpheus,” see The Berkeley Gazette (June 6, 1964, and January 8, 1965).

10. From A Charlie Brown Christmas: The Making of a Tradition, used many times.

11. Mark Mothersbaugh made similar points in The Art and Making of Peanuts Animation (the source of the Dave Brubeck quote that appears later).

12. Mendelson said this about Guaraldi’s process in general in The Making of a Tradition.

13. Mendelson made this point about Guaraldi’s process in It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown: The Making of a Television Classic.

14. See the Mount Vernon Argus (October 23, 1977).

15. Mendelson noted the overwhelming success of Linus and Lucy in The San Francisco Examiner (March 17, 1974). For the point about audience numbers, see the Vallejo Times-Herald (May 17, 1970).