Day 7, Christmas music.

Jazzed-up Peanuts
Posted by linkmeister on 8 December 2012, 6:00 am

Vince Guaraldi had already won a Grammy for his 1962 composition “Cast Your Fate to the Wind” when television producer Lee Mendelsohn heard it and got the pianist’s phone number. Mendelsohn needed a pianist to compose and play a score for a documentary (!) about Charlie Brown and the Peanuts gang. Guaraldi happily accepted the offer and wrote one. Ultimately the documentary never aired for lack of sponsorship, but when Mendelsohn got the go-ahead to do “A Charlie Brown Christmas” he used some of the already-written score Guaraldi had composed. There were eventually sixteen different Charlie Brown specials, all with music by Guaraldi.

Here’s the original.