Raposo was born in Fall River, Massachusetts,[1] the only child of Portuguese immigrant parents Joseph Soares Raposo and Maria (a.k.a. "Aunt" Sarah) da Ascenção Vitorino Raposo.[2] He was known as "Sonny" to his family.
Joseph Sr. was an accomplished musician, classical guitarist, violinist, flutist, pianist,[1] music teacher and Joe's first music teacher.
Raposo worked in musical theater both before and after his work for the Children's Television Workshop and Sesame Street; musical theater was where he first encountered future collaborator Jim Henson. According to Jonathan Schwartz, during the mid-1960s, before Sesame Street, Raposo performed side music in piano bars in Boston to make ends meet, and also served as pianist and music director for a jazz trio working at Boston's WNAC-TV. Upon hearing Raposo's musical skill, Schwartz claims in his autobiography he urged Raposo to give up piano bar playing in Boston and move to New York City. Raposo's decision to take Schwartz's suggestion and move in 1965 eventually led him to his fated meeting with Henson, to Sesame Street, and toward international fame.
Raposo was the musical supervisor and arranger of the original off-Broadway run of You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, and he contributed additional music to that show. He was also responsible for the memorable theme music for New York City television station WABC-TV's The 4:30 Movie; the piece, called "Moving Pictures," was also used for the station's other movie shows, and subsequently by ABC's other owned-and-operated stations.
Sesame Street
Raposo is best known for the songs he wrote for Sesame Street from its beginning in 1969 through the mid-1970s, and also for a time in the 1980s. He wrote the "Sesame Street Theme" – various versions of which have opened every episode – as well as many of its most popular songs, such as "Bein' Green", "C is for Cookie", "Sing" and "ABC-DEF-GHI". A version of "Sing" recorded by The Carpenters in 1973 reached #3 on the Billboard top singles chart. For many years, most of the music used in Sesame Street's film segments was also written — and often sung — by Raposo.
Aside from his musical contributions, Raposo performed several uncredited stock characters on Sesame Street during the early 1970s. According to his son Nicholas in a 2002 telephone conversation, Joe Raposo usually chose to portray anonymous, silly characters in these segments, which were nearly always produced on 16 mm film. He also did voice-overs for a few animated segments.
The Sesame Street character Don Music maintained a framed and autographed glamour photograph of Raposo on the wall of his Muppetatelier.
Raposo was very fond of sweets according to many who knew him. One favorite food of his was cookies. It has been rumored the Wheel-Eating Monster created for commercial advertisers in the 1960s by Jim Henson may have been altered by Henson specifically into a "cookie" monster after Henson observed Raposo's unusual propensity for cookies; this has never been substantiated. His widow Pat Collins-Sarnoff celebrated his life with a milk and cookies reception.[3]
In 1971, Children's Television Workshop created the show The Electric Company, meant to help teach reading to children who had outgrown Sesame Street. Raposo served as the musical director of the show for its first three seasons, and contributed songs throughout the show's run, until 1977.
Raposo performed joke characters for film segments on The Electric Company similar in style to what he had done on Sesame Street. One segment showed him attempting to get dressed in jacket and necktie against a white wall under the word "dressing", until the prefix "un-" appears and attaches itself to the prior word, forcing him to engage in a mock striptease which ends with him modestly hopping off-screen and tossing the remainder of his clothing into an empty chair left on-screen.[5] In a variation of this film, he is shown packing a suitcase when the "un-" prefix returns and pesters him using the behavior of a meddling fly until, exasperated, Raposo strikes the word with a hammer, knocking it unconscious into the suitcase, which he then triumphantly slams shut with a smirk.[6]
Raposo enjoyed doing animation voicework. Other forays of his into the craft included both the tenor singing role of "master pickler" Gil Gickler in DePatie-Freleng's Dr. Seuss cartoon program Pontoffel Pock, Where Are You? and Gickler's spoken dialogue.[7] Raposo also performed at least three other character voices in the cartoon, including a Groogen musician whose "flugelbugle" is destroyed by Pontoffel in an attack flyover,[8] as the ancient Senior Fairy above McGillicuddy who oversees the fairy squadron's worldwide search for the missing Pock and his piano, and as an angry Groogen dairywoman spilt milk upon by a too-close fly-by of Pontoffel's.[7]
The HBO animated adaptation of Madeline, for which Raposo composed the music and songs (with writer/lyricist Judy Rothman), aired four months after Raposo's death; the cartoon The Smoggies, for which Raposo wrote the theme song, premiered in Canada.
Additional film, stage and other television work
Although primarily known for work in live-action and animated children's television, Joe Raposo actually aspired to become a Broadway musical composer.[3]
In the 1970s, Raposo wrote original music for the animated film Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure; he later teamed with William Gibson (The Miracle Worker) to create a stage musical about Raggedy Ann. The musical was the first theatre company production from the United States to perform in the Soviet Union upon resumption of cultural relations between the two countries. It later had a brief run on Broadway in 1986.
During his career Raposo composed themes for several sitcoms such as Ivan The Terrible,Three's Company, The Ropers and Foot in the Door, film scores such as The Possession of Joel Delaney (1972), Savages (1972) and Maurie (1973), and documentaries, most notably Peter Rosen's production America Is for which Raposo not only scored a patriotic, critically well-received title theme but, unusually, served as its on-screen narrator.
Musical style and influences
Raposo was an ardent fan of satirical composer and bandleader Spike Jones. "The Alligator Song", which Raposo composed for 1970s-era Sesame Street, was Raposo's sound-effects-laden musical homage to Jones. Raposo also composed numerous other works influenced by Jones for Sesame Street, many featuring kazoo and other comical sound-effect objects and instruments like siren whistles, bulb horns, and tenor banjos. Another Raposo composition, "Doggy Paddle", features Raposo barking like several singing dogs during its instrumental verse, a blatant musical homage to the singing and barking dogs of "Memories are Made of This" by Jones and His City Slickers.[9][10]
Raposo's songwriting tended toward wistful introspections on life and nature. Primarily celebrated for his bright, uptempo major key compositions, he also showed skill at arranging original blues and jazz pieces in minor key and often took sudden melancholy lyrical detours in the midst of otherwise cheerful songs.
Unlike his children's television scoring contemporaries, Raposo exhibited an uncommonly broad grasp of compositional styles. Raposo was classically trained as a conductor and at the École Normale in Paris as an arranger. As a student of Nadia Boulanger in Paris, he extended his facility in piano technique. This classical background gave him the ability to engage different music genres authentically. So diverse were the genres he regularly frequented, that often the only identifying mark of his songs as "Raposo" were common lyric allusions to "sunny days" or "flying", or his signature use of piccolo and glockenspiel atop the melodic or contrapuntal line, as well as the prominent uses of guitar in the rhythmic line.
Most overtly, however, Joe Raposo's sonic trademark was his seemingly obsessive, and often exhaustively authentic, live replication of the tonal quality and exact playback cadence of the 20th-century self-operating player piano when composing for and performing on a grand, baby grand or upright piano. He appears to have specifically tuned his Children's Television Workshop pianos not only to blatantly mimic the player piano in its antique tonality, but to achieve and then maintain what became a signature ragtime tack or saloon-piano sound by them.
Raposo's considerable stylistic ambition during his tenure as music director lent Sesame Street its trademark extreme musical diversity. For The Electric Company, particularly for songs he composed for the Short Circus, he led CTW to pop-record production values and generally strongly enforced an adult musical sophistication for all content he supervised. Given an unusual creative freedom in the Music Department at 1970s CTW, Raposo toggled from convincing country ballads (e.g. "The Ballad of Casey MacPhee," which depicted Cookie Monster as a heroic train engineer caught in a mountain avalanche) and authentic hillbilly ("It's a Long, Hard Climb, But I'm Gonna Get There" and "My Favorite Letter P" among others) to blues elegies of considerable emotional and tonal complexity, like "New Life Coming" and "Bein' Green."
Raposo also evidenced skill as an American funk composer, making frequent and arguably credible musical allusions (on 1970–1974 Sesame Street) to the underground black soul and funk performers of his day. Themes written for muppet Roosevelt Franklin and the segment H exhibit some of Raposo's most convincing soul and funk composition and arrangement; the former contains clear allusions to the Philly Four and Lee Dorsey while the latter attempts coupling a convincing African-American Seventies funk bassline to the cycling musical structure of a European round, all while still somehow retaining his signature high end accents along the upper melodic ramparts of the composition. Raposo also made several stylistic allusions to jazz-funk organist Louis Chachere in compositions Fat, Cat, Sat and Some, All, None, and on both selections played the Hammond B-3 like Chachere, but using its leslies as a comedic device as would have Raposo's idol, Spike Jones.
Personal life
Raposo was married twice. He had two sons, Joseph and Nicholas, from his first marriage. He had a son, Andrew, and daughter, Elizabeth (Liz), from his second marriage- to Pat Collins-Sarnoff.[11][12]
Sinatra recorded four of Raposo's songs on his 1973 album Ol' Blue Eyes Is Back. Sinatra insisted the album be composed entirely of Raposo's compositions, but the record label balked and prevailed over Sinatra, limiting him to four. Jonathan Schwartz reports that Sinatra idolized and popularized Raposo and his music, frequently attending Raposo's parties at his and first wife Susan's New York apartment during the 1960s with glamorous friends and several cronies, including Leo Durocher. Schwartz's memoir adds that Sinatra was infatuated with Raposo's piano-playing skill and commonly referred to him to others, characteristically, as "Raposo at the piano", or "the genius".
Death
Raposo died on February 5, 1989, in Bronxville, New York, of non-Hodgkin lymphoma,[1] three days before his 52nd birthday. He was survived by wife, Pat Collins, his four children and by his parents who were at the time living in Chatham, Massachusetts. His grave is located at Union Cemetery in Chatham.
In 1998, many of his manuscripts were donated by Collins-Sarnoff to Georgetown University Library.[3]
Raposo was eulogized in the April 1990 documentary Sing! Sesame Street Remembers Joe Raposo and His Music, which was hosted and directed by Sesame Street crew member Jon Stone. A tribute CD was released in 1992 commemorating his work on Sesame Street.
