Before ‘Mary Poppins,’ He Wrote a Pretty Good Rock ’n’ Roll Song
One-hit wonders have always been a charming, amusing and occasionally poignant subplot in modern popular music. From the Penguins’s “Earth Angel” through Barry Sadler’s “Ballad of the Green Berets,” Tiny Tim’s “Tiptoe Through the Tulips,” Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life,” Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” and hundreds of more recent vintage, these tunes make up a memorable corner of our collective soundtrack.
And, lest we forget, the recent passing of Richard M. Sherman reminds us there have also been one-hit songwriters.
Now Richard Sherman, who died May 25 at the age of 95, was in the full scope of his career anything but a one-hit wonder. He and his brother Robert wrote hundreds of songs featured in family movies like The Jungle Book, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Mary Poppins, for which they won a pair of Oscars. They won three Grammys. They wrote “It’s a Small World,” which has been heard by almost everyone who ever visited a Disney park, and which Robert Sherman once wryly said inspired all those visitors to either want to “kiss or kill” him. They wrote Broadway shows, they wrote children’s songs, they are in the Songwriters Hall of Fame and unless they invested with Bernie Madoff, they lived large.
Inspired by a father who wrote songs in vaudeville, the Sherman brothers mastered the musical art of simple, melodic and happy, which is way harder than the results make it seem.
While they were best known for the movie standards “Chim Chim Cher-ee” and “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” much of their catalog is comprised of titles like “Rumbly in My Tumbly” and “The Ugly Bug Ball.” They were not Lennon and McCartney. They were not Cole Porter. They weren’t trying to be. Music is a big tent. And if some of us never tucked a lot of Sherman brothers discs into our record collections, millions of other people did. Richard and Robert racked up 24 gold or platinum albums.
Explaining how Richard could be called a one-hit wonder, then, requires focusing on rather selective evidence, specifically the early years when he and Robert were scrambling to get any song placed anywhere. In that quest they wrote a few random stand-alone pop songs and since it was the late 1950s, those songs fell in with the early days of rock ’n’ roll.
Two of those tunes, “Tall Paul” and “Pineapple Princess,” landed with Annette Funicello, one of the original Disney Mouseketeers. Annette was the breakout Mouseketeer, so popular in those pre-TikTok days that Disney decided to make her a solo star. She eventually scored her biggest splash as an actress, in a series of featherweight beach movies with Frankie Avalon, but before that she had four hit singles — including “Tall Paul” and “Pineapple Princess,” which featured a bouncy melody and lyrics like “We’ll settle down in a bamboo hut / And you will be my only co-co-nut.”
Yeah, well, okay. More importantly for the Shermans, Annette was the conduit through which they caught the ear of Walt Disney, at whose studios they became even bigger though less visible stars than Annette herself.
Among their early songs for Disney was “Let’s Get Together,” which young Hayley Mills sang in The Parent Trap. Six decades later it remains one of the shortest records ever to become a top-40 hit (1:28). That also remains its only distinction.
So the Shermans had less than a monster pop catalog. But somehow, for some reason, out of somewhere, they wrote “You’re Sixteen,” which was recorded by Johnny Burnette and reached №8 on the Billboard hot 100 chart in December 1960.
Best record ever? No. But it’s a really good record, wherein the Shermans marry their gift for melody with lyrics that are simple and sweet: “You’re sixteen, you’re beautiful and you’re mine.”
It’s a teenage love call true to its times, close kin with the likes of “Sixteen Candles.” There’s a classic lyrical grace in a line like “You walked out of my dreams and into my arms.” It has a great studio band and perhaps because Burnette was a genuine rock ’n’ roller — seriously underrated, by the way — he turned “You’re Sixteen” into an authentic rock ’n’ roll ballad.
When Ringo Starr remade “You’re Sixteen” in 1974, with a little help from his friend Paul McCartney, he added a couple of tweaks, singing “You walked out of my dreams and into my car” and segueing into Frogman Henry’s “I Don’t Know Why I Love You Like I Do,” which has close to the same melody. While some critics found it creepy that a 33-year-old man was singing to a 16-year-old girl, Ringo was actually singing in the character of a song he liked back when he was 18. In any case, it was one of the many hits he enjoyed, rising to №1.
By 1974 the Sherman brothers were long gone from the rock ’n’ roll world, where they never wanted to hang out in the first place. But “You’re Sixteen” stayed there, making it legitimate to suggest that by whatever serendipitous happenstance, Richard Sherman and his brother Robert wrote one authentic rock ’n’ roll hit.
