How Vince Guaraldi and ‘Peanuts’ scored a top 40 hit
Vince Guaraldi was already a famous jazz pianist by the mid-1960s. Having made his name in the San Francisco jazz scene of the 1950s, Guaraldi formed his own trio and became a household name thanks to his contributions to the 1959 film Black Orpheus.
That soundtrack contained the instrumental ‘Cast Your Fate to the Wind’, which eventually won the Grammy Award for Best Original Jazz Composition in 1963. ‘Cast Your Fate to the Wind’ also gave Guaraldi a top 40 hit at a time when jazz songs were being phased out of popular music charts thanks to pop and rock music.
It wouldn’t be Guaraldi’s only hit on the charts. In 1963, Guaraldi was contacted by television producer Lee Mendelson, who asked him to compose the music for a new documentary called A Boy Named Charlie Brown. Guaraldi accepted, kicking off a long and fruitful collaboration between himself and the Peanuts franchise.
His next project with Mendelson was a Christmas special. A Charlie Brown Christmas also got the Guaraldi treatment, this time featuring the pianist and his trio taking on classic holiday songs and hymns. Guaraldi also decided to write a few originals for the special, including ‘Christmastime is Here’ and ‘Skating’.
While assembling the album’s material, Guaraldi called Mendelson and excitedly told him that he needed to play him his latest composition immediately. Mendelson wanted to wait for the planned recording session, but Guaraldi was insistent. So, over the phone, Mendelson heard ‘Linus and Lucy’ for the first time. “It just blew me away. It was so right, and so perfect, for Charlie Brown and the other characters,” Mendelson observed in 2012. “I have no idea why, but I knew that song would affect my entire life. There was a sense, even before it was put to animation, that there was something very, very special about that music.”
The recorded version retained the same excitement that Mendelson felt over the phone. If you turn up the volume on the song, it’s possible to hear someone’s voice (presumably Guaraldi’s) shouting along with the performance in real-time. While most of A Charlie Brown Christmas was either slow jazz or traditional yuletide songs, ‘Linus and Lucy’ had energy and an infectious drive to it.
That infectiousness made the song instantly iconic once the special aired in December of 1965. ‘Linus and Lucy’ went all the way to number 37 on the Billboard Hot 100 in early 1966, a rarity for an instrumental jazz single. Guaraldi would continue his collaboration with the Peanuts franchise, but ‘Linus and Lucy’ continued to define his legacy until his unfortunate early death in 1976.
