The Music of Country Bear Jamboree, Part One

In the future, we who move in Disney theme park circles may look back on the heady early days of the dominance of "The Blog" as being most important for providing the start of a great resurgence of interest in history. News and opinion may be the internet's stock in trade, but there wasn't really much detailed coverage of the company's history prior to 2006-07. Now, anyone with the faintest memory of the Golf Resort may find photos of it, and younger fans will discover and trace the development of EPCOT Center through a Google search bar.

And all without any help from Disney. The fan community is writing their history without them.

And yet one of the largest blind spots that has developed over the years is the development of one of WED Enterprises finest creations: Country Bear Jamboree. We know that the show was being worked on during Walt's lifetime and we also know that it was destined for the Mineral King ski resort in the late 60's. There's some early concept art pieces and song demos and then, that's it - the show opens in 1971 at Magic Kingdom and is a runaway success, but we don't really know how it came together, it just always has been.

This is where Disney's non-participation becomes more of a liability, because we simply don't have access to the documents to follow the paper trail. Whatever and however Marc Davis and Al Bertino put together what is probably the zenith of the Disney park theatrical experience, we can only guess.

Or can we?

There's always been a few tantalizing scraps. In "Project Florida", we see some storyboards and unused narration and animation for Henry. But the pieces never line up into a coherent picture. The piano sequence we see Al Bertino pitching in storyboard form is nowhere to be seen in the final show. In Project Florida, Henry moves and speaks lines that were jettisoned by opening day - full figure animation, several days worth of work. Both the figure seen in Project Florida and some of Marc's drawings suggest that Henry was intended to be seen only from the waist up, not seated on a barrel as in the final show. Nothing we see from the development period seems to be represented in the show as it has come to us.

Yet there is a way in, a way to circumvent Disney's notorious "closed door" policy, and that's to bypass them. The songs used in Country Bear Jamboree almost all existed before it did, and by going back to the source material that Davis drew on to create his characters we may gain insight into the creative process as it probably happened.

It's also unusual to hear the original recordings as they existed before Disney remade them to fit the animatronic bear show: it's like discovering a familiar but foreign holograph of something you spent your whole life seeing, the original definition of uncanny. But before we jump into the music itself, I'd like to take this opportunity to say a few words about genre.

What's in a Name?

That word. Country.

Country Bear Jamboree has never had a sterling reputation amongst some Disney fans, despite its historical pedigree, structural, and comedic sophistication. It has low humor, of course, but it has unusually smart humor as well, and this seeming contradiction has never set comfortably with some. There are those who maintain that the show is essentially mean spirited, who seem to jump to the conclusion that any depiction of "rural types" must invariably be negative. The assumption has generally been to look for farce, find it in Country Bear Jamboree, then make the leap that that is all that there is. Yet Country Bear Jamboree develops its memorable characters out of farce and, through subtlety and comedy, builds them towards something like an actual personality. It may appear to be doing very little, but the show contains whole universes.

And then there are those who simply cannot move beyond that word on the marquee: country. But "Country" is a multifaceted music genre, and one the show explores in some depth, which is why it begins with those words spoken by Henry at the start:

"...featuring a bit of Americana - our musical heritage of the past."

This is true, but it seemingly hasn't ever been explored in any detail, so to frame that exploration we need to know what "country music", exactly, is. It's always been a messy lump of a genre, and musicians we don't always think of as "Country Music" have wandered through it - not just Johnny Cash, but Elvis, Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie and Burl Ives. The definition of "Country" has changed dramatically since the attraction opened, and today carries connotations which have doomed it with audiences who aren't willing to meet the show halfway. All of these things are important to understand, because Country Bear Jamboree has much more complexity than any show about singing bears has any right to.

The earliest roots of "country" music was what was then officially known as "Hillbilly" music - ballads, railroad songs, and other stories that passed verbally between singer and listener. One of these, "The Wreck of the Old 97" sung by Vernon Dalhart, sold seven million records in the 1920's, making it one of the biggest hits of its era. Today when we listen to "Hillbilly" music, we're unlikely to immediately connect it to our modern Country music, but the style is a key to unlocking what's going on in Country Bear Jamboree:

It's worth remembering that in this era, there still were travelling musicians and performers to pass these songs around, and while Dalhart was busy recording innumerable disaster-themed songs like The Death of Floyd Collins and The Wreck of the Shenandoah, other traveling musicians like Woody Guthrie, one of the great chroniclers of the American Depression, were rewriting ballads Dalhart sung into new forms.

The 1930's saw the emergence of the second key style represented in Country Bear Jamboree: the Western genre, the reason why the show can be placed in Frontierland. Popularized throughout the 30s, 40s and 50s by "Singing Cowboys" like Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, Western music, which is largely dead today, has claim to some of our most beautiful American music:

Both styles grew out of the same traditional folk and mountain music, one drawing inspiration from the native sound of the Southeast, the other the Southwest. By the 1940's, the styles were lumped together by radio stations and record producers, and Country Bear Jamboree, more "Out West" than "Down Home", mixes up the styles frequently even as, through the 1950s, Country began to evolve and Western began to decline. I think it's important to hear and know both Hillbilly and Cowboy music because this is what "Country" would've meant to the men who put the show together, whose impressions and memories of the music would've been formed before the 1940's.

The 1950's saw Country merge with the emerging Rock and Roll sound as well as another native American style, Blues, to form "Rockabilly", the style which made Elvis famous. From there, in the 60's onwards, the big record companies in Nashville began to push for slicker and glossier Country music standards, pushing the genre closer to the emerging Pop music scene. The instrumentation became denser, drums were introduced, backup vocalists, as well as anything else that would've made for a popular music sound of its era.

Country Bear Jamboree, and the music we'll be hearing today, date from pretty much the dead center of the shift towards a pop-rock sound, and many of the songs heard in the show are from the sixties - in 1971, most audiences would've recognized these songs from less than ten years ago. But the show itself has a more classical sound, most akin to bluegrass or the early "Hillbilly" records, which is part of the reason why it's played for so long - it quite literally is Your Grandfather's Country. In 1971, the show took popular music of its day and hauled it back towards its roots, demonstrating how very different sounding styles were in fact, at their root, related.

And Country Music kept changing. While Country Bear Jamboree was less than ten years old, Country had fully realized its merge with Pop with breakthrough records by artists like Dolly Parton and John Denver, who managed to get airplay on all radio stations regardless of audience. The style had mainstreamed its sound. By the late 80s and early 90s, most Country was indistinguishable from Pop except for the two-step or ballad arrangement and a few stringed instruments.

Additionally, culturally Country now meant a very different thing than it had in the 1960s. In the 80s, large numbers of rural AM radio stations which had previously specialized in "easy listening" began to switch to Country/Western full time in hopes of drawing in listeners thanks to the onslaught of FM radio. Urban and coastal audiences - those who didn't flee immediately upon seeing the word "Country" on the marquee at Disneyland and Walt Disney World - went inside and may have encountered something very different than they were expecting - if they thought about what they were hearing at all.

In the 80s, the growing rift of expectation and reality was "corrected" by a new generation of Imagineers with two new shows using the existing infrastructure of the Country Bear Theater: the "Christmas Special" and "Vacation Hoedown" in 1984 and 1986. The Christmas show in general, and the Vacation show in particular, seemed intended to draw California audiences back into the theater by both updating the presentation to reflect slick, modern Country-pop and introducing new styles of music, including Beach Boys and old standards like "Singin' in the Rain". Walt Disney World switched back to the original show almost immediately after a four-year run, but the Vacation Hoedown held on in California before belatedly closing in 2001. In 2012, the original show was cut by nearly a third in Walt Disney World. Both the Vacation and "digest" shows may have been masterminded by well-meaning and respectful creative teams, but neither does a show - that was always sort of a cult item - any favors.

Meet the Stonemans

One of the reasons the Marc Davis/Al Bertino show has dated so little has to do with the specific sound achieved by George Bruns in the recording of the performances and music, and much of that is attributable to the under appreciated performing group who brought the music to life, The Stonemans.

The Stonemans were, as of the late 60's, officially a performing group consisting of five to six members: Patsy Stoneman (autoharp), Van Stoneman (guitar), Roni Stoneman (banjo), Jimmy (upright bass), Donna Stoneman (mandolin), and sometimes Scotty Stoneman (fiddle). I'm being clear because the group included, up to 1968, bluegrass pioneer Ernest "Pop" Stoneman, a genuine Appalachian mountain music man who had a breakout success on the 1920's Hillbilly circuit with his song "The Sinking of the Titanic". Pop and his wife Hattie begot thirteen musical children, and depending on the era and record label any combination of them could be billed as "Pop Stoneman and Family", "Ernest Stoneman Family", "The Stoneman Family", and countless other variations. After Pop's death, the core group of five migrated to RCA records to become "The Stonemans", and it is this group, plus Scotty, who were hired by Disney to record the Bear Band music.

The Stonemans never fit well into the categories and market trends of the Nashville music industry; compared to the well-produced, slick product that dominated Country music in the 60's, the Stonemans seemed archaic. They continued to record their music much as Pop has taught them to play on the front porch of their Appalachian house; as a result, their music never quite evolved out of the Bluegrass/Hillbilly sound of the 1920's and 1930's.

The Stonemans got caught up in the folk/protest song movement of the 60s, and the sleeve of their most famous album, In All Honesty, wore hippie outfits while posing amidst the ruins of a battered barn. At the urging of youngest siblings Van and Joni, with probably no small influence from Bob Dylan, the Stonemans were mixing their traditionalist sound with sixties counterculture. The result has dated remarkably well. It's like folk music played at the clip of rock, Hippie Bluegrass:

The variety of skills, performers, and background of the Stonemans made them not only the best, but practically the only option for Disney back in 1970, and it is their specific, culturally unique sound that is the signature sound of the show, the most important thing that the later shows are missing. If you grew up with Country Bear Jamboree, it's surreal to hear a Stoneman record: it's almost impossible not to imagine Zeke, Zed, Ted, Fred and Tennessee playing the music. That's Roni "twangin' on banjo" for Zeke, Scotty on fiddle for Zed, and almost certainly Jimmy's signature upright bass, which once caused female fans to rush their stage in an attempt to touch the instrument, for Tennessee's one-stringed "Thing". Wendell's signature mandolin suddenly sounds more familiar. Many of the voices heard in the show even are provided by the Stonemans.

"I don't know how many labels anymore that Daddy was on, or how many names he used, but we recorded a lot of labels. You know that. We've done a lot of labels. The only two that's ever really paid us anything was a Disney/Vista record and Folkways. [...] We had to disguise our voices. They'd say, "Do it like you'd think a bear would do it," and that was it In fact, Mr. Roy Disney gave each one of us a Mickey Mouse watch. In fact, my husband wears it all the time. I still have mine. I wouldn't take a pretty penny for this."

 - Patsy Stoneman interviewed by Will Smith

Now that we've covered why the show sounds the way it does, it's time to get into the meat of the post: the original recordings that inspired Marc Davis and Al Bertino and what we can learn about the creation of Country Bear Jamboree from them.

Some of these records are not especially difficult to find; in these cases, I've included only a sample of the song - the section that made the final cut on Country Bear Jamboree - and encourage you to seek out the full track through whatever legal means are at your disposal. Others are completely obscure and don't appear to be available through any official channels and so appear here in full.

Also providing additional information is a list of musical numbers that appears to predate the final shape of the show; my copy has been heavily notated at a later date in preparation for the production of the Tokyo Disneyland version.

 Give me a little intro, there, Gomer.....

Pianjo! - Don Robertson - Monument MN45-964 1966

 One of two tracks licensed for Country Bear Jamboree and included in the final show, Pianjo! (which is indeed its name on the record) is a jaunty little ditty recorded by Elvis songwriter Don Robertson. Robertson was well known enough, but if he ever issued Pianjo on a compilation LP, I haven't found it. This version comes from a 45 rpm single intended for use on radio; the flip side is a bizarre track called "I Dreamed I Lost You" which leans heavy on electric organ.

This track is especially strange for longtime fans of the show, not just because the Robertson version is twice as long, but because Disney edited the track in 1970 to sound much more straightforward than Robertson's original, which circles and cycles around its melody in a rather jazzy, free form way.

Most of Marc Davis' character drawings for the show include the lyrics the characters was designed to express up in the corner, but Gomer is a noteworthy exception, and I would be interested in knowing if he was designed to fit Pianjo or if the track was found later on.

Following Pianjo, Bear Band Serenade begins, having been written by George Bruns and X. Atencio to set the mood. Although the LP hints at it, I don't think it's widely known that Pianjo was not written or even recorded specifically for the show - at least, I was surprised. Interestingly, this means that the first bit of original music for Country Bear Jamboree to be heard comes about a minute and a half into the show, which is an eternity for a show that moves as quickly as this does.

"Jethro" (left) and "Henry" (right)

Fractured Folk Song - Homer and Jethro - Fractured Folk Songs - RCA Victor LPM-2954 1964

Henry ("Homer) Haynes and Kenneth ("Jethro") Burns were the "Hillbilly" comedians who formed the basis of the Henry and Wendell dynamic of the first half of Country Bear Jamboree; Homer, on guitar, and Jethro, on mandolin, skewered every target, including themselves, with their hilarious patter all while attempting the Herculean task of picking out a simple tune.

Marc Davis seems to have based even the appearance of Wendell, in particular, on the musical comedians, down to the fact that one partner is significantly taller than the other - some things are just naturally funny, after all. Davis may have decided to switch up the dynamic a bit, or he may have just not been entirely clear on who was Homer and who was Jethro, because he seems to have based the face and character of Wendell on Jethro, the comedian of the two, although in reality, Henry was the short one:

What's most interesting for Country Bear Jamboree fans is that all of the patter at the top of Fractured Folk Song in the show comes direct of the Homer and Jethro record. Since Henry is referred to simply as the "M.C." in almost all of the internal materials for what was then known as Bear Band, it seems likely that his name actually comes from Henry "Homer" Haynes and may in fact be called Henry only so the (very funny) insults from the original record can be retained.

Homer and Jethro's "Fractured Folk Song" is especially funny, and it's worth hearing in its entirety, below.

My Woman Ain't Pretty - Tex Ritter - Tennessee Blues - Hilltop 6059 1968

Tex Ritter, one of the quintessential Singing Cowboys of the 30s and 40s, was branching out to Country, Blues and Gospel records thanks to the implosion of the Western music genre by the end of the 50s, and this record, on the "Hilltop" label, seems to be quite obscure.

Interestingly, although Tex sang two songs that ended up in the show, neither character which represents these songs as bears really resembles Tex in any way. Liver Lips, who's usually taken as a sort of Elvis parody, seems to be not an imaginative extrapolation of the performer as is the case of, say, Wendell being based on Kenneth Burns above, but instead an imagined version of who could be singing such a song. Bertino and Davis seem to have latched onto the song primary thanks to the comedy potential of the lyrics and then designed an outlandish character to match.

I think Liver Lips represents Blues in the show, a genre which has a lot of messy crossover with Country and Western, and which also famously launched Elvis' career, which may be why Davis chose to give Liver Lips his trademark cartoon snout.

Liver Lips is certainly extreme, but he's not an Elvis parody, which is just one of the points where the later shows seem to have seen only the most obvious joke. Elvis was trim, carefully groomed, and full of sexual allure in his era. Liver Lips is no Elvis; he's a ludicrous slob. He's full of bizarre touches such as the outrageous single-strap overalls and slingshot tucked in his back pocket. The laugh - and Liver Lips almost always gets one - has to do with his crazy appearance and funny song than any sort of similarity to any real performer in history. Neither Tex nor Elvis need be offended.

Mama Don't Whup Little Buford - Homer and Jethro - Fractured Folk Songs - RCA Victor LPM-2954 1964

Henry and Wendell return for yet another Homer and Jethro song, the second of what was originally three included in the show (more on the third later).

"Mama, Don't Whup Little Buford" is a one-note joke, and the show treats it as such - the original recording isn't much more complex, although it is longer, with explanations of Buford's criminal prowess, his strength ("Buford has been studying Judo / and he'll break your scrawny ol' neck"), and finally, how the family escapes Buford's reign of terror. It's funny, but Davis and Bertino wisely distilled the joke down to its shortest form.

Tears Will Be the Chaser For Your Wine - Wanda Jackson - Reckless Love Affair - Capitol ST-2704 1967

Wanda Jackson's "Tears Will Be the Chaser For Your Wine" represents the first of what could, at the time, be considered "modern" Country music in the show, although the arrangement by Bruns and the Stonemans mellows the song out enormously. Jackson's version is a much more aggressive two-step arrangement with all of the polish Capitol could muster.

Trixie is another character who only got the obvious joke in the Vacation and Christmas shows, where she was given big, brassy Aretha Franklin-style songs. Although Trixie is sometime treated like an extended fat joke (and Henry's introduction of her as "The Tampa Temptation" sets us up for one), once past the visual joke (one reinforced by having her perched on an absurdly tiny feminine little settee), Trixie is funny because of the dichotomy between her appearance and dainty, sad song and behavior. Elsewhere in Country Bear Jamboree, Davis and George Bruns use the energetic sound of the Stonemans and the bluegrass/country genre like a locomotive, to pull the show faster and faster towards the inevitable derailment (Big Al's appearance). Trixie's sad little song and gentle demeanor is the last time Country Bear Jamboree stops for a breath, and this careful attention to pace and structure is one of the things that sets the original show apart from its zanier but less interesting successors. This is one of the reasons Trixie is so memorable: a leftover from the old Mineral King resort show development, Davis seems to had real affection for sad Trixie, and the whole show settles into a gentle groove for her lament.



Next Time: the rest of the show!

Main Street USA 1976-1991 Evening

Pro Tip: Start here to help make sense of what follows.

In my previous post, one reason I was so concerned with verifying the authenticity of an (apparently) authentic music loop source was to provide a bedrock, base layer of reliable information. Thanks to years of speculation and misinformation, the waters have been muddied consistently on the subject of Main Street music, resulting in reconstructions based on false information and guessing and rumors. Once we do know what played at a certain place at a certain time, we at least have a concrete set of data to base our speculations on, as we will be doing in this very post.

Today the question revolves around whether or not Main Street USA at Magic Kingdom in Florida had two different background music loops, and what this means.

It's been assumed for years that Main Street had two different music loops, one for morning and one for evening, although it's impossible to guess where this information originally comes from. Slightly corroborating this idea, for many years Disneyland Paris' Main Street had an AM and PM loop, that park's Main Street being very closely based on the Magic Kingdom version. But information about the elusive PM loop remained obscure.

When I began researching Main Street music, there was one primary source for obscure background music information: Utilidors Audio Broadcasting, which is very good at posting files which circulate in the darkest corners of the collector's circuits.

One file they hosted split into several parts was labeled "Magic Kingdom 1972", which turned out to be identified as the Main Street BGM at Disneyland and Magic Kingdom 1976-1991, as established in my previous post and hereto called the "AM Loop". UAB also hosts this same AM loop, split into single songs, under the title "Disneyland Main Street Area Music (Uncertain Vintage)". It will take a Disneyland specialist to determine what exactly played at that park and when, although in my opinion the 1976 Main Street loop would've been installed at both theme parks in the same year.

UAB hosts yet another BGM identified as Main Street music, which they associate with Disneyland and the years 1969 - 1975. It is very similar to the AM Loop, but has many distinct differences, and was identified and compiled by Michael Sweeney based on the UAB copy. This mysterious second loop "Disneyland 1969-1975" is our subject today.

Now that the loop has been recompiled and most of it has been identified, there are two important characteristics of the "1969" loop that need to be clearly explained:

1) It's made up of different tracks from albums used to compile the "AM Loop"

Just as identified in the AM Loop, four albums form the backbone of the loop: the Gaslight Orchestra's Gay Ninties Waltzes, 30 Barbary Coast Favorites, and two Albert White albums, Your Father's Moustache Volumes 1 and 2 (published by the Barbary Coast label).

Confusingly, Albert White also published two other albums on the Fantasy record label, also called "Your Father's Moustache" but made up of different songs and recordings. Both of these albums - one of World War I songs called "Over There" and another billed "Your Father's Moustache in Hi-Fi" - are used in this "1969" loop.

Even further complicating matters, a few tracks used in the "AM Loop" also repeat here - "Good Old Timers" and "Silver Heels".

All of this helps to convince me that Jack Wagner compiled both of these loops at the same time, starting with the "AM Loop" and proceeding to this one. Having finished the AM loop, he seems to have had trouble with the "1969" loop, perhaps looking to find more music like the Gaslight Orchestra and Albert White albums, only to find two more Albert White albums of different material. Those of us who research background music can imagine his frustration.

This implies that the label "1969-1975" is obviously false. 1969 predates Wagner's involvement with Disney in selecting BGM loops, and given that this particular loop, if it is authentic, has Wagner's fingerprints all over it, it has to at least be 1970-1971. Allowing that it seems to be produced at the same time as the "AM Loop", I'm comfortable assigning this loop to the same 1976 time period.

2) The sound and tone of the music is quite different

If you own the Albert White albums proper, you know that listening to them in album order is a pretty frustrating experience. White jumps wildly from jazzy, wildly embellished standards to beautifully stately arrangements. What we can say about this mystery loop is that most of the Albert White pieces on it are of the much jazzier variety, and the loop overall pulls much more heavily from the honky-tonk 30 Barbary Coast Favorites album.

Largely, the "AM Loop" gets the stately, slow, dreamy tracks and this mystery loop gets the crazier jazz-era stuff. This is crucially important because this implies design intent, and design intent is what we are looking for here. If Wagner was looking for more jazz-era material from Albert White, this helps explain why he suddenly introduces tracks from two extra albums, almost as if he got frustrated and went back to the record shop.

Similarly, it's as easy to imagine Wagner needing just a few more tracks to round out the "AM Loop", leading him to think of music from his private record collection that fit the mood. This could explain why the tracks from "Donnybrook!" and the "Theme from Minnie's Boys" - both musical Broadway productions - ended up in the AM Loop. All three of the "Broadway" tracks appear one after another in the AM Loop, further implying that they were decided on all at once after Jack reached an impasse.

But what does the differing character of the two loops mean?

Well, it could be that one was intended for Disneyland and the other for Walt Disney World, but this seems unlikely to me. Although the two areas are aesthetically unique, they're tonally similar enough to make me think that Wagner wouldn't have bothered. We also know that the "AM Loop" played at Magic Kingdom most of the time and at Disneyland around the same time, leading me to conclude that this loop was compiled with something slightly different in mind.

It could be that the slower, more stately music is intended to cause pedestrians to slow down, admire the scenery, and just maybe... shop? Similarly, the jazz music at night, which is frankly very appropriate to the visual of Main Street's twinkling lights, could've been intended to get pedestrians up and stepping quickly, helping clear the park at the end of the day and keeping crowd circulating during the parade and fireworks.

Was the "mystery loop" intended to help crowd flow during the popular Main Street Electrical Parade? It's not as far fetched as it sounds, Wagner produced the music for the parade as well. The Electrical Parade returned in 1976 at Magic Kingdom and Disneyland following the final run of America on Parade, lending possible credence to a 1976 date.

The date, Wagner's fingerprints, and the design intent apparent in the resulting work itself convince me that this "mystery loop" is the legendary "PM Loop" for Magic Kingdom's Main Street, USA.

...But is it authentic?

Ay, there's the rub.

In an absolutely ideal situation, this loop would've been rebuilt from a live recording, but as it is it's been remarkably difficult to find evidence of this loop actually playing in park. Unlike the AM Loop, which everyone remembers, the "PM Loop" seems to have played only occasionally.

As it happens, I've come across some helpful clues on YouTube. Here is a 1982 home video where "Geraldine", a song occurring in the PM Loop but not the AM Loop, can be heard starting at 1:24. Disconcertingly, this video was shot not at night, but in the early morning. Thankfully, more concrete proof can be heard in this video from 1990, starting around 1:40, several continuous minutes of the PM Loop - at night - can be heard, starting with "Man on the Flying Trapeze" and continuing through "At A Georgia Camp Meeting", "Smokey Mokes", "Ida", and "Good Old Timers". This exactly matches the "PM Loop" gathered from UAB and pretty much fixes its probable authenticity.

Best of all, if we backtrack to the first part of the home video, as the family enters the Magic Kingdom, an AM-only track - "Strolling Thru the Park / Mary" - can clearly be heard, establishing that these two distinct loops played alongside each other at least as recently as 1990. By 1990, Jack Wagner had effectively retired from Disney, and since this is almost certainly a Wagner loop created alongside his "AM Loop", the chances of my mid-70s date being accurate are very good.

The question of why the PM loop is so obscure is harder to answer definitively, although it's not hard to guess. This was an era when theme park music was still run on 1" magnetic tapes and played out of speakers that were placed somewhat randomly around the park. EPCOT Center's BGM was far more sophisticated than Magic Kingdom's in that you could hear it almost everywhere and at consistent levels. In 1990, Magic Kingdom was just on the cusp of a wideranging refresh of their area music delivery system, switching to CD playback as well as replacing many vintage Wagner tracks with more modern loops from Tokyo and Paris.

This really just means that Magic Kingdom's system was low tech. Very low tech. By 1990, it was basically antiquiated compared to new systems in place at EPCOT Center, Tokyo Disneyland and Disney-MGM Studios. It's highly, highly doubtful that Disney synchronized two 1" magnetic tape machines to a clock just to play different pieces of music on Main Street at day and night back in 1976. This means that the playback probably had to be manually switched, perhaps by a Maintainence guy or a Parade tech. If we assume that human error was just as likely to forget to switch the BGM as not, and sometimes forget to switch it back in the morning, then the obscurity of the loop and the fact that we have some evidence that it sometimes played at times when it wasn't supposed to becomes less mysterious. As a result of all of the preceeding, I'm comfortable labeling the "Disneyland 1969-1975" Main Street music loop sourced from UAB as being the authentic Magic Kingdom Main Street USA PM Loop.

But now you're part of this thing, too, so listen to the music, look at the evidence, and make up your own mind.

Main Street USA Evening Version 1976 - 1991 
Running time: approx. 59.00


01. And the Band Played On [Edited] [2]  
02. Saxema [6]  
03. Saddle Back [6]
04. Poison Ivy Rag [3]  
05. Goodbye Broadway, Hello France [7]
06. Rose of No Man's Land [7]  
07. Everybody's Rag [3]  
08. The Old Grey Mare [6]  
09. Down at the Barbecue [8]  
10. I've Got Rings on My Fingers [3]  
11. Bedelia [3]  
12. Unknown A  
13. Unknown B  
14. Medley [3] 
      - a. Billy Boy
      - b. Tavern in the Town
     - c. Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight  
15. Grizzly Bear Rag [8]  
16. Honey Rag [3]  
17. Geraldine [8]  
18. Man on the Flying Trapeze [3]  
19. At a Georgia Camp Meeting [8]  
20. Smokey Mokes [8]  
21. Ida [3]  
22. Good Old Timers [5]  
23. Silver Heels [Edited] [5]  
24. Black and Blue Rag [Edited] [3]  
25. Polka by Request [8]

[2] Gay Nineties Waltzes by the Gaslight Orchestra (Somerset, P-3400)
[3] 30 Barbary Coast Favorites by San Francisco Harry & the Barbary Coast Bandits (Fantasy 3270)
[5] Your Father's Moustache, Vol. 1 by Albert White & the Gaslight Orchestra (Barbary Coast, M-33002) 
[6] Your Father's Moustache, Vol. 2 by Albert White & the Gaslight Orchestra (Barbary Coast, M-33008)  
[7] Your Father's Moustache, Vol. 1: Over There  by Albert White & the Gaslight Orchestra (Fantasy 3273)  
[8] Your Father's Moustache, Vol. 2 by Albert White & the Gaslight Orchestra (Fantasy 3292)
 
Compiled by and thanks to Michael Sweeney. 

Main Street USA 1976-1991 - Morning

Main Street USA Morning Version - 1976 to 1991
Run time: approx. 59 minutes

01. Frisco Rag [3]
02. Tammany Picnic [2]
03. Unknown
04. The Old Grey Mare [6]
05. Golden Arrow [6]
06. Sidewalks of New York [2]
07. Pretty Baby [6]
08. Mississippi Cabaret [6]
09. Strolling Through the Park / Mary [2]
10. 'Lasses Trombone [5]
11. Good Old Timers [5]
12. School Days [2]
13. Old Timers Waltz Medley [5]
14. Horse Cars [2]
15. Sweet Rosie O'Grady [2]
16. Silver Heels [Edited] [5]
17. Wisha Wurra [4]
18. Man With A Load of Mischief [7]
19. Theme from 'Minnie's Boys' [1] 
20. I Wouldn't Bet One Penny [4]
21. Medley [3]
  - a. Bird in a Gilded Cage
  - b. Two Girls
  - c. Good Old Summertime
22. Little Annie Rooney [2]
23. On a Sunday Afternoon [3]
24. Bicycle Built for Two [2]

[1] Appearing Nightly at the Piano by Merv Griffin (Metromedia 1023)
[2] Gay Nineties Waltzes by the Gaslight Orchestra (Somerset, P-3400)
[3] 30 Barbary Coast Favorites by San Francisco Harry & the Barbary Coast Bandits (Fantasy 3270)
[4] The Pete King Orchestra Plays the Music of Donnybrook by the Pete King Orchestra (Kapp, KL-1243)
[5] Your Father's Moustache, Vol. 1 by Albert White & the Gaslight Orchestra (Barbary Coast, M-33002) 
[6] Your Father's Moustache, Vol. 2 by Albert White & the Gaslight Orchestra (Barbary Coast, M-33008)
[7] Man With A Load of Music by Ralph Carmichael and his Orchestra (Kapp, KL-1518)

 

Main Street USA 1976-1991 AM by twilightflopple

Disentangling the Main Street, USA music proved more difficult than expected, largely because of the large amount of misinformation about this piece circulating in the public sphere.

The music that nearly everyone associates with the vintage Main Street music is represented by the playlist above which I believe began playing at Magic Kingdom in the mid-70s. Some who specialize in Disneyland music believe that the same playlist constitutes the 1971 Disneyland Main Street music. While I cannot prove or disprove that, I have my own theories about what played at Magic Kingdom from 1971-1975, to be discussed in a seperate post.

The backbone of the music loop is an excellent LP called The Gaslight Orchestra: Gay Nineties Waltzes, consisting of dreamily stately interpretations of American classics arranged by Joseph Kuhn. About evenly supplementing these are tracks from Albert White, which are arranged in a similar style. Albert White was an influence on the Paragon Orchestra, who provided the peppy Main Street music for Disneyland Paris which was used on all Main Streets from 1991-2012, meaning that this Wagner track very much set the Main Street "sound" which still reigns today. The current loop by Dean Mora is generally slower than the Paragon tracks, so in a way we have returned to the original Gaslight Orchestra "sound" of Main Street.

Many sites report that the original Main Street loop was comprised entirely of tracks by Albert White, from a list beginning with "Waiting on the Robert E. Lee". Some have even built restorations based on this list by pulling from the vintage LPs. Although there are some authentic selections to be found amongst that list, the list is entirely false. The error sprung up due to the nature of the early collector's circles. Starting in the late 80s, a few "mix tapes" of selections of Albert White tracks, with the authentic Main Street selections on one side of the tape and assorted other cues from the records on the other, began being circulated. As the tapes were copied and re-copied from one fan to the next, it was forgotten that these were mix tapes representing some of the music, not actual tape masters. The "Robert E Lee" playlist seems to have re-compiled from these tapes at some later date.

Because of this, it was extra important for me to make certain that my list above was accurate. Besides consulting home videos, I was able to confirm this as an authentic loop based on a live recording generously provided by Mike Lee. Those who have grown accustomed to the false "Robert E Lee" playlist restorations will find this authentic Main Street music loop be vastly more consistent in character, appropriate to Main Street, and enjoyable to listen to. This version is a transfer that appears to come from a reel-to-reel tape provided by Mike Lee, who got it from Todd Beckett.

This list was compiled by Michael Sweeney. Thanks to him, as well as Mike Lee and Mike Cozart for their invaluable assistance in figuring this one out.

And for those of you trying to track down records for your own restoration effort, or for those simply curious, Donnybrook! was a 1961 musical by Johnny Burke and Robert McEnroe based on, of all things, John Ford's The Quiet Man. I don't know if it's more difficult to explain why there's a musical based on The Quiet Man or what on earth the music was doing playing on Main Street. But as we will soon see, these tracks, plus the Merv Griffin one, will prove to be important clues as we move ahead....

[Edited May 11, 2013 to add "Man With A Load of Mischief" to the list; thanks to "Ralphdude" at MouseBits.com Forums]

A Brief Introduction to Early WDW Music

This post is intended to be exactly what the title states: a brief overview. Those who have downloaded and read my expanded notes to A Musical Souvenir of Walt Disney World will already be well ahead on this topic, but for the rest of my readers some preliminaries are in order.

Starting shortly on this blog I'm going to begin an ongoing series about the music which constituted the very earliest in-park background music, or BGM, at the Magic Kingdom as well as topics relating to it.

It's generally my goal to allow others to disprove me, if necessary, in future research, so consider this the start of a paper trail in which I'm going to reveal some very specific and obscure information. Please remember: myself, and my friends who helped me gather, compile and post this information, are human too, and can and possibly have made mistakes. Some of the conclusions you'll see me coming to could probably not be defended in a court of law and are based on interpretation of certain known factors. As you'll shortly be seeing, even sometimes obvious conclusions can turn out to be very, very wrong in the strange, murky world of early theme park background music.

So what is early background music and how do we know about it? It's time to...

Meet Jack Wagner
If you spent any time going to Walt Disney World or Disneyland in the 70s, 80s, or 90s you know that Jack Wagner's voice was ubiquitous. You heard this man's voice everywhere. Inside monorails, Peoplemovers, at ticket booths, during ride breakdowns, for parade announcements, and more. His voice is the one which, having been run through a synthesizer, provides the opening announcement for the Main Street Electrical Parade. Jack Wagner also voices the two most famous bilingual safety announcements of all time: "Please stand clear of the doors. Por favor manténganse alejado de las puertas" and "Remain seated please; permanecer sentados por favor."

Wagner had been an actor, a radio player, and a disc jockey. Of interest to Disneyland fans is his long-running “Silver Platter Service” pre-recorded radio broadcasts of performances and interviews with Capitol Records performing artists, which are very much like the well-rounded audio experiences he would craft for Disney. Wagner’s experience in radio, voice over, music rights and clearances and compilations made him uniquely suited to what Disney was asking him to do. In fact, his one-man operation was completely unique in the industry.

"But there is more to Wagner's unusual occupation than discoursing for Disney. His voice has proven so distinctive that a growing number of corporations, police departments, airports and schools are paying to use it for their own purposes.

Wagner also is a versatile sound engineer with a knack for shortcuts and money-saving recording techniques that have made him popular among producers in the growing field of taped musical productions and video marketing presentations.

The same voice that tells the Tinkerbell story each night also hawks everything from weapons systems to pharmaceutical equipment.

For example, it was Wagner's voice, recorded against a backdrop of James Bond music, that pitched to Pentagon officials a proposal to purchase dune buggies loaded with rocket launchers and machine guns for desert warfare. The armored vehicles are made by International Ordnance Systems, a Los Angeles defense contractor. Hardly the stuff of bedtime fairy-tales." Los Angeles Times, June 10, 1988

 Walt Disney Productions outfitted Jack’s Anaheim ranch house fully with sophisticated audio and video recording apparatus wired directly to Disneyland. If Disneyland was to close early that day due to rain or fog, Wagner could create a new recording to be played in the park in his on-site recording studio and it could be playing inside Disneyland within minutes. He recorded announcements about ticket prices, special programming, events, and attraction spiels. His voice was the voice of Disneyland, and it would soon become the voice of Walt Disney World, too.

But Jack's influence stretched even further than that. Although Disney hired Wagner in 1970 as a contractor to act as their in-house announcer, his tasks also came to include overseeing practically all musical components of the Disney outdoor entertainment empire.

Working from his house, Jack Wagner essentially invented the idea of theme park background music as we know it today and set many of the stylistic conventions. There almost certainly was music that played at Disneyland in Walt's era, such as the Tiki Room "Lanai music", "When You Wish Upon a Star" inside Sleeping Beauty Castle, and the dozens of unique soundtracks and sound effects for the attractions. Still, there were then and remain areas of Disneyland with no formal continuously running musical underscore, such as Tomorrowland and New Orleans Square, but the Magic Kingdom in Florida was intended from the start to have continual orchestral accompaniment in every area. This was Wagner's task, and very possibly why he was hired in the first place.

Record from the Disneyland Sound Archive shows Wagner's notations for Tokyo Disneyland selections

Wagner's job was to work directly with record companies on behalf of Disney to clear specific pieces of music for broadcast inside a theme park - and he must have gotten them for good terms, because some of those pieces he cleared back in the 70s still play on today. Checking off tracks on the back of record sleeves, Jack obtained the clearances for his desired pieces of music - sometimes entire albums, sometimes just a single song. From there he would compile these pieces of music onto reels of magnetic tape, each following a specific theme... "Marches", "Polynesian", "Ragtime", etc. When Disney asked for a new piece of music to play at a specific shop, venue or even special event, all Jack had to do was work off his reels of cleared music and put together a new piece of BGM, or "music loop".

The masters were delivered directly to the Disneyland Sound Department in the Carousel of Progress building, who then would either send the magnetic tape off to Florida or start transferring the music themselves. Masters would wear out over time, requiring Wagner to compile new masters based on his notes or to come up with new pieces of BGM. As these magnetic tapes were retired or thrown out, they would circulate into the hands of collectors, which is how some of the early BGM tracks reach us today.

The broadcast standard for music had shifted throughout the 50s - as the complexity of radio broadcasts increased, it became impractical to have a half dozen turntables simply to play radio spots and station ads, and by the 60s the broadcast standard had become magnetic tape audio carts, like the Fidelipac one seen at the right. These could be custom cut to any length, would repeat endlessly, and were cue able by means of electronic tones which could either stop the tape, start it back up, or cue a second audio cart to start playing. This media format provided the recorded narration for monorails, ferry boats, show breakdowns, and more.

According to a 1969 press release, RCA contributed all of the speakers and playback devices used in the construction of Walt Disney World. Whether or not this is true (it was RCA themselves making the announcement, after all), and you can be sure that at least some of those devices were built to Disney's exact specifications. Below is a bank of custom machines based on the Fidelipac model below ground at the Magic Kingdom. These machines, each processing a single reel of magnetic tape capable of housing many channels of sound, could be synchronized to control the audio of a single complex attraction like Pirates of the Caribbean. They're something like extremely fancy variants of  familiar 8-track tape decks.

Custom audio cart playback machines in Magic Kingdom's DACs Central, mid 70s

Music that did not need to be kept synchronized was treated differently. Disneyland and Walt Disney World used the more familiar one-inch reel-to-reel tapes for in-park music. BGM has always been (and remains) mono sound, because Disney liked to use each stereo channel of a magnetic tape for different pieces of background music - the Main Street USA and Main Entrance music, for example, emanated from the left and right channels of a single reel of magnetic tape stored beneath the train station at Disneyland. The "banjo music" and "haunted caverns music" in Pirates of the Caribbean played from the same tape, and this remained the case even during the CD conversion of the 90s and the data chips which play theme park music today.

(Thanks to ColanderCombo, in the comments below, for helping clarify this section)


Interpreting Data
It's important to have this information handy because otherwise one could incorrectly interpret the extremely mystifying sets of data offered by some of these early background music loops. For example, because Wagner liked to create hour-long pieces of music for most of this career, one could conclude that some of the early loops are fraudulent or incomplete because they're also not an hour long.

In reality, because the in-park magnetic tapes were custom cut for each piece, they could be and often were any old length. The one-hour convention - still adhered to today - seems to have developed for two reasons. The first is that Wagner liked to use Scotch magnetic tapes to deliver his audio masters to Disneyland, no doubt because of the machine he had at his disposal back home. These tapes could house thirty minutes of music playing forwards and another thirty minutes playing backwards. The more songs he licensed, the more he could charge Disney for his services - so Jack had good incentive to fill the whole tape.

Reel from Jack's archive - WaltsMusic.Com

The one-hour convention isn't necessarily a technological limitation on Disney's part. As technology has changed, the way these BGM loops are constructed has changed. Many hotels at Walt Disney World use CD changers loaded with six CDs set to "random", resulting in six to eight hour background loops of no particular "order". Other hotels seem to have licensed many many hours of music tracks, arranged them alphabetically by title in iTunes, and called it a day.

Wagner was at least extremely scrupulous in his selections and often eclectic in his tastes. Once one has had enough experience retracing Wagner's steps, you start to be able to suss out what his methods were. As a result, I can offer these general principles I try to follow when looking at Wagner's early-era background loops:

- No choice is too obscure. If Wagner liked the sound of a piece of music, he would license it, and sometimes only it. Some of his choices are extremely surprising, such as playing "Theme From Minnie's Boys" from the album Appearing Nightly at the Piano by Merv Griffith on Main Street, USA. Jack seems to have loved that one, dropping it into his Main Street loops for Disneyland, Magic Kingdom, and Tokyo Disneyland. It fits very well. Who knew?

- Reuse, Reuse, Reuse. Once Wagner had completed a loop to his satisfaction, he rarely saw need to change it. Of all the areas in the Magic Kingdom, Tomorrowland's music changed the most between 1971 and 1993 - three times. In the mid-70s as Wagner increased the length and ambition of several pieces of music, even then he went out of his way to expand out the existing loops to a full hour. Some pieces of music repeated several times across the two parks and hotels. Pieces of music which appeared in the 1971 Sunshine Pavilion BGM track pop up again in the Disneyland Tiki Room Lanai loop for 1976. Pieces of music already recorded and owned by Disney were always used, such as the Main Entrance loop which pulled heavily from titles in the Disneyland Records portfolio. In many ways Wagner was extremely economical in his choices.

- Expand, not contract. Similar to the point above, but still worth noting: Wagner generally reused as much of his early work as possible. it's therefore possible to find traces of earlier loops in more recent ones, such as the bones of the 1973 Frontierland loop in the 1976 one. His 1989/1990 "New Age" Tomorrowland track supplied music still used today at Epcot - and which had its roots in music licensed and compiled for Tokyo Disneyland in 1983.

- No BGM was too obscure. This is a dangerous game to play, but it seems that Wagner created more loops than are strictly necessary, simply because Disney paid him as a contractor per work done. As a result he put together BGM loops for almost every shop and every restaurant at Disneyland and Walt Disney World - unique ones. As the BGM playback system modernized in the late 80s, many of these loops were removed and replaced with the general area music. This may help explain why we sometimes run into hints of things like two Adventureland Veranda loops - he made more than was needed.

It's a ludicrously complex maze, and one I'm still navigating. In the best situations, we have consistent loops from multiple sources and eras and dated live recordings. Tokyo Disneyland, which has changed their music the least of all the Disney parks and still uses many Wagner compilations from 1983, is also a useful source and one which is very well documented. Home videos on YouTube are invaluable clues. In the worst, you'll see me doing some "informed speculation". We may never know all the answers, but I do hope to dispel some longstanding rumors and provide an interesting glimpse at the sound of early Walt Disney World.

Hope to hear you soon!

Where it all happened... Jack Wagner's Anaheim "Studio". Set on Imagur

A Long Look at Tom Sawyer Island

Tom Sawyer Island is one of the very best attractions at Magic Kingdom.

Yes, you read that correctly. At Magic Kingdom, the park that contains the highest number of attractions per square acre that represent why people go to that crazy Walt Disney World anyway, in a park featuring such brilliant and hauntingly beautiful creations as the Haunted Mansion and 1971 Jungle Cruise, a low-tech oddity like Tom Sawyer Island can still go up against timeless classics and the newest of the new.

I sometimes hear scoffs about that, but it's always from people who haven't seen Tom Sawyer Island, which is not the same as saying they haven't been - because to see Tom Sawyer Island means it has to seep into you, you have to let it into dark spaces where your mind doesn't often travel. One can raft across to the island, disembark, walk around for twenty minutes and leave without actually seeing a darn thing - without looking past the tip of her nose.

Tom Sawyer Island is essentially a collection of low-tech gags that build to an imaginative space of astonishing richness. Many of the gags could've been thought up and installed by almost any theme park - but they weren't. Like the best Disney special effects, the disarming transparent simplicity of the Island gags encourage our imaginations to fill in the blanks - and that's how it gets to us.

Tom Sawyer Island is one of the very last flowerings of a primal mode of themed design representation which most closely resembles a magic trick - rather, misdirection. A speaker and light in the right place can populate a cave with Pirates, or a staircase rising to a sealed door creates an imaginary room. These simple images engage our conscious imagination and create highly pleasurable illusions. This is, to me, what themed design is all about at its best - the scribble in the margin that so enriched rides like Horizons and If You Had Wings. The Island is rich with texture and detail, from the uneven "earth" pathways to the rock-edged waterfalls and babbling brooks.

Tom Sawyer Island is a fantastic place to observe one of the major structural concepts which underlines every Disneyland-style theme park: the dynamic of control versus chaos. Disney creates real-feeling environments where, unlike our unordered cities or uncivilized countrysides, everything has been placed for specific aesthetic effect - from the tiniest white rock to the color of the water in the fake lakes. This effect is especially pervasive at Walt Disney World, where everything as far as the eye can see both inside and outside the theme parks has been placed there by Disney. But while this is pleasing and reassuring, it's also unnatural, and part of our mind draws back. To contrast this  uncanny effect, Disney creates spaces inside their attractions where their orderly world appears to break down and Things Go Horribly Wrong.

Of course, just as it's a carefully controlled illusion of perfection in the theme park, it's a carefully controlled illusion of peril - Brer Fox is an animated chunk of metal and fiberglass and nobody has yet perished from riding a log down Chikapin Hill. Just as we suspend our disbelief in admiration as we walk down Main Street, we suspend our disbelief in gratitude as we pretend to think we're in danger on Big Thunder Mountain.

There are few attractions where the sense of rules having been suspended is as pervasive or effective as it is on Tom Sawyer Island, especially in those caves, where we almost think that we won't make it out again. The Magnetic Mystery Mine, where physics become disturbingly unhinged, or the Escape Tunnel, which is narrow enough to give many adults momentary panic attacks. We run, saunter, shput, tremble, snooze, or daydream on Tom Sawyer Island - we tromp through the flowerbeds, get wet, step off the pathways, shoot fake guns, and generally get away with things. And there are few places where we feel as genuinely unchaperoned- and alone.

Why does Tom Sawyer Island feel so uninhibited? Part of it, I suspect, is symbolic - we take a raft to get there, and therefore experience a physical transition to another place - we feel as though we're outside the theme park, and no longer governed by its rules. Thus the (highly engineered, it's worth noting) adventures we experience take on an ominous undercurrent - not because they are dangerous, but they could be. Just as Mark Twain wrote a fantasy version of his childhood from the perspective of an adult, Tom Sawyer Island zips us right back to the "once upon a time" of a dimly remembered childhood afternoon when we went exploring - an ingrained cultural memory that maybe very few of us ever actually did. But it's a evergreen myth - from Tom Sawyer to Little Nemo to Stand By Me and The Goonies.

No other attraction makes exclusive use of daylight in quite the same way, which is probably why Tom Sawyer Island closes at dusk - although at Magic Kingdom, in particular, a very large number of lights and lanterns have been positioned on the island to illuminate it at night so that it appears to be real place, or at least enough of a real place to have a continued existence after we leave it. But maybe Tom Sawyer Island is most impressive for being basically unlit - scenes like Harper's Mill ask us to step into dim rooms and strain to make out the details - just as in life. Even the caverns mostly refrain from theatrical lighting - if we see a light, it's from a lantern or a torch. The rest is allowed to fall off into obscurity.There is also a remarkably simplistic sound design - next to no music, and the bulk of the sound effects are motivated by a source that can be seen. If we hear birds, they probably are real birds. This contributes to the feeling of being unrehearsed and overall quite different than the carefully crafted, lit, and scored world of the rest of the theme park in general.

These reasons alone are enough to argue for the continued preservation of this remarkable attraction, but, as always, there are more.

Although it probably seemed a lot less special in 1973, today Old Scratch's Mystery Mine is notable for being a very well preserved example of a homespun American original - an attraction which once proliferated across the country and made good use of simple perspective tricks - the Mystery Hill or Mystery Spot. The most famous one still operating today is in Santa Cruz, California, although Old Scratch's Mystery Mine is more likely inspired by the Haunted Shack at Knott's Berry Farm.

The Mine is a creative interpretation of this traditional roadside attraction, as well. Since the attraction has no host or guide which is required for the various scale and perspective illusions of something like the Knott's Haunted Shack, the Disney version uses visual and sensory grammar to make sense of its illusions. An entry tunnel gradually increases in pitch although its walls appear to remain upright, making the audience feel as if they are being pulled to the left, while an ominous humming, the sound of the mystery magnets, can be heard. Inside the main room, a sluice placed under a trickle of water seems to run uphill into a barrel, and a small indoor waterfall becomes a river running upstream towards a formation of jewels which juts out of the wall, shaped like the profile of a man. The entire room is tilted, making travel unsteady and forcing viewers to lean towards the magnetic jewels. The final room is a variation on a traditional scene in classic dark rides such as those by Bill Tracy - the diminishing mine shaft, where visitors appear to grow larger as they reach the end.

Aunt Polly's in better days, Photo by Al Huffman

Old Scratch's Mystery Mine is, as far as I know, the only "mystery spot" ever built by Disney, and that alone makes it worthy of preservation. Tokyo Disneyland got a version of the Disneyland Island in 1983, after which the attraction stopped being built. Disney literally does not make them like this anymore.

But the entire attraction overall is remarkably unchanged since June 1973, and that itself is a wonder. We can pretty much account for the changes on one hand:

 - The "Explorer's Maps" are no longer handed out at the entrance, although a number of metal versions have been placed around the island to aid navigation.

- After years of spotty service, in 2001 the sign was finally removed from Aunt Polly's Refreshments, meaning the closure of this simple snack stand. In the early days it sold cold sandwiches and soda, and later expanded to include things like potato salad and cold fried chicken.

 - The Cantina in the Fort is no longer the place to go for frozen lemonade. I personally have no memory of this ever being open, so its demise may have been far earlier than Aunt Polly's.

 - The extremely cool "spinning rocks" playground was removed and an off-the-shelf playground designed to look like a "salvage fort" was added a few years earlier. Thankfully, we can still see it being enjoyed by children in pyjamas in the late 80's souvenir video "A Day at the Magic Kingdom".

Left: the merry go round, Right: the teeter-totter / Photos by Al Huffman, 1999

This places Tom Sawyer Island in extremely select company at Magic Kingdom, alongside the Riverboat and Peter Pan's Flight and It's a Small World and the Peoplemover as attractions which substantively have never changed. Who in 1973 would've guessed that Tom Sawyer Island would outlast Country Bear Jamboree or the Tiki Room in their original forms? In June of this year, it will have gone forty blessed years without so much as a Pirate intervention.

Which means it's no time like the present to start documenting it. I recently spent several days on the Island trying to document those things likely to be overlooked when and if the time comes to close it - the winding paths and trails and picnics areas on the hills over Injun Joe's Cave and the two ponds which open into slow moving waterfalls, the Hangman's Steps and Gallows Getaway and Hickory Switch Hill and textures and tones and impressions of a few hours exploring.

It's not intended to be a fast-moving overview, but rather an opportunity to explore and contemplate an attraction rich in fascinations. In other words it's meant to document some of the pleasures I find in this attraction and perhaps preserve something of the atmosphere if the time ever does come to close it.

Why do I think Tom Sawyer Island stands high among WED Enterprises' finest creations? Because it both requires and supplies imagination - a little bit goes a long way. It's the retreat inside the retreat - the ritualistic crossing on the raft, the swaying of rocking chairs, the dapple light through the trees becomes a space which perhaps supplies little if we are not willing to stop, look, and listen, but becomes tremendously real and hauntingly deep. Harper's Mill and Potter's Windmill and Fort Langhorn feel as ancient and real today as anything at Walt Disney World, and the effect can be spooky as well as transcendent - like the rest of the Magic Kingdom was just built around it, and there it remains as it has for perhaps a hundred and fifty years.

That's a convincing illusion. And Tom Sawyer Island, untouched these forty years, still has the power to circulate wild and indomitable energies and rich imaginative constructs, a graceful and lingering prose poem that draws its energy from the lapping of the river which surrounds it - the Magic Kingdom's most successful and beautiful lament for the spirit of a bygone time.