by Maxwell King
Music was always a lifeline and an inspiration for Fred Rogers. As a young man, he’d often retreat from his parents’ parties upstairs to his room, to his puppets and music. Rogers had the opportunity to infuse his show with music on nearly every level. His signature opening song, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor,” one of his most iconic and lasting achievements, is still sung today by longtime fans.
As he wrote to a viewer in 1984: “I think that of all the things I do, the thing I like best is composing music for the program. And I’ve liked musical expressions ever since I was a young boy. I remember playing the organ every Christmas Eve at our house on Weldon Street. Dad always put the soundbox out on the street so that people driving or walking by could hear the Christmas carols and other music I was playing. I have such good musical memories from childhood. That’s probably one major reason why I enjoy music so much today: The adults in my young life helped me to know what value there was in things musical.”1
For thirty-three years, Fred Rogers asked millions of “television neighbors” if it was a beautiful day in their neighborhood. The many other songs he wrote for the show, two hundred in all, as well as the musical interludes, weren’t just for the children in the audience: They were key outlets for Fred Rogers’s emotions, as well as a creative wellspring.
The crew on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood reported that when Fred became frustrated, even a little angry—most often when technological glitches would interfere with producing just the scene or sequence he was looking for—he would leave the puppet stage, move over to the piano, and just start playing. Sometimes it was quiet music, sometimes loud and powerful.
Rogers’s longtime secretary Elaine Lynch recalls an incident that caused Fred Rogers to erupt in a most uncharacteristic manner: “I remember specifically when Dr. McFarland’s health was failing, one of the things that Fred did was to audiotape their sessions so that he would have them to refer to. And he came in one afternoon, and he was so angry, and he was punching the machine and he was saying words I won’t even repeat. And he was just upset because . . . one of the most important parts in their conversations together—and he did not know it until he tried to play it back—was not coming through on the tape. So I took the recorder and the tape from him, and I said, ‘Let me see what we can do.’”2
Lynch managed to get a transcript of that part of the conversation from a local audio-recording company. And Fred took solace in his music.
From time to time, Johnny Costa would come over and play the piano with Fred. Always the crew and staff listened raptly, enjoying the break. And everyone understood that this was Fred’s way of coping.
Rogers once replied to a young viewer’s letter with an explanation of how important managing one’s feelings can be: “You wondered if I ever get angry.
“Of course I do; everybody gets angry sometimes. But, Alex, each person has his and her way of showing angry feelings. Usually, if I’m angry, I play loud and angry sounds on the piano. . . . I think that finding ways of showing our feelings—ways that don’t hurt ourselves or anybody else—is one of the most important things we can learn to do.”3
As an adult, Rogers reflected on the fact that music was his emotional refuge growing up: “I was always able to cry or laugh or say I was angry through the tips of my fingers on the piano. I would go to the piano, even . . . when I was five years old, and start to play how I felt. It was very natural for me to become a composer.”4
Dealing with anger was a topic Fred Rogers addressed frequently. As he explained in a 1974 letter to a brother and sister in Pennsylvania, “If I couldn’t allow myself to feel angry, then I would never be able to let out the happy feelings when I am happy.
“Sometimes children think that feeling angry with another person can hurt them, but it can’t. It’s only the things we do when we are angry that can hurt.”5
Then he sends the young fans a song called “Freedom.”
In a tribute documentary about Rogers hosted by Michael Keaton that aired on PBS in 2004, Fred Rogers observes that he found solace and an outlet for his emotions in music, because he didn’t want to voice things that would make him “a bad boy.”6
Rogers often spoke in more personal and revelatory terms in speeches, perhaps because of his ability to connect to an audience, as a preacher might from the pulpit. He used his own life experiences to illuminate his many very human struggles.
For example, when he finally addressed the traumatic incident in which he was bullied and chased home from school, he shared the moment full of feeling: “I resented the pain. I resented those kids for not seeing beyond my fatness or my shyness, and what’s more I didn’t know that it was all right to resent it, to feel bad about it, even to feel very sad about it. I didn’t know it was all right to feel any of those things, because the advice I got from the grown-ups was ‘just let on you don’t care, then nobody will bother you.’
“Let on you don’t care! . . . I felt I had no friends, and I was told to let on that I didn’t care.”7
Fred told this story in two speeches, first in 1995 at the Saint Vincent Archabbey in Latrobe, and then in 1997 at the Memphis Theological Seminary—trusted settings. In these addresses, he has chosen to lower his guard, and he uses the story of Fat Freddy to talk about the ways in which he was shaped by the experience of suffering: “What I actually did was mourn,” he continues. “I cried to myself whenever I was alone. I cried through my fingers as I made up songs on the piano. I sought out stories of other people who were poor in spirit, and I felt for them.”8
Latrobe’s richest child, with prominent parents, found common ground with others in far less advantageous material circumstances. The emotional release and comfort Fred Rogers found in music propelled many of his creative choices.
Besides the many songs Rogers wrote for Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, he also composed thirteen operas over the show’s thirty-three-year run. And his delight in hosting performers like Tony Bennett, Rita Moreno, Mabel Mercer, and Van Cliburn was palpable in special “guest” segments. In Bennett’s surpassingly charming 1975 appearance on “MGR-TV” (Lady Elaine Fairchilde’s mock television studio in the Museum-Go-Round, where she interviews special guests in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe), Bennett sketches Lady Elaine, dolled up in a pink boa, before launching into a hard-swinging rendition of “It’s You I Like.” She swoons appreciatively.9
When Wynton Marsalis and the Neighborhood band tear into an instrumental version of the same song in a 1985 show, it’s clear that Fred Rogers’s music stands alone brilliantly, even without his heartfelt lyrics.
Joe “Handyman” Negri, the show’s first musical advisor, notes that Fred Rogers’s emphasis was often on a song’s “lesson”: “Fred wrote in a very simplistic harmonic way. For ‘It’s You I Like,’ he would write chords in C major.
“Johnny [Costa] and I would do it differently, with chord changes that made it totally sophisticated, with a jazz quality to it. If I would play you ‘It’s You I Like’ in a folk style, it would be very simple. Johnny would add chords, and I would get my shot to add sophisticated harmonies, which really changed the whole picture, and made it much more of a jazz composition.
“There’s a song that he [Fred] wrote—and I think Josie Carey might have had a hand in this one—‘Once Upon a Lovely Day’: ‘Once upon a lovely day / Your song comes along . . .’ It’s one of my favorites. And again . . . Fred wrote it with a very, very plain—as we say in the music business, ‘vanilla’ harmony—meaning just basic chords, no substitutions, nothing fancy added. Johnny and I would take that song and we would make it a lot richer with the harmonic changes.”10
Special musical guest Wynton Marsalis grew up watching Fred Rogers’s show: “It was always on a few of the PBS channels in New Orleans, Channel 26. He [Fred Rogers] was love.
“You thought that the show was not real, you know, just a show. He’s not actually like that. But when I came to Pittsburgh, when I arrived, from the person who picked me up, till I
came to the show . . . I’d never heard that many people speak positively, with such genuine love and kindness, toward a person that they worked for. I’d never experienced that . . . even to this day. From my initial contact with the show to being on the set, everybody else would talk about how great Fred was. And it wasn’t like they were programmed; it was so honest and open.
“Then when I met him . . . it was an unbelievable pleasure to see that he was exactly as he was on the TV show. He was patient, calm, generous.”11
Joe Negri also notes that jazz trombone player Joe Dallas came into his music store on the Neighborhood, as did Nathan Davis, head of jazz at the University of Pittsburgh at the time: “So there was a lot of jazz, even besides Wynton.”12
A noted composer, virtuoso performer, and college instructor of jazz guitar, Joe Negri says: “I really would have liked to have done a lot more musically on the show. In fact, I asked specifically if I could be part of Johnny’s combo . . . but I was turned down. I honestly think that it was a matter of money. If I would have done that, they would have had to pay me two salaries, an actor’s salary, and a musician’s salary. They didn’t want to do that: that’s my own personal feeling as to why I was turned down.”13
Wynton Marsalis has a different take on whether Fred Rogers should have featured musicians like Joe Negri and Johnny Costa more prominently: “That’s like when you serve me spaghetti, and I say, ‘Man, it sure would be nice if we had sushi.’
“Or I go for some sushi and then I say, ‘Well, sushi is great, but I thought we were having a hamburger.’
“First of all, his show [the Neighborhood] was so original, exposing people to the music, with the greatest musicians he could find, and the players that he found were fantastic. They functioned on the show the way that no other group functioned on a TV show then, except maybe on The Tonight Show. They had a lot of great musicians on there before Johnny Carson. What other kids’ show had music on that level?
“So I would never go to that. I would say it was fantastic that he featured them.”14
A few years after Wynton’s 1986 appearance, his father, Ellis, and three of Wynton’s musician brothers also appeared on the Neighborhood on an episode about fathers and music. With Ellis on piano, Branford on sax, Delfeayo on trombone, and a very young Jason on drums, the Marsalis family, accompanied by Joe Negri on guitar and Carl McVicker on upright bass, rip into a swinging version of another Fred Rogers composition, “Something Isn’t Always.”
Oldest brother Branford also reflects on the lessons they learned from their father, not necessarily about music per se, but about how to treat other people, and how to carry themselves in the world. “This has a profound effect on what we play musically,” he tells Mister Rogers, who says approvingly: “You’re playing from your heart.”15
In the thirteen operas he composed for the Neighborhood, truly inventive flights of lyrical fancy, Fred Rogers had an opportunity to show the full range of his creative whimsy. Every winter he would go down to Florida to work with Johnny Costa on new material. Rogers wrote the music as well as the lyrics, but as noted by Chuck Aber, “Johnny put it all together.”16
The two would compile audio tapes to send back to the cast in Pittsburgh, with Rogers singing the songs. Aber observes that “those of us who read music didn’t necessarily need the tapes. But you would hear how it all would come together, and what Fred was looking for.”
The two men, Rogers and Costa, from vastly different class and ethnic backgrounds, got along swimmingly. As Betty Aberlin observes, “He [Johnny] was like pepper, and Fred was salt.”17 (In 1996, beloved musical director Johnny Costa died of cancer. For the rest of the Neighborhood’s run, the role was taken on by Michael Moricz.)
Fred Rogers’s operas, often wacky and highly imaginative, showcased his musical abilities as well as the talents of his cast. Early productions such as Babysitter Opera (1968), The Three Bears (1968), Campsite Opera (1968), and Lost and Found Teddy Bear (1969) were set in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, presented by the usual mix of puppets and cast members. In Campsite Opera, for example, X the Owl is given the role of a visiting Ben Franklin. And the lost teddy bear in the 1969 production is Daniel Striped Tiger, playing the lead.
The rotating casts included John Reardon, an accomplished baritone with the Metropolitan Opera in New York, who’d known Fred Rogers since their student days at Rollins College in Florida, as well as other members of the Neighborhood’s core troupe, such as Betty Aberlin, Don Brockett, Chuck Aber, Joe Negri, Audrey Roth, Bob Trow, François Clemmons, and Michael Horton, a trained opera singer who was behind the scenes doing puppet voices.
In an opera called Grandad for Daniel, Horton’s puppet Betty Okonak Templeton-Jones played a starfish: “In her puppet voice, I had to explore upper registers that weren’t in my normal voice.”18
Horton reflects on the camaraderie that developed among the key players on the operas: “The fun for me was working with Audrey [Roth] and Don Brockett, although they complained incessantly about being stuck in those costumes. [I valued] any chance I had to be around the people that worked on the program—especially Betty, whom I met and became very close to, very early on. We traveled back and forth together from New York. . . .
“It was interesting to see just the process of how it worked, being a musician, because all Fred ever did was write down melody lines. In many ways, it was pretty much an improvisation, because everyone would get together at a table read, and then when it came time for you to sing your part, Fred had worked it out ahead of time with Johnny and the trio, knowing what direction he wanted it to go in. It was this great collaborative process that sort of unfolded in real time. There was no one standing there with a stopwatch, as there [was] during the taping of normal programs.”
Horton clarifies the nature of the improvised element to the operas: “If there was a word that needed to be changed, sometimes—not all the time—Fred would be open to changing words. The music, it wasn’t so much improvised as far as changing actual notes that people sang. . . . In the collaborative process, everyone was able to offer what they thought—though instances of that were few and far between.
“You’d normally have to have a piano in an opera rehearsal, before the orchestra shows up. But the improvisation came from them [Johnny and other musicians]. The whole musical process, aside from the actual notes and rhythms, and words on the page, was somewhat improvisational.”19
He also notes the method in what seemed to be Fred Rogers’s over-the-top whimsy. In Grandad for Daniel, Daniel’s father is a professional polisher of the dusty leaves of plants: “Polishing, polishing, I’m polishing in the jungle,” goes one of the songs.
Horton recalls: “At the time, I thought to myself, ‘Wow, he [Fred] is really out there.’ I’d never heard of anyone polishing leaves in the jungle. Well, up until last year, my partner and I owned a flower shop in western Maryland. We learned very quickly that all leaves have to be polished! I immediately thought back to the opera and Fred, when I thought that was crazy. I’d just never heard of it.
“It’s still a weird thing to write a song about. But if your characters are in a jungle, I guess it’s an accessible thing for children to think somebody does.”20
Perhaps the most famous opera on the Neighborhood was Windstorm in Bubbleland, which appeared on May 23, 1980. The actual opera was part of a weeklong exploration called Making an Opera, in which Mister Rogers instructs his television neighbors in how stories in song are put together. A spirited song from Officer Clemmons opens one of the introductory episodes, after which Mister Rogers ambles over to Chef Brockett’s bakery for instructions in how to make things with bananas, including a “banana boat,” a slice of white bread spread with peanut butter and then folded around a whole banana, with pretzels inserted into the sides as oars. In a subsequent episode in which the full opera is performed, Don Brockett plays the captain of a banana boat.
Windstorm features John Reardon as an amiable television news
reporter named Robert Redgate, who is always sure there’s never, never, never any trouble in Bubbleland. Lady Aberlin plays Betty of Betty’s Better Sweaters. Dressed in an elaborate gray costume, François Clemmons portrays a weather-forecasting porpoise, and Lady Elaine Fairchilde is Hildegarde Hummingbird, who thinks a windstorm is approaching Bubbleland, but no one believes her.
In fact, a terrible storm is brewing, thanks to the latest product on the market: Spray Sweater, created by W. I. Norton Donovan (Handyman Negri), which is the wind in disguise. Once his plan goes into effect, the wind attempts to demolish Bubbleland completely. Joe Negri notes that it was “the only time in my life that I ever had to play a bad guy. I really had to act on that—to come off like a meanie. They hooked me up to a contraption that Peter Pan used on Broadway, so that I could fly. Oh, it was a weird time.”21
A most unlikely heroine, Hildegard Hummingbird, saves the day.
In another memorable opera, the 1982 production Spoon Mountain, Bob Trow plays a character called Wicked Knife and Fork, who lives atop Spoon Mountain dressed in a burlap-like costume emblazoned with a crossed knife and fork on his chest; the insignia also appears on his knit cap. But by the end, it’s revealed that he’s not wicked. He sings: “All I ever I wanted was a spoon, a spoon. A spoon was all I ever wanted. But all they ever gave me was a knife and fork.”
Don Brockett, the local king, and Audrey Roth, the queen, finally give him a spoon. Chuck Aber, in vaguely Tyrolean attire, and Betty Aberlin as Betty Green, a park ranger, fall in love as they climb Spoon Mountain to try to rescue Purple Twirling Kitty, played by Jeff Shade, a local baton-twirling champion. Their exploits, reported on the Alpine News by a reporter played by a bearded John Reardon, are aided by a heroic commodore (François Clemmons).
Despite the somewhat outlandish story, framed by a troubadour/storyteller (Joe Negri), the soaring, melodic score carries the opera, whose ultimate lesson is that people have a lot more in them than we may realize at first. Chuck Aber observes: “I don’t know where any of that came from. It’s Fred’s whimsy and creativity.”22