Eleven years ago I began to document my journey to recreate and collect old music loops which played at Walt Disney World in its early days. I started with a few easy ones, proceeded through obscurities and new discoveries, but all through the process one of those really early music loops was seemingly lost forever.
I'm delighted to return with news that the last major 1970s music loop has been recovered, meaning we now have accurate background music for the whole of Magic Kingdom. That final missing piece of the puzzle was Frontierland, and it has quite a story behind its recovery.
Frontierland would seem, on the face of it, to suggest an obvious musical background. The logical choice to reach for is western movie themes, and that's what Disneyland and Disneyland Paris have done since the the 90s. But in the 1970s those films were still relatively recent, and may have been cost prohibitive to license. Disney really only played movie tunes around its front entrance in those days, and so Jack Wagner had to decide what a "Frontierland" would sound like for Magic kingdom's opening in 1971.
You can hear the resulting odd mix of folk tunes for yourself; it survives as a direct tape said to come from Jack Wagner's collection, dated 1973, and probably preserved by Mike Cozart.
[1] The Buckaroos Play Buck and Merle by The Buckaroos
[2] Nashville Rock by Earl Scruggs
[3] Norwood: Music from the Motion Picture by Al De Lory
[4] Square Dance Tonight by Tommy Jackson
[5] "Mile Long Bar" BGM; George Bruns
OK, already there's some oddities to point out.
The first is the issue of the "Mile Long Bar" music, which is a can of worms all its own. This music was evidently overseen by George Bruns and was recorded in-house, at least partially with the Stoneman family (see my piece on the Country Bear Jamboree music here). It was then used in a variety of sources including the Mile Long Bar, Hungry Bear Restaurant at Disneyland, and certain tracks were issued on the Country Bear Jamboree LP from 1972.
For a long time, the six tracks released on the LP were the only ones known to exist, and since the LP itself calls out the tracks as being from the "Mile Long Bar at Walt Disney World", that's what we know it as. However, its' also become clear over the years that more than these six tracks were recorded for an unknown purpose, and no source for all of what was recorded seems to exist. In other words, I believe these tracks were recorded as background music, possibly for all of Frontierland. This would explain why Jack Wagner sprinkled them heavily into the loop he ended up creating.
And about that original loop - its fast, but not really high energy, and not very appealing. Honestly, my main motivation for not covering it when I covered all of the other Magic Kingdom loops was because I didn't like it and was holding out hope for the rediscovery of its predecessor. In the past on this blog I've suggested that early BGM with odd "tones" could possibly be due to Jack working mainly off concept art and descriptions before the opening of the park. That is just a theory, but it does make sense of Jack reaching for honky tonk piano music. There's a definite lack of a "Hollywood West" feeling in this loop, which is the sound and tone most are going to expect out of a Frontierland.
There is one scrap of evidence of the music actually being played in park, which is this 1975 video of sound b-roll, in which Devil's Dream can be heard at 05:00:
However, with the introduction of expanded area music played throughout Magic Kingdom in 1975, Jack tried again. If there was any piece of early Magic Kingdom music I was ready to declare "lost media", it was this 39 minute 1975 atmosphere loop, and I'm incredibly pleased to finally be able to post it.
[2] Town and Country Square Dances (Everest Records 1960)
[3] Media Music Release No. 2 - No. 4 Western Themes/Fun Marches by Ib Glindemann
[4] Square Dance Festival, Vol.1 by Tommy Jackson
[5] Media Music Release No. 7 - No. 5 - Solo Instruments by Henrik Nielsen**
[6] Media Music Release No. 6 - No. 8 - Special Occasions / Country & Western by Henrik Nielsen
[7] Country Honky Tonk Piano by The Nashville Four and "Slim" 88 Wilson
[8] Come On In! We're Pickin' and Singin' Folk Songs by The Wanderin' Five
[9] Instrumental Music Of The Southern Appalachians (Tradition Records, 1957)
* Edited to repeat a section, so the track is 0:00.658-1:03.615, then repeats 0:41.927-1:03.615, and finally repeats 0:41.927-0:43.728
** There are 30 second versions and 60 second versions recorded of all of the tracks on this record; the loop exclusively uses the 60 second versions.
I think this effort is a lot better. The whole thing seems to be structured around the square dance and Capitol Media Music tracks, and selections were made with an eye on keeping the energy levels high. Every so often the loop slows down for a solo or a more sedate selection, but never for long. Given that many of the Media Music tracks were intended for commercials and top out at a minute long, there isn't much time for anything to outstay its welcome.
I noted this difference when editing the second version of my Musical Souvenir audio project, and it's impressive. This music could still be playing in Frontierland today and not feel dated.
And is there a lot of weirdness to point out about this loop! Again it begins with Mile Long Bar music, except different selections, then proceeds through folk music from highly obscure sources. Jack Wagner had contacts at record companies all over Hollywood, and he must have worked overtime on this one to secure clearances on some of the cheapest music imaginable (for his masterpiece in this department check out That Infernal Swiss Music).
Tommy Jackson returns from the earlier loop, but from a different record. The tracks from this Tommy Jackson Square Dance Festival album would go on to be almost as much of a stalwart of Walt Disney World as Frontierland itself, being used in The Land pavilion and, most memorably to this author, as the "Country Bear Jamboree" music used in the "A Day at the Magic Kingdom" souvenir VHS.
And then there's the Capitol Media Music line, already covered in my piece on Tomorrowland's early music. The Henrik Nielsen "Country & Western" tracks still kick around the Disney ecosystem in places like Disneyland Paris. "Western Saloon" by Ib Glindemann played at the entrance to Disneyland's Frontierland all through the 70s and 80s. The Capitol tracks really help this loop feel more cinematic, which is really what Frontierland is about.
But it's "Evening Campfire" that will send many Gen Xers a-tingling, because it's the same track used in the 1970s "Mighty Dog" dog food commercials. It's this track that Mike Cozart remembered playing at Magic Kingdom, then again at Disneyland in the late 90s, which made it possible to recover this loop at all:
For a very, very long time this track was lost with no real hope of being found, so the story of how it appears here today is worth recounting. Frontierland 1975 was not one of the tracks preserved by Mike before the death of Jack Wagner. Michael Sweeney and I had put together some observations based on home videos and had a handful identified tracks, but we knew we were on the right track due to Mike Cozart's recollection of "Evening Campfire". The fact that we could watch Mighty Dog Dog Food commercials on YouTube then hear the same music playing in the background of home movies helped confirm that our data was lining up correctly.
Mike also recalled that this loop, or one very much like it, playing at Disneyland in the late 90s at a "Chip n Dale" meet and greet. Again, the defining song was "Evening Campfire". And there, it seems to pass out of history.
Except!
Flash forward to 2022, when MouseBits member Pixelated noted that at least something very similar to this "Chip n Dale" loop was playing inside the Golden Horseshoe. This allowed Aubrey at DLRmusicloops to get a full recording, which as it turns out exactly synched with the partial reconstruction Michael Sweeney had begun back in 2012. The only difference was a single track, "Home Sweet Home" instead of "Bile 'Em Cabbage Down".
Except, there was still one unknown track. It was found in higher quality in the collection of WaltsMusic, where it was labeled as part of a recording called "Mile Long Bar #4". This meant the unknown song was recorded by Disney and George Bruns, dashing hopes of locating it commercially. Finally, Disney music super guru DisneyChris jumped in with the right answer: it was "Farewell", from the Davy Crockett television series. This song was composed by George Bruns to fit an actual poem written by the real Davy Crockett.
And with that, the long lost music loop was recovered. If we count Mike Cozart noticing the loop playing at Disneyland in the late 90s, it took many Disney music nerds over multiple generations to put the pieces together over a span of almost thirty years. Remarkable.
Let me be clear here... this is not the end of the story. There are still lots of vintage pieces of background music that remain unrecovered, and likely, unrecoverable. Music played in restaurants, and shops, and resorts, and weird places like the Kennel that you wouldn't even think of. But in terms of music you would recognize and remember, we now have a full representation of Magic Kingdom from 1971 until the present day. Its amazing, and I'm honored to be have helped steward the musical legacy of this park in the way I have.
This post was updated with new information on January 2, 2022.
🎶 Let's all sing like the birdies sing... 🎶
No, not that music of the Tropical Serenade. Today let's get detailed and talk about the music that played outside of the attraction throughout its lifetime.
Tropical Serenade is just about the only WDW attraction which has had an authoritative original BGM available online since the 90s - or, at least, what was widely accepted as authoritative. As part of the early legitimate loops available through collector's circles such as the Main Street USA music, King Stephan's Banquet Hall and Adventureland Veranda, the "Sunshine Pavilion BGM" was vouched for by several sources, and How Bowers recently released a live recording made in the 90s which confirms its authenticity.
Co-incidentally, Ryan Komitor, who recently did an incredible job rounding up all of the original Adventureland Veranda music, pointed me in the direction of a fairly obscure Criterion Records release, The Beat of Tahiti. It's unpolished, in situ records of Tahitian drumming, but most importantly it provided the two missing tracks for the Sunshine Pavilion BGM.
Sunshine Pavilion BGM 1971 - 1998
01. Voodoo Bamboos [Edited] [2]
02. Kawohikukapulani [1]
03. Fautaua (Rain) [Edited] [5]
04. Bora Bora [Edited] [5]
05. Kalua [3]
06. Trade Winds [4]
07. M' Bira [3]
[1] Hawaiian Sunset by Arthur Lyman (Hi-Fi Records, SR807)
[2] Night of the Spectre by Chaino (Tampa Records, TP-4)
[3] Primitiva by Martin Denny (Liberty)
[4] Soft Hawaiian Guitars by the Hawaii Calls Orchestra (Capitol)
[5] The Beat of Tahiti (Criterion Records TT-170)
Compiled by Jay, wedroy1923, and Ryan Komitor
This loop is commonly labeled as being from 1971, a date I accept in the absence off any more compelling evidence. As I’ve hopefully repeatedly demonstrated on this site, the music rollout at Magic Kingdom for the first few years was messy and sporadic, and nailing down dates is largely an exercise in frustration. However, Disneyland had been using music in the lobby areas of their attractions more or less since the 60s, so I think it’s reasonable to assume that Disney prioritized waiting area loops over generalized area loops and that Jack Wagner would have cranked this out to be ready for the October 1971 debut. If this is true then this is probably his original exotica loop.
Like other early 70s loops, such as those for the Adventureland Veranda and Liberty Square, it’s a surprisingly conceptual loop, not at all like the aural exotica wallpaper he would create for later Adventureland music projects. We know this because his loop for the Disneyland Tiki Room Lanai, created in 1976, also still exists, and it’s a totally different creature.
The Sunshine Pavilion loop intersperses aggressive, almost dissonant drumming tracks with the standard exotica music you’d expect to hear outside of a Tiki Room. What first seems to be an odd choice gains more meaning once you realize that these drumming tracks were not easy to find; the first track, by weirdo experimental drummer Chaino, is a very close edit of a very specific section of one track from one very obscure album. Jack didn’t have much room for error in editing this, because just seconds on either side of the section he used are the sounds of panting and screaming!
Two selections from "The Beat of Tahiti”, which is more of the sort of thing you’d expect the Smithsonian to release than a proper music album, are followed by a Martin Denny track which begins with drumming in a similar tempo, creating the illusion that the aggressive island drums fade into an exotica reverie. The final track, another Martin Denny confection, is again heavy on the percussion, climaxing with a flurry of drum beats to herald the start of the pre-show.
I think the idea here was predicated on the entry area of the attraction being a Balinese pagoda, and perhaps related to the pre-opening term of the central feature of the Sunshine Pavilion itself being a “Ceremonial House”. That is one place you would expect to hear exotic drumming, and threading the exotica music through jazz and authentic folk music recordings is an interesting idea. I don’t think Jack totally pulled off the idea, mind you, but it’s a deceptively carefully crafted piece of work.
UPDATE: I found some extra information in a recent research dive that pieces together some more information. According to the Tampa Tribune, Dec 22 1974, while discussing the Florida Citrus "reception room", they mention in passing...
“Sounds come sifting through from the pre-show area, where guests to the entertainment attraction are plied with Polynesan-style music, punctuated at intervals by an Anita Bryant recording, “Meet me in the shade of the Sunshine Tree…”
This would be from her 1967 album "The Sunshine Tree", first song on Side B, "Sunshine Tree", which you can hear here:
If we add this 2:20 song to my existing 15:20 reconstruction, we get 17:40. The show runs 17:13 on the original soundtrack LP. So there's good evidence that this was in the original 1971 loop, either at the start or the end. My money would be on it appearing at the start of the loop, but you never can tell. Since the Clyde & Claude toucan pre-show runs about 5 minutes, it's impossible to tell if the music simply looped endlessly while the pre-show was not running or if it restarted every time the theater show was activated. While I worked at Under New Management in the late 00s it restarted with the show, but significant work was done on the show infrastructure in the early 80s (when this song was likely deleted) and I'm no longer 100% confident that it would have worked in exactly the same way.
Under New Management was a bad idea for a bad show, but one element that took the sting out of it was that the attraction received an absolutely phenomenal waiting area loop. In the generation since Jack created his first exotica loop, Tiki culture had died on the vine and then come roaring back to life - right about the same time the Tiki Room had gone UNM. The incubator of the Tiki revival was Southern California, so somebody inside WDI knew what they were up to here. Instead of drumming interspersed with leisurely island music, the new waiting area loop was a glorious crescendo of the patron saint of exotica lounge - Martin Denny.
Beginning with a track in which Denny and his percussionists were merely the supporting act to Arthur Lyman, the group’s signature jungle howls and wails build and build, leading up the original single version of Denny’s immortal Quiet Village. The track manages to be fun, kitsch, and melodic all at once while blending a near history of lounge exotica music into a cohesive whole. I worked at Under New Management for a while, and while I can confirm that audiences simply didn’t like the thing, I was pleased that the sacrifice of my sanity for a few months more than prepared me to rebuild this waiting area loop from memory.
Oh, and after all of that rich atmosphere building by the music and architecture, then the waterfall opened and the talent agents of Iago and Zazu would bicker at each other. You know, fun!
Enchanted Tiki Room: Under New Management Waiting Area Music
01. Taboo [1]
02. Martinique [2]
03. Love Dance [2]
04. Quiet Village [2]
[1] Exotic Sounds of Arthur Lyman by Arthur Lyman (Legacy International)
[2] Exotica: The Best of Martin Denny by Martin Denny (Rhino)
Playlist compiled by Jay
Under New Management was also the recipient of another unlikely first, the first and only Tiki Room to ever have an area loop. This played out of the exactly one speaker situated on the facade pointing out towards Adventureland, and after the construction of the Magic Carpets of Aladdin was mostly inaudible. For the identification and preservation of this information we can thank Jay at Magic Music, who spent many no doubt painful months compiling the data.
Enchanted Tiki Room: Under New Management Area Music
Running time: approx. 52:44
01. Jungle River Boat [02:32] [2]
02. Bwana A [03:08] [1]
03. Moon of Manakoora [02:34] [3]
04. The Enchanted Sea [01:57] [2]
05. Moon Over a Ruined Castle [02:56] [1]
06. Hawaiian Paradise [02:44] [3]
07. March of the Siamese Children [01:29] [2]
08. Dahil Sayo [02:28] [1]
09. Jungle Flower [01:47] [2]
10. Magic Islands [03:37] [4]
11. Hawaiian War Chant [02:33] [3]
12. Escales [02:26] [2]
13. Ye Lai Sian [02:48] [1]
14. Oahu (My Lovely Island Home) [02:47] [3]
15. Baia [03:15] [2]
16. Yellow Bird [02:32] [1]
17. My Little Grass Shack in Kealakekua Hawai'i [02:34] [3]
18. Aku Aku [02:37] [2]
19. Tropical [02:51] [4]
20. Aloha Nui Loa [02:50] [3]
[1] Exotic Sounds of Arthur Lyman by Arthur Lyman (Legacy International)
[2] Exotica: The Best of Martin Denny by Martin Denny (Rhino)
[3] Hawaiian Songs for Dancing by Guy Lombardo (Decca)
[4] Legend of Pele by Arthur Lyman (Rykodisc)
In the absence of a live reference recording of this material, I don't think a reconstruction is ever going to be possible. As I mentioned, the music was practically inaudible in the park, and the only track I can ever remember hearing clearly is the Guy Lombardo version of Hawaiian War Chant. I'm only halfway positive that the Lombardo tracks were edited to remove their vocals, and unlike with the pre-show music, my memory here is fuzzy enough that I'd rather not trust it.
However, for posterity's sake, here is the Guy Lombardo Hawaiian Songs for Dancing album, which seems to have never been re-released in any form, preserved in amber in amazing 1949 low fidelity!
In 2005, Disneyland’s Tiki Room got a top to bottom overhaul which included the retirement of the old Jack Wagner waiting area music from 1976 and the introduction of a new loop of Hawaiian Guitar music. This same loop was copied over to Magic Kingdom in 2011 with the reopening of the original show there, where it plays on to this day.
That’s 50 years of Enchanted Tiki history for you, and like all of us, there’s a lot of highs and a lot of lows too. Let’s hope the music plays on and on.
Do you like exotica and mood music? I've got a treat for you, because there's a treasure trove of playlists and reconstructions just like this as well as other resources over on our Theme Park Music page!
A few years ago, I previewed a bit of the work being done in an infuriating little corner of Disney music that I call "The Swiss Loops". This is a group of three or four Jack Wagner loops created at an unknown time consisting entirely of alpine music - yodeling, accordions, lederhosen, etc.
So grab your alpenhorn and feathered cap, and let's finally get this out of the way - we're going to plunge into those infernal Swiss loops. I hope you like polkas!
Pinnochio Street Music
One of the least appreciated areas of Magic Kingdom is the stretch of Fantasyland that runs from Liberty Square, up past what was once the Skyway Station, past Small World, and ends with Pinnochio Village Haus. On early blueprints, this is called the "Pinocchio Street" - an area of steins and Bavarian charm anchored by a Swiss chalet spitting out a steady stream of brightly colored sky buckets. Compared to the more prosaic and less elaborated themed west side of Fantasyland, and especially compared to the Fantasyland of 1955 which was still what Disneyland had, this little area was the seed that eventually would overrun the entire concept of Fantasyland, turning the whole of the area into Little Europe. It may not look like much to anybody who's been to the 1983 Fantasyland at Disneyland or the 1992 version in Paris, but for 1971 the Pinocchio Street was a major accomplishment, and had its own specific project name to prove it.
Regardless, what is likely the earliest surviving piece of music associated with this area was thankfully recorded by Mike Lee in 1991. It's only 30 minutes long, which puts it in line with other early music loops of its era, and the two Capitol Records LPs used in the Matterhorn Bobsleds queue BGM also appear in it.
Thanks to a snippet posted by the excellent website WaltsMusic, I'm confident in assigning a date to this one. The WaltsMusic segment, taken from Jack Wagner's collection, is the first seven tracks represented here, and is labeled "Village Haus Disneyland 1974". Since Disneyland didn't have a Village Haus in 1974, this has to be our date.
I'd give a lot to know if music played in the Skyway and Village Haus before 1974, but like a lot of early Disneyland and Magic Kingdom music, we'll just never know.
“Pinnochio Village Haus”
Compiled by Jack Wagner 1974, Recorded by Mike Lee 1991
01) Obervazer-Schottisch - Bündner Ländlerquintett [1]
02) Gruss Milano (Salute To Milan) - Bündner Ländlerquintett [1]
03) Lusbübe-Ländler (Naughty Boy Ländler) - Ländlerkapelle Oberland [1]
04) Beim Augustfeuer (By The Bonfire) - Ländlerkapelle Bärner Mutze [1]
05) Tessin Melodies - Orchestrina Verbanella [1]
06) Urner-Polka - Bündner Ländlerquintett [1]
07) Am Hinterrhein (At The Source Of The Rhine) - Bündner Ländlerquintett [1]
08) Unknown A
09) Unknown B
10) Unknown C
11) Der Klarinettenmuckel - Alfons Bauer and the Bavarian Entertainers [2]
12) Landlergrusse - Alfons Bauer and the Bavarian Entertainers [2]
13) Gruss aus Bayrischzell - Alfons Bauer and the Bavarian Entertainers [2]
14) Rund I’m Salzburg - Alfons Bauer and the Bavarian Entertainers [2]
[1] A Visit to Switzerland - Capitol ST-10264 1964
[2] Music of the German Alps - Capitol ST-1-211 1959
For this track to be playing in 1991 seems astonishingly late considering that its replacement, fully considered below, had already been available for eight years by that point.
However, the 1990/1 date does line up with when Magic Kingdom was really starting to standardize their sound system - see my piece on Tomorrowland for another example. Once "Fantasyland West" received its new digital music playback system, of course it would receive the newer, longer version of the Swiss loop.
"Fantasyland West"
For decades, a 60-minute loop has been floating through the Disney music diaspora called "Fantasyland West". Trying to identify the tracks in this loop has always been an absurd nightmare of yodeling, brass bands, and alphorns - after even just a few minutes, all of the yodeling begins to bleed together and my eyes would begin to roll back into my head.
Which is how things stood for years. This 60 minute loop played in the Skyway station at Magic Kingdom and Disneyland, inside Village Haus restaurants in California, Florida, and Paris, and heck, even at Tokyo Disneyland - here's a quick video where you can hear it. Besides the fact that it had seemingly been playing since anybody could remember, nobody had any idea where it came from or what it was made up of.
Most of the really early Magic Kingdom music loops were really odd lengths. But even if Disney had wanted to replace the Skyway / Village Haus loop as early as, say, 1975 - when both Main Street loops got filled out to a full hour - it's hard to imagine them having a good incentive to pay Jack Wagner to do the same work over again. In the early 80s, Disney was moving to standardize the length of all of their BGM loops to exactly 60 minutes thanks to emerging digital formats, a standard that holds even today.
What makes more sense to me is that Jack prepared the 60-minute loop as part of his commission to prepare the music for Tokyo Disneyland. Many of his loops for TDL are interesting expansions and variations of his earlier loops at Disneyland and Magic Kingdom, and all of them are a rock solid hour in length. It also makes sense that Disneyland would use the same loop as part of their New Fantasyland project, which saw the addition of a German-style Village Haus of their own.
Meanwhile, the discovery of "A Visit to Switzerland" on MouseBits by RocketRods and the tracks it shared with the Matterhorn Bobsleds made it much clearer the relationship between all of the various "Swiss" loops was much closer than it initially seemed. Except for one little problem...
Bi Eus im Schwyzerland: A Mystery Inside An Enigma
In mid-2013, our understanding of the Fantasyland West loop improved considerably when, with no warning whatever, most of the source tracks appeared on iTunes. Suddenly, we had track names and performing artists but with no real insight into where these things came from. The album in question was called "Bi Eus im Schwyzerland, Volume 3", released by the mysterious "Elite Special" and dated 1974. Trouble was, who knows if the metadata provided on the album was at all accurate. Even more worrying, the total run time of the digital release was nearly an hour - a total impossibility on the vinyl records Jack Wagner was working off of in the 70s.
Thanks to the magic of "Bi Eus im Schwyzerland, Volume 3", we can now show you Ländlerkapelle Edy Keiser, who you've been listening to over a loudspeaker at Disney for basically your entire life:
So just who the heck was Elite Special? As it turns out, Elite Special was a sub-label of Turicaphon AG - founded in 1930, and which still exists today in the Swiss town of Riedikon (on the Turicaphonstrasse!). Once you have label and performer information, the rest begins to fall into place.
Its seems as though Truicaphon took a special interest in recording and releasing Swiss folk music in the 1950s - although for all we know, they were releasing these recordings on 78 records in the 30s. Alpine music being of limited interest outside of Switzerland, eventually the Elite Special sublabel was formed to recycle their music into budget LPs of the kind that haunted drug stores through the 60s - cheapjack releases with names like "I Remember Switzerland". Just looking at the mysterious track data and recording company history, that much of the story seemed obvious.
But I still was not satisfied with this "Bi Eus im Schwyzerland, Volume 3". I knew the chances that a single record had nearly the entirety of a Jack Wagner loop was too persuasive to ignore, but after weeks of checking databases and virtual auction sites in English and German, I could find no evidence of a physical release of Bi Eus im Schwyzerland - never mind Volume 3, I couldn't find Volume 1 or 2. I knew it couldn't be this obscure.
After literally years of downtime, in which Pixelated put the rest of the puzzle together, finding "Accordion in Gold" by Horst Wende, I was ready to try again - and I finally struck gold in the Worldcat, where "Holiday in Switzerland" had a single entry with nearly every track listed - the only thing missing was the track "Jodel-Polka". I even found a company in the United States selling a CD of the album.
I was so close I refused to believe that this was not the correct album. After another search through German eBay, I was able to find the actual LP - and "Jodel-Polka" was included. As it turns out, Jack had dumped practically the entirety of "Holiday of Switzerland" into his Village Haus loop, and in near exact album order, no less. With the 4-year mystery of "Bi Eus im Schwyzerland" solved, the Village Haus loop finally came into focus.
"Fantasyland West" / "Pinocchio Village Haus"Compiled by Jack Wagner, 1983
Reconstruction by Michael Sweeney, Foxxy, and Pixelated
01) Obervazer-Schottisch - Bündner Ländlerquintett [1]
02) Gruss Milano (Salute To Milan) - Bündner Ländlerquintett [1]
03) Uf Em Grätli (Up On The Cliff) - Ländlerkapelle Bärner Mutze With Sepp Sutter [1]
04) Lusbübe-Ländler (Naughty Boy Ländler) - Ländlerkapelle Oberland [1]
05) Beim Augustfeuer (By The Bonfire) - Ländlerkapelle Bärner Mutze [1]
06) Urner-Polka - Bündner Ländlerquintett [1]
07) S' Kantönlilied - Ländlerkapelle Heidi Wild mit Kinderchor [2]
88) Frohsinn (Schottisch) - Ländlerkapelle Edy Keiser [2]
09) Am sunnige Egge - Jodelduo Josy Eugster, Helene Schwegler [2]
10) Frühlingsfreuden - Ländlerkapelle Edy Keiser [2]
11) Alpenjodel - Jodelduo Josy Eugster, Helene Schwegler [2]
12) Heigh-Ho / Whistle While You Work - Polka Band [3]
13) En Heimelige - Jodelduo Josy Eugster, Helene Schwegler [2]
14) Jodel-Polka - Ländlerkapelle Edy Keiser [2]
15) Liechtensteiner Polka - Horst Wende und seine Accordeon-Band [4]
16) Die Fischerin Vom Bodensee - Horst Wende und seine Accordeon-Band [4]
17) Mi Freud - Jodelduo Josy Eugster, Helene Schwegler [2]
18) Am Hinterrhein (At The Source Of The Rhine) - Bündner Ländlerquintett [1]
19) Mitenand Gaht's Besser - Ländlerkapelle Bergfriede, Jodelduo Josy Eugster und Helene Schwegler [2]
20) Aelpli (Schottisch) - Ländlerkapelle Edy Keiser [2]
21) Läbeslust - Berhely Studer [2]
22) De Würzegrübler - Ländlerkapelle Edy Keiser [2]
23) "Obe abe - une ufe" - Ländlerkapelle Edy Keiser [2]
[1] A Visit to Switzerland - Capitol ST-10264 1959
[2] Holiday in Switzerland - Elite Special PLPS 30150 1973
[3] A Musical Souvenir of Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom - WDP 1972
[4] Accordion In Gold - Polydor 249 306 1970
One of the nice things about having the actual Holiday in Switzerland album to look at is that it clarifies that not all of the tracks included in the loop are traditional songs. Nearly everything on Holiday in Switzerland is an original composition - these traditional folk music groups, which had likely been performing together since before World War II, and who recorded their efforts for a small, local recording industry would eventually go on to be heard by billions of vacationers in search of a cheap pizza in Florida. That's an exceptionally bizarre path to infamy, but it's a good one.
Also interesting is the inclusion of a single track by the Fantasyland Polka Band smack in the middle of the loop. Many versions of the loop begin with the Heigh Ho, but the loop does appear to play out as I've got it arranged here, with the Polka Band around the 30 minute mark.
The Polka Band was an afternoon offshoot of the Walt Disney World Band that hung around Fantasyland for a few years in the 70s, and their phantom appearance in their old haunt is intriguing. It reminds me of Jack's use of Fred Burri in the Matterhorn Bobsleds loop - a recorded testament of atmosphere music which was once recorded live.
Honestly, this is probably how all of Disneyland's music loops began - a tape would be played while the band went off to lunch. A few years ago, a tape was sold on eBay which supposedly played in the Skull Rock seating area of the Chicken of the Sea restaurant in Fantasyland. Without having a transfer of the tape to be sure we'll never know, but it appeared to be a recording of the pirate band which played in that area in the early 60s. Intentionally or not, this notion survives in the Matterhorn and Village Haus loops of today.
And with that romantic notion, I think we've found as good a place as any to finally put this subject to rest. Auf wiedersehen!
"Muzak and mood music [...] emit music the way the twentieth century is equipped to receive it. They have so successfully blended genres and redefined music appreciation that they have become the music world's Esperanto." - Joseph Lanza
Some time ago I was at a thrift store, hovering over an especially unpromising stack of vintage records, when I had an uncomfortable realization.
Over the years, first from working at Disney, then writing this blog and researching historical music loops, has warped my musical taste. I'm much more likely to spin a piece of background music to relax - Epcot's Innoventions music loop, for instance, or perhaps George Bruns' Moonlight Time in Old Hawaii. After a tough day at work, I want to settle into a groove with a drink and some mellow music.
As I stood there contemplating one of these dog eared LPs, I had one of those horrible moments of lucidity that makes one doubt her sanity: I was shopping for easy listening music. I was excited to find elevator music. I went home and began to cue up video after video on YouTube of the most treacly, canned music possible - and I loved it. Theme parks had made me love Muzak.
Gradually I began to wonder if that was such a bad thing after all. Background music cassettes from K-Mart went viral just a few years ago; a cursory search online reveals a raft of websites dedicated to preserving the background music of the past. And yet, theme parks are one of the few places left where you can experience true background music; walk into an average Starbucks or Waffle House and they're playing a sleeker, streamlined kind of BGM that's entirely popular recordings. It's sort of startling to realize that humans as recently as 80 years ago lived in a world where music wasn't constantly blaring out of every ceiling; what's so bad about a preference for music that's atmospheric and relaxing instead of popular hits of the past 20 years?
So I thought I'd take a quick look through the history of moodsong in the 20th century. At first blush this seems to be a tangent for this blog, but the links between postwar elevator music, social engineering, and Walt Disney run deeper than you think - once you go about digging them up, of course. It's a story that stretches over the better part of a century, world wars, and wrenching social changes, all events that can be bridged by strings echoing out of a tinny speaker in the ceiling.
Music To Read By
It was the early 1920s, and George O. Squier had an idea. George had spent a lifetime as an inventor and tinkerer for the US Army - he had invented the method for carrying multiple conversations over a single wire, allowing for the rise of a functional national telephone system, and had flown in one of the Wright Brothers' earliest aircrafts. Now, he wanted to apply his way with wires to send music to homes, offices, factories, and ballrooms across the country. George took the final two letters from "Kodak" and applied it to "music" to end up with "Muzak".
Squier was competing for an increasingly congested marketplace. The original American - which is to say, industrialized and populist - source of background music was almost certainly the radio. A boom market in the 1920s, by the 30s the radio was ubiqutious in American homes - it's been said that if you walked down the street on a hot summer evening during the broadcast of Amos 'n Andy or The Fibber McGee and Molly Show, you could hear the entire program from the open windows without missing a word. In the places where average Americans congregated - cafes, diners, and soda fountains, the radio rapidly gave life a distinct rhythm. And while today we think immediately of the radio stars of old, the fact is that the popular evening radio programs were but a tiny slice of an 18 hour broadcast day - a broadcast day made up of lots and lots of music.
Experiments in the teens and twenties discovered that those early crystal radio sets were best at transmitting a very narrow range of sound. The subtle buzz and hum of early radio transmissions could be counteracted by stringed instruments - especially those played overlapping, in a high frequency range. While George Squire was asking apartment owners to pay several dollars a month for subscription to his wired music services, a crystal radio set could play nearly nonstop all morning and night after the purchase of just one attractive unit that complemented the washing machine and icebox.
Unauthorized use of commercial 78 records, or electronic bootlegs of the same, were so rampant amongst small, rural radio stations that record companies began to stamp "Not For Broadcast" on their record labels. But even the mainstream radio stations of the 20s and 30s had off hours to fill with content, and in-house orchestras were kept gently sawing away between 11 pm and 1 am in stations like Chicago and New York in programs called Music To Read By, Time For Dreams, or Nightcap. The sounds of soft classical music became the defining sound of progress and modernity for a generation.
These early crystal radios were AM only; the superior FM format lumbered along inauspiciously, copying the content of the AM stations until World War II, when political pressure from radio manufacturers and increasing demand for television airwaves caused the US Government to move all of the FM stations further up the dial. This rendered obsolete in a stroke nearly every FM radio in the country. FM stations already just about on the rocks needed to adapt quickly or fold; they began offering their services to two symbols of modernity in urban America: the department store and the self-service grocer. Merchants found that the music helped move product and added and aura of prestige. In later years this format would come to be known as BM Music.
BM - Beautiful Music - stuck around for an astonishingly long time and has never really gone away - do a quick search and you'll find a small station probably not far from you who still broadcasts it. BM stations often ended up as a smaller operation inside of a larger radio studio, handled by less experienced operators. Free of commercials or announcements, BM stations churned away silently in the backdrop of modern life in major cities around the country. All across the country, businesses sprouted up like mushrooms with names like The Storecast Corporation of America, Store Radio, and Point-O-Salecast. Muzak's first major success came in arranging, recording, and selling music to BM stations who were becoming an increasingly legitimate and organized business.
Social Engineered Sound Scapes
George O Squier had died in 1934, a decade before Muzak's full ascendancy. In comparison to the wireless music provided by BM stations, all through the 40s Muzak had differentiated themselves by only offering wired music - the fidelity and reliability being said to be much better. Muzak also refused to be content with playing bootlegged light classical music - they recorded their own versions in house, carefully arranged to be as pleasant and unobtrusive as possible.
As early as 1935, Muzak was using red, vinyl discs running at 33 1/3 RPM, making them more or less the inventors of the LP. They also began to target their music to specific periods of the day - marches for breakfast, tangoes at lunch, light jazz at cocktail hour, then classics at dinner and dancing till midnight. Through the 30s, Muzak had been bolstered by a raft of social studies published by such outlets as the Stevens Institute of Technology who found that "pleasant, functional music" improved worker productivity and happiness. The constant hum of nonintrusive music had become a welcome addition to a world plagued by depressions and worldwide wars.
(Yellow, Green, Red and Blue were Muzak's four programs - Red was intended for small restaurants, Blue and Yellow serviced retail, and Green for home use.)
By the end of World War II, Muzak Corporation had hit upon the concept of "Stimulus Progression". As American culture converged towards an illusion of stability in the late 40s and early 50s, Muzak claimed that workers were happier and more efficient while background music was playing, and that said music was more effective when played in 15 minute chunks, then silenced for another 15.
Muzak installations that offered the Stimulus Progression package came in two varieties: music for factories and music for offices. A 400 hZ signal broadcast over the wires separating the 4 fifteen-minute chunks would tell the office Muzak installations to remain muted during the more upbeat factory installations, or vice-versa. But a company doesn't go from a name brand to a description on novelty alone; you can't go from Xerox to 'xerox' by accident. With Stimulus Progression. Muzak hit exactly the tenor of their time.
By the 50s, except for that annoying Rock and Roll, American taste was flattening out. The generation that had fought a great depression and two World Wars wanted things to be simple, to be pleasant for once, and a growing peacetime economy and a technology boom promised a happy, prosperous America from sea to shining sea. What could be more pleasant, more productive, more futuristic and modern than pleasing, scientifically selected mood music?
What got forgotten in the Baby Boom generation's rush to tear down all of their parent's idols is that many people genuinely liked the sound of this stuff. The seeds planted back in the 1930s with the radio constantly cranking out it light classical tunes eventually flowered in the 50s into an entire genre: Easy Listening. Go to any old record store and there they will be: hundreds upon hundreds of easy listening records, bought back in the 50s and 60s by Mom and Pop while junior held his nose. Muzak went mainstream, and emerged on the other side as muzak - and ended up on the home stereo.
Indeed, a key part of an hostesses' job was selecting exactly the correct record to play on the newly behemoth home record player consoles, which could play five or six LPs stacked up in order - a full evening's worth of mood music. In the era where the home cocktail party or backyard luau was the social glue that held together a generation, the tasteful background of cocktail tunes was an essential skill.
"The musically aware hostess no longer allows the butler, or her husband, to sling records on to the turntable in a haphazard way... she now supplies a ready made background of elegant and suitable music to smooth the evening into one long feast of pleasure and unshattered nerves." - Liner Notes, Velvet by the Frank Chaksfield Orchestra
The boom economy begat imitators. Seeburg, who started off manufacturing orchestrions, had moved into jukeboxes by the 50s and eventually released the Seeburg 1000 BMS1, the Cadillac of background music equipment. It was sized and styled to replace the old crystal radio haunting shelves in diners across the country.
Each Seeburg 1000 played specially-sized records at 16 1/2 RPM; the device would play the underside of a record, drop it down, then play the top. The device would hold over 25 records, each holding 40 minutes of music, for about 16 hours total, and could automatically repeat the process. Every four months, a new shipment of five records would arrive, and five records would have to be removed and sent back to Seeburg for destruction. Like Muzak, Seeburg offered a number of subscription "plans" intended for various settings, which they called Basic, Mood, and Instrumental. The strictly enforced obsolescence of the music discs and the styling of the unit itself makes the Seeburg 1000 highly collectible today, thankfully, interested parties can stream the music online for free at Seeburg1000.com.
By the same time, radio stations had moved away from records and towards the new endlessly repeating, automatically cueing Fidelipac cassette tapes, a kind of precursor to the 8-track. Fidelipac tapes were a single length of magnetic tape which spooled around inside its caddy endlessly; while best for voice announcements, it could also be played slowly enough and theoretically made large enough to allow for background music application.
The most impressive of these tape systems was the Cantata 700, manufactured by 3M of Scotch Tape fame. Consisting or two giant tape reels spinning around in a massive walnut box, 3M sold the device and tape outright to businesses instead of offering the subscription plan that BM Stations, Muzak, and Seeburg relied on and saw the device fail as a result.
That was in 1965, where the market was already overstuffed enough to see new options floundering. But cultural changes were underway - rock and roll came back, and now it was politically charged and experimental. The lightly relaxing music which once connnoted sophistication and modernity was the squarest of the square; just about the most damning thing you can say about any piece of music, then or now, is to called it elevator music - to call it Muzak.
The Decline of Background Music
Muzak and Seeburg continued trudging along, offering their subscription plans through the 70s and 80s while the various tape machines began to degrade, fall apart, and eventually be replaced by... the radio. Popular radio stations fled the AM band, crowding out BM stations. Grocery and department stores, accustomed to their FM receivers, kept playing the new FM program of popular hits. A few BM stations moved back to the AM band, but most just closed. After 8-track, after compact cassette, it was no longer classy or special to walk into a store and hear music playing - it was just something that happened everywhere.
In 1968, a company called Yesco began offering what they called "foreground music" - popular music of the day, intended to appeal to young Boomers. By the 80s, the writing was on the wall, and Muzak struck a deal with Yesco and began distributing their music programs through the existing Muzak channels. A few years later, both companies were purchased and merged. Yesco's corporate officers and headquarters ate up Muzak, which continued to do business only as a name - their entire strategy was oriented around Yesco's "foreground music".
In the 70s, Brian Eno sat in an airport for a few hours waiting for a flight and was annoyed by the canned background music. In 1978 he produced Ambient 1: Music For Airports, a mellow, experimental soundscape intended to relax listeners. Rolling Stone missed the point entirely, squawking that you could only appreciate the music by listening to it. In 1986, during the Muzak-Yesco merger, Ted Nugent, back then most associated with arena rock, made a public stunt of offering to buy Muzak for $10 million in order to destroy it. In the minds of many, Muzak, which effectively no longer existed, was still associated with inane social programming.
And yet, throughout all of this, wasn't there something unacknowledged just below the surface? In the 50s easy listening boom, records by Jackie Gleason, Henry Mancini, Les Baxter and Martin Denny pictured rigorously sexualized, perfectly up-do'd women staring temptingly out from the record sleeves. Compare this to the cover of any Mantovani album and perhaps we begin to wonder if the marketing of the Les Baxters of the world were perhaps overcompensating for something. Since the 50s, those who rail and rally against the constant musical backdrop of mood song have danced around what would otherwise seem to be their core complaint. Don't their protestations ultimately come down to the music being a little wimpy, a little emotional, a little... feminine?
Women were the ones who heard, supported, listened to, curated, purchased and played the genre we now know as easy listening. It was women who were home all through the 30s to get the taste for the light classical constantly blaring out from the crystal set. Women supported and enjoyed the addition of background music to take the drudgery out of factory jobs as they flooded the workforce during the war effort. And the modern cocktail hostess, armed with a fleet of up to date wonder devices like the washing machine and self-cleaning oven, provided the social lubricant of the 50s and 60s with her easy h'orderves and jello molds made with convenient, shelf-stable products. Mantovani, Liberace, Frank Chaksfield, Ray Conniff and Lawrence Welk played music that appealed to women, and there may still be a sublimated hint of sexism in today's detestation of the genre.
Today, aural relaxation techniques include everything from nature sounds to ambient music. Pop hits, perhaps from several decades ago, are more likely to be heard at workplaces than peppy little marches. The few businesses that do play light classical or jazz music do so in a deliberate attempt to differentiate themselves. While in the American lexicon "muzak" is today synonymous with any sort of canned music, you'll have to look pretty hard to find any genuine examples.
That is, except at Disneyland. Just as it won't take much online searching to bring up people who insist that background music contains "subliminal messages", Disneyland has always reflected the surface optimism and social engineering of the 1950s that some have always found so sinister. In 1957, Muzak was even purchased outright by Jack Wrather, television mogul and owner of the Disneyland Hotel. It's probably a safe bet that Disneyland used Muzak's "aural wallpaper" in several areas around the park in the early days.
Walt Disney was one of those twentieth century conservatives who supported large scale effort to improve the lives of the middle class. Born of blue collar cities at the turn of the 20th century, the product of the hangover from 19th century utopian fiction and the fallout of the great depression, Walt believed in massive public and private efforts like the building of the Eisenhower interstate system. I'm sure his EPCOT City would have played wall-to-wall Muzak inside its covered downtown, apartment complexes, monorails, and Peoplemovers.
It seems that, at least inside Disney, the association between a continuously flowing musical accompaniment and an automated, futuristic world never quite went away - EPCOT Center opened in 1982 with an entire, carefully orchestrated and custom recorded aural soundscape intended to set to mood. The styles ranged from bombastic at the entrance to ambient outside Journey into Imagination to unambiguously Easy Listening in World Showcase.
In the late 60s, Disney hired ex-radio DJ Jack Wagner to act as their permanent in house background music specialist. Jack's job was to clear the rights to and compile music into pleasing musical programs to play in the park - essentially, nothing but Disney's version of the "Stimulus Progression" concept. Prior to his assignment, Jack always maintained that "you'd go down Main Street and they'd be playing '60s musical hits like 'Mrs. Robinson'", which sure sounds an awful lot like something Muzak would have provided. But the story of Jack Wagner and his contributions to theme park background music are a story for another article.
While malls, grocery stores, department stores, and workplaces were switching over to the invasive hum of the radio, Disney held true to their convictions and background music eventually became an accepted facet of theme parks. In the 90s, Universal Studios Florida played pop hits from popular movies - none of that lame easy listening stuff! But their second theme park, the beautiful Islands of Adventure, had a much more traditional theme park musical background, setting the stage for their attempt to out-Disney Disney. The Port of Entry BGM remains one of the finest ever created.
Background Music and Moodsong in Context
Today, we are all music curators. The iPod taught everyone how tough it is to create the perfect playlist, and the disastrous effect following up Duke Ellington with Radiohead can have. What's more, theme parks are one of the only places left where you can watch background music still working. You can watch people pick up the pace in tune to the music on Main Street, or take on solemn, attentive postures inside the Hall of Presidents. It may be subliminal messaging or social programming, but it also works and makes people happy, which is what these places are all about.
There's never going to be consensus about background music, because there are as many people as there are options. But, you know, Muzak, or specifically Yesco - now called Mood Media - are still around, and they still sell sounds and even smells to retail chains. The "Muzak Principle" is still a sound one - consider how the teenagers who frequent, say, Abercrombie & Fitch would feel about those clothes if Garth Brooks were playing in the stores. Or how the patrons of Bass Pro Shops would feel if Run-DMC were playing at the entrance.
Meanwhile, certain sectors of the 50s and 60s Easy Listening genre have managed to shed their toxic reputation and bounce back to respectability. Thanks to his hipster image, Frank Sinatra has never really stopped being cool, but it's easier to find people enthusiastic about Dean Martin, Bing Crosby, or Nat King Cole than it was even twenty years ago. The re-emergence of cocktail culture in the United States has lifted a great number of moodsong purveyors of the 40s and 50s, and the subsequent re-emergence of Tiki as a popular drinking subculture means that exotica music is back in a big way. If you enjoy Percy Faith when he's orchestrating faux-Oriental nonsense under the auspices of a midcentury idol, you'll probably enjoy him in other contexts, too.
Ironically, the concept of background music may be making a resurgence. For many, just getting through a week is getting tougher and tougher, and any kind of stress-free outlet is appreciated. Next time you've had a hard day at work, try playing some Henry Mancini or Mantovani when you get home. It may not be chic, but it still works if you let it.
In 2015, Downtown Disney in Florida became Disney Springs, and the radio-style pop music which once haunted the streets of Downtown Disney was replaced with a mellow, nearly ambient selections of light jazz tracks. The new custom loop for the Marketplace is an hour and a half of unbroken ambient riffing which occasionally breaks into recognizable Disney tunes. It's as if the long arm of Stimulus Progression is reaching through time to gently guide us along, after all.
Do you enjoy long, carefully researched essays on the ideas and history behind theme parks, like this one? Hop on over to the Passport to Dreams Theme Park Theory Hub Page for even more!
Welcome! if you've ever wanted to know what the music that played at Walt Disney World in the 1970s and 80s sounded like, this is the site for you!
My name is Foxx and I am the author of the blog "Passport to Dreams Old & New". Here I gather up all of this site's published content covering the topic of music heard and played in the Disney Theme Parks. Myself and my friends and collaborators have spent many years researching, verifying and reconstructing these extremely obscure and vintage pieces of music, which were in real danger of being lost. This page collects all of our efforts.
It was last updated on July 9, 2024.
If you are interested in the old-time music of the Vacation Kingdom, a great place to start is this own site's Another Musical Souvenir of Walt Disney World, which compiles hours of retro park music into an entire "day" trip to the Walt Disney World of old.
The Secret Recording Career of George Bruns - three lost LPs released by Bruns during his career but outside of Disney, including restored presentations of Moonlight Time In Old Hawaii and Have A Good Time With Big George Bruns. May 2018. The Mysterious "Bridge" Loops - quick overview of some very obscure pieces of music which once played between areas at Magic Kingdom. October 2017. Pirates of the Caribbean: Two Soundtracks - full attraction sound mixes for the original attractions at Disneyland and Walt Disney World. June 2017. The Music of Country Bear Jamboree: Part One - definition of the show's genre, who recorded the music, and the first part of the show. May 2013. The Music of Country Bear Jamboree: Part Two - the second half of the show, and a personal reflection on its appeal. May 2013.
Other Disney Park BGM Resources: Disney Parks Music Compendium - Michael Sweeney has helped out with a great deal of the playlists on this site, and he's put online dozens of carefully curated, extremely accurate playlists of music heard inside the parks.
Disneyland Resort Music Loops - This is a searchable, sortable database of all of the music from Disneyland put together by Aburey, who has really taken up the mantle of researching all of this material.
MouseBits - Features a lively discussion community with numerous playlists, and a torrent seeding resource for a great number of of the commonly circulated pieces of Disney music.
Magic Music - Another discussion forum, this one featuring yet more playlists with a focus on current music and many impressive compilations by site owner Jay.
Tokyo Disneyland BGM Lists - Star Orion has migrated their Wikia site to this slickly designed page, which is easy to navigate even if one does not read Japanese.
Disney Chris Audio - Chris Lyndon spends an enormous amount of time polishing and perfecting the tracks in his Disneyland Tour, which is so extensive I can't think of something he doesn't have available for listening on his site by now.
Liberty Square remains the Magic Kingdom's most successful area beyond the upper edge of Main Street; it's as small and effortless as it is accomplished and rich. It's as intimate as Magic Kingdom gets, and anchors three of her best attractions. In terms of landmass, it's small, but in terms of artistry, it's large.
Which is why you really, really need the musical background here to be appropriate. I'd argue that Adventureland, Fantasyland and Tomorrowland can support a wide variety of music styles because they're themed to attitudes and ideas, not places.
But when you get to Main Street, Frontierland, and Liberty Square, you have to be very careful. People already have an idea of what those areas could feel and sound like, and the key is to meet these expectations while harmonizing with the architecture and the overall message of the area. It's trickier than you think.
Liberty Square is special to me, so for the next few weeks we'll be taking a close look at the music of Liberty Square. The 1971 Music: A Fife and Drum Extravaganza Anyone who collects park music has likely come across a scratchy piece of fife and drum music with odd fades in and out which purports to be the very original Liberty Square music. From most perspectives, this file is chock-a-block with problems. The music quality is poor, there's weird fades, and worst of all, it's only 12 minutes long. And this from a subset of the community which is no stranger to mislabeling, subterfuge, and just plain lying. No way this is authentic, right? Wrong! The original Liberty Square music comes to us from the collection of Mike Cozart, who beat all of us to the punch by getting friendly with Jack Wagner before he died. Many of the early, difficult to verify music loops which circulate in the collector community, such as the original Adventureland Veranda and King Stefan's Banquet Hall loops, come from Mike, who got them direct from Jack. Mike sent along a photograph of the original Master Copy reel from his collection:
Michael Sweeney has identified most of the tracks in the digital file version of this music reel as we have it today. Most of them come from a 1957 Eastman Wind Ensemble Record "Spirit of '76". Please note that the version which was used to create our music loop in question was the LP version. The same music is available most commonly today via a 1997 CD which compiles "Spirit of '76" as well as another Eastman Wind Ensemble record, "Ruffles and Flourishes". This CD version breaks up the running order of the tracks a bit and obscures some of the choices Jack made in 1971. Tracks 11 - 13 in this list come from a as yet unknown source. Given the rest all come from a same LP - and appear basically in album order - may seem rudimentary, but is characteristic of other very early Wagner-era music loops.
Liberty Square Area Music [ca. 1971 - ca. 1980] 01. Yankee Doodle [1] 02. Sergeant O'Leary [1] 03. The Belle of Mohawk Vale [1] 04. Garry Owen [Fades In] [1] 05. Dixie [1] 06. Sentry Box [1] 07. The Breakfast Call [1] 08. Rally 'Round the Flag [1] 09. Bonnie Blue Flag [1] 10. The White Cockade [1] 11. Battle Cry of Freedom [Fades In] 12. Yankee Doodle
13. The Girl I Left Behind Me [Fades Out]
[1] The Spirit of '76 & Ruffles and Flourishes by the Eastman Wind Ensemble (Mercury Living Presence)
Okay, okay, I'd better say something before the more ardent BGM fans out there start throwing things at the computer screen: this list, and the photo provided of the reel above, don't match up. The reel clearly indicates a run time of 14:40. And then below the 14:40 on the identification sticker in Jack's handwriting, it says "19:10", which isn't correct either. This loop has three different run times, and none of them make any sense!! Okay, relax, let's put on our detective cap here and go through this one problem at a time. The Missing 2:40 The loop as we have it comes out to around an even twelve minutes. Thanks to Jack's notation on the reel above, we know that the full length was intended to be 14:40. So where did the missing 2 minutes and 40 seconds go to? What is evident when you're looking at the original LP instead of the somewhat misleading CD version, is that Jack drew from a very specific set of tracks to create the loop. Each side of the Eastman Wind LP is divided into two suites. Side A includes "Traditional Marching Tunes for Fife and Drum" and "Camp Duty of the US Amy", and Side B contains "Traditional Music for Fife and Drums" and "Drum Solos". He uses the entirety of Side A's "Traditional Marching Tunes" and one Track from Side B's "Traditional Music for Fife and Drums". He doesn't use anything from "Camp Duty" or "Drum Solos". Why?
Rear of the Eastman Wind Ensemble LP
It could be that these suites are very, very heavy on, well, drumming. One reason why he may have added the fade into "Gary Owen" is to eliminate the long drum solo at the start of the recorded track. Based simply on what we have, he didn't seem interested at all in "Camp Duty" or "Drum Solos". In fact, when he needs more music for the loop, he goes over to Side B skipping "Camp Duty" entirely. Therefore, if the missing 2:40 is from the Eastman Wind Ensemble LP at all - and I'm not saying it is, because we'll never know, but if it is - then it's probably from Side B of the record in the "Traditional Music for Fife and Drums" suite.
Tracks used are highlighted
And it just so happens that the next three tracks on the LP following "The Breakfast Call", which he used, happen to work out to about two minutes and 33 seconds - "The Dinner Call", "Wrecker's Daughter Quickstep", and "Hell on the Wabash".
This would fit in with his modus operandi elsewhere in the loop of simply working down the LP more or less in disc order. The final song in the "Fife and Drums" suite - Downfall of Paris - is a length which would require combination with either an edited track or more material of an unknown origin to hit the required 2 minute 40 second window, which of course is not outside the realm of possibility. With Pauses? An additional wrinkle on the Master Copy is Jack's handwritten note: "19:10 with Pauses". This means there was apparently sections of the BGM loop which had no music recorded in them! As it happens, this 1971 loop used to circulate on the internet broken up into three files: what I've got listed above as Tracks 01-03 was once file one, Tracks 04-10 was file two, and Tracks 11-13 in a third. Sometimes they're presented in other orders, as on Utilidors' copy, but those three groupings remain consistent.
Notice that the first two groupings come from Eastman Wind Ensemble and the third from the as-of-yet unidentified second source. It seems unlikely to me that whoever broke them into pieces did not do so for no reason. I think they broke them up into pieces to get rid of long gaps between the songs. In fact, I swear I remember downloading this piece of music online in the early 2000s and being baffled that it was filled with long pauses between the fife and drum music. I deleted it, convinced it was a mistake. Now I'm not so sure and I wish I had kept that copy. So we know that the track is intended to have 14 minutes 40 seconds of music in a loop which is 19 minutes 10 seconds long, which is a difference of 4 minutes 30 seconds. And if we combine this with my guesses above that the missing 2:40 comes from the Eastman Wind Ensemble LP, and that the missing Eastman tracks would have been all grouped together possibly in LP playlist order, we have a fourth "suite" of tracks which is missing from our version of the 1971 BGM. That's four distinct "suites" of fife and drum music, three contributed by the same "Spirit of 76" LP, and one from an unknown source. I doubt Jack would have begun or ended any BGM loop with a long gap of silence, that leaves three spaces between "suites" where the silence would have been. These three gaps exactly correspond to how these files were broken up while they were circulating on the early internet. And, as it happens, 4 minutes and 30 seconds breaks up into three 90 second pauses exactly. So, one possible 1971 playlist could have been:
01. Yankee Doodle [1] 02. Sergeant O'Leary [1] 03. The Belle of Mohawk Vale [1] (90 seconds of silence) 04. Garry Owen [1] 05. Dixie [1] 06. Sentry Box [1] 07. The Breakfast Call [1] 08. Rally 'Round the Flag [1] 09. Bonnie Blue Flag [1] 10. The White Cockade [1] (90 seconds of silence) 11. Battle Cry of Freedom 12. Yankee Doodle 13. The Girl I Left Behind Me (90 seconds of silence) 14. The Dinner Call [1] 15. Wrecker's Daughter Quick Step [1] 16. Hell on the Wabash [1] [1] The Spirit of '76 & Ruffles and Flourishes by the Eastman Wind Ensemble (Mercury Living Presence)
Please remember, this is nothing but apure guess. But if I'm right, then the final group of three tracks could have been physically truncated off the reel at some point before Mike Cozart got it transferred to digital - such damage being more likely to occur at the end of the reel than the start or the middle - and then later on somebody else removed the long gaps of no music between the songs. So why would there be gaps anyway, and what's with the strange fades? Why is this loop so weird? I think that what Jack had in mind was a bit different from theme park BGM as we know it today. We're accustomed to a constant, gentle musical accompaniment inside theme parks, often in continual hour-long cycles. No such conventions could have informed Jack's choices in 1971 since he was inventing the style as he went. I think what he was going for here was the impression that a fife and drum band could be playing, perhaps just around the next corner. The fades in and out could represent the approach or retreat of another group of minute men. Let's also not lose sight of the fact that just because Jack was paid to create this loop doesn't mean it was widely heard in the way theme park music is today. As demonstrated elsewhere on this blog, in the 70s the Magic Kingdom sound system was patchy, and wild. You probably couldn't hear most of the music in the park unless you were inside or right under a speaker. Perhaps this only played from a few speakers near the entrance of the land, or only immediately around the Hall of Presidents. We'll probably never know for sure. But, yes, we can confidently say that the 1971 Liberty Square music is authentic, even if it only survives today in weirdly incomplete form. Ready for more? Visit the Passport to Dreams Theme Park Music Hub. Or, hop a monorail to the past and spend a full "day" at the Walt Disney World of the 1970s by downloading Another Musical Souvenir of Walt Disney World.
