Awesome Music / Sesame Street

♫ The band is jumpin'
The music's thumpin'
It's really somethin'
They hit the ceiling... ♫

In all likelihood, any song you remember from Sesame Street, for better or worse, can be linked to either Joe Raposo or Jeff Moss. Oh, the tantrums that have been stopped... Paul Jacobs, his wife Sarah Durkee, Tony Geiss, Sam Pottle, and Christopher Cerf also deserve credit.

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• During the show's first few years, Stevie Wonder performed one of the most devastatingly epic versions of "Superstition" ever! Listen for yourself!
• How about the show's theme song? The first song ever to be played on the show, it has gone through several revisions. The original version was used for 23 years before it was changed in 1992, then again in 1998, then 2002 (with a slight revision in 2003), 2007, 2009 (with a slight revision in 2012), and 2016 (with a slight revision in 2022).
• Much of Season 1 is Jim Henson and Frank Oz using Sesame Street as their personal cover album, to awesome results. Particular standouts include their covers of "Spinning Wheel", "Octopus' Garden", "Everyone Knows It's Windy" and future Muppet standard "Mah Na Mah Na".
• Ernie's "Rubber Duckie" (Official Video here) was a huge hit (#10 on the Billboard pop charts!) in 1970.
• "Sing" is one of the most iconic and beloved songs in the show, and for good reason, as it is a simple, timeless, and joyful song that will last your whole life long and make you want to sing, sing a song. This song is only made better by the Carpenters' beautiful cover of the song, which rose to #3 on the Billboard pop charts in 1973. They also added a second verse to the song that ended up being adopted by Sesame Street itself for later versions of the song, bringing things full circle.
• Ray Charles' cover of "Bein' Green" (recorded for his 1975 album Renaissance and later featured on The Cosby Show) is as awesome as it is gorgeously uplifting. He performed his version on the Street in 1989. Frank Sinatra and Van Morrison also recorded covers.
• The wonderful closing credits music that used to accompany Friday episodes, complete with Toots Thielemans' mellow, bluesy harmonica rendition of the theme and the unforgettable "Funky Chimes" music (basically, imagine Sly and the Family Stone doing the Sesame Street theme). Then there's the closing theme used in the 90s and early 2000s.
• "Pinball Number Count". Fun Fact: Yes, that is The Pointer Sisters singing it. "1-2-3 4-5 6-7-8 9-10 11-12!"
• It's Hip to be a Square, based on "Hip to be Square" from Huey Lewis and the News and every bit as catchy. The writers did not have to write a soundalike melody for this song. Lewis said of the parody, "they contacted our publisher about doing it, and we were happy to let 'em. I think it's sweet."
• "The Word is 'No'", featuring a note-perfect 80's music video parody from noted real-life video producer Jim Blashfield.
• "Just Happy to Be Me", performed by Kingston Livingston III, with some backup from his friends. Sure, it dates itself, but that bass line is slick.
• "Gimme Five" by The Lovers of Five (a.k.a. David, Luis, Gordon, and Bob). Intended as a parody of "Float On" by the Floaters, but between an insanely catchy chorus and the guys batting it right out of the park with their singing, this parody song is far better than the original. Who could imagine a song about loving the number five could be so cool and suave?
• "Keep Christmas with You", both the original and the remix. It has the emotional message about how you can still feel happy and friendly like it's Christmas, even when it's not.
• Philip Glass' "Geometry of Circles" music. All four clips are pure minimalist goodness, and while they are all based around the same framework, they each play out quite differently to keep things interesting.
• Standing at the Bus Stop Sign. with The Four Tops, and watch for the cameo for Big Bird as the bus driver at the end.
• Sesame Street Creature Feature: The Marmoset. Besides the truly groovy spoken-word performance by Joe Raposo, contains the wonderful (and slightly subversive) lines "Are there things to share, when you're a marmoset? / And do you really care, when you're a marmoset..."
• Another so-oddball-it's-awesome Creature Feature: Props to Christopher Cerf for creating the best (and possibly only) song about how awesome manatees are.
• Another Sesame Street Creature Feature segment: The Tiger. Composed by Joe Raposo and sung by Northern Calloway (who played David on the show). Includes a spoken ending line: "You are such a magnificent animal, and I am really a nice person. And you wouldn't do anything funny, would you? Oh boy!"
• The relentlessly upbeat Creature Feature intro deserves a mention of its own. "Birds in the sky! Beasts on the land! Fish in the sea and bugs in your hand!"
• Although a lot of people get on Cookie Monster's case for eating fruits and vegetables in addition to cookies, they don't seem to remember that Cookie has promoted healthy eating as far back as 1974. In 1987, however, he rapped about healthy food. Awesomely.
• The Alone Song, simply because sometimes people do want to be alone, and there's nothing wrong with it.
• Yakety Yak, Take It Back features celebrities (like Stevie Wonder, B.B. King, and many others...), as well as Bugs Bunny in the music video.
• In 2015, the show's 1995 Greatest Hits Album Platinum All-Time Favorites was inducted in the National Recording Registry, quite possibly the highest honor any recording can receive, for being "historically, culturally and aesthetically important." You don't get more awesome than that!
• Awesome or not, there hasn't been any Sesame Street song quite as bizarre (or funny) as "Do De Rubber Duck". And that's not getting into the segment itself, where we see Ernie, two monsters (Telly and Elmo), a Grouch (Oscar), a frog (Kermit), a vampire-like man (the Count), a construction worker (Biff), a game show host (Guy Smiley), a cow (Gladys) and an owl (Hoots) singing and dancing in (or, in Elmo's case, around) Ernie's bathtub!
• Bet you never thought Kermit could have a better anthem than "Bein' Green," right? Sam Pottle begs to differ.
• Outdoors treats the episode's guest star with respect. It's a parody of the song "I'm Yours" by Jason Mraz. Guess who they got to sing it.
• "I'm an Aardvark" sounds simultaneously inspirational and wacky.
• "What's the Name of That Song?", the production number centerpiece of the Season 6 premiere in 1974 (which also happened to be Roscoe Orman's first episode as Gordon). It's a catchy number, featuring almost all of the cast, which, amusingly, never manages to answer the question posed by its title.
• Never before has a set of hardware tools made you want to get up and dance so badly.
• Worm Soliloquy is one huge parody of the song "Soliloquy" from Carousel, with a sample of "You'll Never Walk Alone" thrown in. John Raitt, who originated the role of Billy Bigelow in the Broadway version of Carousel, the character who sings "Soliloquy", even sings this version. Now that's a dedicated Shout-Out!
• The stop motion animated inserts of the 1970s and early 1980s featured some truly awesome synthesiser music. Among others:
  • Never has a kerosene oil lamp been so awesome, the pieces filing out of the box to a drumbeat before the synth kicks in to add just the right sense of ceremony to the lamp's assembly. It takes a haunting yet delightful turn once the lamp has assembled, the wick is lit, and the studio lights are dimmed so that we can only see by the light from the lamp.
  • Al Jarnow's 1980 short film "Architecture", which re-creates various architectural styles from antiquity to the present day using coloured building blocks, is accompanied by a terrific score by Tom Perri, who mentioned in YouTube comments that he and his team had to wire the ARP 2600 synth with which they were working in ways that had never been done before to bring the sounds in Perri's head to life. And it complements the animation beautifully. The music for the transition from the stone circle to the Greco-Roman temple in particular sounds like the triumphant homecoming of a conquering hero or heroine.
• Watermelons and Cheese, the hilarious, wacky song about how you shouldn't say 'watermelons and cheese' when you answer the phone.
• Imagination has a stunning, soaringly beautiful melody that would not be out of place in a Romantic-era song by Fauré or Brahms. Raposo at his best.
• Somebody Come and Play, another Raposo gem, manages to sound optimistic and wistful at the same time, just like a kid who doesn't have anyone to play with him but hopes someone will turn up soon.
• The hilarious Dance Yourself to Sleep, a major earworm as Ernie explains how to do a tap-dance routine with the Boogie Woogie Sheep to put yourself to sleep at night, over Bert's harrowed protestations as the sheep carry his bed out of the room.
• The Story of Bert's Blanket, another major earworm as the Sheep come to Ernie and Bert's bedroom and sing to Bert about how his blanket is made. At the end of the song, Bert offers to let the sheep sleep on Ernie's bed, since Ernie is at Count Von Count's.
• "It's All Right to Cry" has a message you don't often see on TV, but which is true: crying is acceptable, everyone cries, even grown-ups, and it's not just a baby thing.
  Narrator: Crying's not just for babies. Grown-ups can do it too. Big kids cry when there's a reason why. If they can do it, so can you.
• Cereal Girl, another classic parody, this one of "Material Girl" by Madonna.
• "Quiet or Loud". The animations are funny, it lets kids know they can be loud sometimes whereas similar things focus only on being quiet, and the background music would sound good on its own.
• "We Are a Family (We Love Each Other)" has kids singing about a family as they love each other. Some kids live with their parents, grandparents, or even aunts and uncles.
  Kids: Some families have one kid, the others have two or three.
• Both the songs by How Now Brown and the Moo Wave: "Wet Paint" and "Danger's No Stranger", even though they're both very obvious products of The '80s.
• "City-Country Song" (AKA "Life in the Country and the City"), first shown in 1974, sees a cowgirl (voiced by Marilyn Sokol) sing the virtues of country life, while a city slicker (voiced by Jim Henson) sings the virtues of city life. What really makes the song clever is the genre shifts; the cowgirl's verse is done in a country style (with yodelling for the penultimate line), the city slicker's verse is done in a smooth jazz style (with scat singing for the penultimate line), and then they alternate for the final verse as they sing that they'd certainly like to visit each other's home turf, but would rather live where they already are, ending with a dance across the split-screen effect as they sing their final lines in counterpoint (complete with a cow crossing from the country to the city and back again, and the odd car driving from the city to the country).
• "Listen to the Wind Blow," as performed by Buffy Sainte-Marie. Her vocals are top-notch, as always, and the gentle, lilting arrangement of the song at times feels reminiscent of traditional Indigenous music (particularly with the background chants).
• One reason to feel bad for Mr. Chatterly and all the nonsense he has to put up with in the "Alphabet Chat" segments is that he has a really classy theme song: the alphabet, sung as a round to a Johann Sebastian Bach melody by Richard Hunt and Jerry Nelson in their best madrigal voices.
  W, X, Y, Z, a-and A-ay B-ee Ceeeeeee
• Even the short music cues on this show are insanely good. The "News Flash" music, with a staccato electric organ and Dramatic Timpani, is only about five seconds long and still gets stuck in your head permanently.
• Seldom has the alphabet sounded cooler than in the Vince Collins-produced "Jazzy Alphabet" cartoon from 1974, which matches a series of very clever transitions from each letter to the next with a marvellously energetic jazz score by Donald Byrd and the Blackbyrds. The featured instrument shifts every four letters, with Keith Killgo on drums taking centre stage for A-D, I-L, and Q-T, while Allan Barnes on saxophone gets to strut his stuff for M-P, and Byrd himself on trumpet takes the lead for E-H and U-Z, all anchored by a groovy bass from Joe Hall and keyboards from Kevin Toney.
• "Animal Elevator" is a catchy song about animals riding in a department store elevator.
• "Beginning, Middle, and End" is a catchy song based on the Talking Heads with a trio of singing books explaining the three concepts and structures of stories.
• Snuffy's cover of "On Top of Spaghetti" may as well be the definitive version, as his vocals lend themselves perfectly to a Bluegrass song, let alone a comedic parody of "On Top of Old Smokey".
• I Don't Want to Live on the Moon is a fan favorite Jeff Moss tune, sung by Ernie. For its 50th Anniversary Celebration, Sesame Street created a new animated lyric video, using Jim's vocals (and featuring a familiar face).
• The Count von Count song "Batty Bat" is another classic Raposo number that got featured as an animated lyric video as part of the 50th celebration.
• Caribbean Amphibian is yet another lesser known gem from Kermit. The version he sings with Jimmy Buffet in the "Elmopalooza!" special is particularly notable.
• Several of the songs from "Don't Eat the Pictures":
  • Broken and Beautiful, sung by Oscar as he is admiring the ancient, broken Greek and Roman statues, is a surprisingly sweet song where Oscar describes the statues as "the most beautiful trash he's ever seen".
  • In a different way, the title song of that special is a hilariously weird song where Cookie Monster warns the viewer not to eat the pictures in an art museum, and includes such lyrics as "Mummy look yummy, but it not for tummy".
• While "Doo-Wop Hop" is a fun and catchy Christopher Cerf doo-wop style song in itself, the video for it is even more memorable!
• The Elephant Elevator Operator is another funny Christopher Cerf song, and it's even performed by the Legendary Dave Goelz, in one of his rare Sesame Street appearances! (You usually don't think about it, but it makes you realize how much of a great comedy performer Sesame Street missed out on.)
• Mr. Between, with a rare Dave Goelz lead vocal, is about a guy that likes to get between everything, including, but certainly not limited to, two potted plants, two pairs of pants, and a seal and a herring!
• The Count's First Day at School, a completely infectious klezmer bop—just try to have a bad day when you're singing along. "I'll count Gregory and Sue, that makes numbers one and two..."
• Put Down The Duckie is a rockin' jazz song sung by Hoots the Owl as he tries to help Ernie play his saxophone by, well, putting down Rubber Duckie. Even better than the original version is the celebrity version, filmed one celebrity at a time over several years and well worth the wait.

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