Vince Guaraldi Sheet Music Compiled by Derrick Bang

Until recently, most Vince Guaraldi sheet music could be hard to find.

Because of its popularity, "Linus and Lucy" has always been fairly common as a sheet music single. It can be found in current sheet music catalogs, from which any good-sized music store should be able to order. By the same token, "Christmas Time is Here" is always easy to find, particularly around the holidays.

Historically, the quest is more difficult. In the late '60s and early '70s, Pointer Publications, a division of what then was Hal Leonard/Pointer Publications, put out a series of easy piano books -- the Peanuts Keyboard Fun series -- most of which were adapted from the early TV specials. The books typically contained 32 pages, and the two center pages featured full-color illustrations from the show in question. The musical contents tended to cross over from book to book; in other words, if you had two books, they'd have some of the same songs, and some unique to each book.

For example, the book for He's Your Dog, Charlie Brown includes 12 songs, all by Guaraldi: "Baseball Theme," "Blue Charlie Brown," "Bon Voyage," "Happiness Theme," "He's Your Dog, Charlie Brown" (title theme), "Housewife Theme," "Linus and Lucy" (of course!), "Oh, Good Grief," "Peppermint Patty," "Red Baron," "Schroeder" and "Schroeder's Wolfgang."

These TV score books were $2.95 each, and included the following volumes: A Charlie Brown Christmas Charlie Brown's All Stars It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown You're in Love, Charlie Brown He's Your Dog, Charlie Brown It Was a Short Summer, Charlie Brown

Pointer also published a score book for the first Peanuts feature film, A Boy Named Charlie Brown. Aside from some of the familiar Guaraldi tunes, this also includes incidental music by John Scott Trotter (such as "Bus Wheel Blues") and Rod McKuen's title song, along with the other vocals ("Champion Charlie Brown," etc.).

Additionally, Pointer produced two Organ Fun Books, with the same songs arranged for this instrument. The first book, at $2.95, included a "Peanuts Keyboard Guide and Guide for Parents and Teachers," while the second book, at $1.95, featured a "Peanuts Pointers chart which offers special creative styling techniques." (Probably not the same as a master class from Guaraldi himself, however...)

Finally, the Peanuts Music Fun Notebook, also at $2.95, "allows children to learn music through doing -- reading, drawing and coloring exercises. The book features Snoopy Snip-Outs, small flash cards which teach basic fundamentals such as names of notes, note values, rests and rhythm patterns."

These are all long out of print and absolutely impossible to find (although if anybody reading these words owns one or more, I'd sure like to hear about it!).

In 1984, the Hal Leonard Publishing Corporation, now freed of Pointer Publications, brought out Charlie Brown's Greatest Hits (#HL00240155), originally published at $5.95. This 56-page volume has reasonably complete transcriptions of 18 different songs, all by Vince Guaraldi and arranged by Lee Evans. There was also a beginner version -- #00240154 -- for $8.95.

An early songbook to A Charlie Brown Christmas (shown at the top of this document) contains all the music from the same-titled album, and -- better yet -- arranged in Guaraldi's unique style, transcribed for piano by Bill Galliford and David Pugh. So, you not only get Guaraldi Peanuts originals such as "Linus and Lucy" and "Christmas is Coming," you get his jazzy interpretations of "What Child Is This" and "O, Christmas Tree." The transcriptions are dead-on accurate; if your piano is in tune, you can play along with the CD and sound just like the master himself...or, better yet, surprise your friends during the holiday season by launching into a swinging rendition of "The Christmas Song." The book existed in both easy piano and "regular" versions -- the latter, when first published, was $13.95 for 32 pages -- and was published by CPP/Belwin Inc.

CPP/Belwin Inc.'s Happy Anniversary, Charlie Brown (#P0868SMX) has become pretty hard to find. The 36-page volume has the music for all 11 of the songs found on the CD of the same name, and eight are Guaraldi compositions (including, of course, "Linus and Lucy"). The level of difficulty is higher; these are rich piano transcriptions that sound fabulous when played by somebody who takes the time to learn them well.

CPP/Belwin also produced the folio book that goes with Dave Brubeck's Quiet as the Moon album, which features music used in the "NASA Space Station" episode of This Is America, Charlie Brown. Published in 1992 at a cost of $12.95, the 32-page volume includes transcriptions of eight original Brubeck tunes, two by Guaraldi ("Linus and Lucy" and "Cast Your Fate to the Wind"), and an up-tempo arrangement of Harry Dacre's "Bicycle Built for Two." The front of the book also includes three pages of text and storyboard illustrations that describe the making of that particular animated episode, as recalled by Brubeck himself.

Nearly a decade passed before somebody mounted a renewed market assault, and it once again turned out to be Hal Leonard. At the moment, would-be Peanuts music performers are in luck, because Hal Leonard released a raft of new music books in late 2001, for a variety of ages and skills. For the most part, the song selections mirror those the company published in 1984, in "Charlie Brown's Greatest Hits" (see above). The formats and titles available are:

The Charlie Brown Collection (#00313177, medium-level piano solo), 18 songs and 8 pages of full-color Peanuts art, for $14.95;
The Charlie Brown Collection (#00316070, easy piano), 18 songs and 8 pages of full-color Peanuts art, for $14.95;
The Charlie Brown Collection (#00100149, E-Z Play Today), 11 songs, for $6.95;
The Charlie Brown Collection (#00316071, Big-Note piano), 12 songs, for $10.95;
The Charlie Brown Collection (#00316072, Five-Finger piano), 8 songs, for $7.95;
A Charlie Brown Christmas, a collection of 10 songs from the TV special, arranged in each of the five levels indicated above.

Hal Leonard also re-issued the singles "Linus and Lucy," "Christmas Time Is Here" and "The Charlie Brown Theme," in a style that matches the new books.

The best one, however, is The Peanuts Illustrated Songbook (#00313178, $19.95), an absolutely gorgeous 120-page book that'll appeal both to budding pianists and plain ol' fans of Vince Guaraldi, who have no intention of setting finger to keyboard. It contains a whopping 30 songs, including several -- among them "Frieda," "Surfin' Snoopy" and the main theme to the Thanksgiving special -- that haven't been released prior to this point. The arrangements are medium-level, and certainly "dense" enough to sound reasonably true to the recorded originals. Better yet, the front of the book has an impressive 20-page introduction, by Hank Bordowitz, that talks about Guaraldi and his career, both in terms of his Peanuts work and also his mainstream jazz efforts. George Winston and Vince's son, Dave, are quoted in this introduction, which also includes quite a few old photos of Vince at work and play ... along with plenty of full-color Peanuts line art. Information about Guaraldi is even more scarce than his sheet music (and I should know, since I've contributed a great deal of what little exists), and so this volume is very welcome.

Finally, Hal Leonard also has released The Vince Guaraldi Collection (#00672486, $19.95), which is a true conversation-stopper for those folks who absolutely want to play precisely like Guaraldi. The book contains note-for-note transcriptions of four Guaraldi originals -- "Cast Your Fate to the Wind," "Christmas Time Is Here," "Linus and Lucy" and "Star Song" -- along with his arrangements of five other cuts from early albums: "Greensleeves" and "O Tannenbaum," from "A Charlie Brown Christmas"; and "Manha de Carnaval," "Outra Vez" and "Samba de Orfeu." This is the real deal, boys and girls; these nine songs take up 85 full pages, and -- unless you're a prodigy -- these aren't pieces that you'll master during the last few hours before you want to impress folks at a dinner party. Some of us have waited a long time for a book like this, and we're talking ... well, decades! The book also includes a short (one page) biography that apparently wrote itself, as nobody is credited. There's also no transcription credit, which perhaps makes sense from the standpoint that this is, after all, Vince's own music ... but somebody put a helluva lot of time into this book, and I'm saddened that we'll never know who that was.

These last few books should keep budding jazz pianists busy, and they're also nice for folks who simply want to learn a little bit more about Guaraldi himself.

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