Joe Raposo

For the first few years of my life, Sesame Street was the first thing I would see in the morning. Thankfully, I grew up in the era when it was the stuff of legend. One aspect of the show which made it that way was the music of Joe Raposo, their long-standing musical director. Not only on this, but also The Electric Company, various Muppet TV specials, and many others. I read somewhere that within a five-year period, he'd written 2,000 songs and/or instrumental pieces. In fact, the instrumentals were what really made me take note; they usually accompanied short but memorable film-clips of animals or insects in the wild. These and his vocal pieces covered an astounding variety of musical styles: jazz, pop, Latin, country, bebop, marches...you name it, he did it, and it was always good. If I ever got any jazz-oriented tendencies, this is where they came from. Like a lot of young viewers, when he sang, I thought it was Emilio Delgado, who played Luis, but that's only because their voices were slightly similar. I always enjoyed his works on the show, and after he passed away in 1989, his songs and music were sadly (for the most part) phased out from the show. Thankfully, there's always loads of clips of his work on YouTube to listen to, reminisce, and remember him by. Geoffrey is well-versed in his songs, thanks to me playing them from the Old School DVD's, or YouTube.