Vince Guaraldi - It's Arbor Day Charlie Brown / Charlie Brown's All Stars!

Vince Guaraldi — It's Arbor Day Charlie Brown / Charlie Brown's All Stars

Original soundtrack recordings 50th Extended and 60th Anniversary Limited Editions

Pressed on Forest Green colored Bio-Vinyl

Here's a great collector's item for all the Peanuts comics fans! Featuring the premiere soundtrack release of Charlie Brown's All Stars, the second Peanuts TV special, for its 60th anniversary. Plus the premiere soundtrack release of It's Arbor Day, Charlie Brown, celebrating the TV special's 50th anniversary, recorded in part on the day that Vince Guaraldi died. All on one 12" 33 1/3 RPM LP!

Lee Mendelson and Bill Melendez, a pair of television writers and producers, with Guaraldi, struck gold with Guaraldi's score for the 1965 animated special A Charlie Brown Christmas. The special became a Yuletide perennial, broadcast every December. When Mendelson, Melendez, and Peanuts creator Charles Schulz began work on a Halloween-themed Peanuts special, It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, Guaraldi was again invited to write the music. He became an integral part of the production team behind the specials (generally at least one was produced each year), and also wrote music for the Peanuts-themed feature film A Boy Named Charlie Brown.

Charlie Brown's All Stars, a 1966 animated television special based on the Peanuts characters, was the second prime-time TV special to be produced by Mendelson and Melendez (who also directed). Guaraldi's score for the special had a baseball theme, as the special focused on one of the comic strip's most titular subjects, the Peanuts characters' baseball team, led by Charlie Brown as pitcher. 

Guaraldi's work on the Peanuts projects kept him busy enough that he would release only six more albums during the rest of his recording career (including two albums for Warner Bros. that found him experimenting with electric instruments), though he kept up a schedule of live performances in addition to his television commitments.

On February 6, 1976, Vince Guaraldi died of a heart attack in a hotel room in Menlo Park, California; he had completed recording of his score for It's Arbor Day, Charlie Brown earlier in the day, and was resting between shows during a nightclub engagement when he collapsed and never woke up.