Carl William Stalling (November 10, 1891 – November 29, 1972) was an American composer, voice actor and arranger for music in animated films. He is most closely associated with the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies shorts produced by Warner Bros. Cartoons, where he averaged one complete score each week, for 22 years.
Life and career
Stalling was born to Ernest and Sophia C. Stalling. His parents were from Germany; his father arrived in the United States in 1883. The family settled in Lexington, Missouri where his father was a carpenter. He started playing piano at six. By the age of 12, he was the principal piano accompanist in his hometown's silent movie house. For a short period, he was also the theatre organist at the St. Louis Theater.
By his early 20s, he was conducting his own orchestra and improvising on the organ at the Isis Movie Theatre in Kansas City. His actual job at the time was to play organ accompaniment for silent films. During that time, he met and befriended a young Walt Disney, who was producing animated comedy shorts in Kansas City. According to music critic Neil Strauss, the chance meeting between Stalling and Disney in the early 1920s was of great importance to the development of music for animation. Stalling was at his job at the Isis Movie Theatre, demonstrating his ability to combine well-known music by other creators with his own, improvised compositions. Disney stepped into the movie theater and was reportedly impressed with his style. He approached Stalling to introduce himself, and their acquaintance was mutually beneficial. Stalling was able to arrange the screening of a few Disney animated shorts at the Isis, and Disney ensured that Stalling would play the accompaniment for his films.
Disney eventually left Kansas City and moved to California to open a new studio. Stalling and Disney kept in touch through correspondence, and considered each other friends. In 1928, Disney was on a journey from California to New York City to record the sound and make the preview of Steamboat Willie, Disney's first released sound short. During the journey he stopped at Kansas City to hire Stalling to compose film scores for two other animated shorts.
Stalling encouraged Disney to create a new series of animated short films, in which the animation and its action would be created to match the music. This was still unusual at the time, since film music was played or composed to match the action of a film.
Musicologist and animation historian Daniel Goldmark has noted that Jones repeated this anecdote about Stalling in a number of interviews. Jones also claimed in a 1975 interview that "My Funny Little Bumble Bee" song was too obscure for the audience to notice the musical reference. He exaggerated that one had to be 108-years-old to even remember the existence of the song. Goldmark believes that the anecdote itself was inaccurate in several ways. The "Bumble Bee song" of the anecdote was actually "Be My Little Baby Bumble Bee" (1912), which was not obscure to begin with. It was a hit song from the musical A Winsome Widow, produced by Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. It had also been recorded to great acclaim by the popular duo of Ada Jones and Billy Murray.