My goal was to preserve some never-before-heard recordings of an incredible Dixieland jazz band made up of mostly Disney employees, the Firehouse Five Plus Two.
But along the way, I accidentally discovered an incredible lost song that was cut from Walt Disney’s Cinderella.
Here’s the backstory. In the early 1940’s, a bunch of talented folks in the powerful orbit of legendary Disney animator Ward Kimball, which naturally included plenty of folks from the Disney animation and sound departments, discovered that they shared a common love of jazz.
During World War II, they started a studio band called the Huggajeedy Eight, and mostly played as part of Disney “camp shows” — vaudeville-style programs put on by studio personnel for soldiers at local military bases. Then, around 1945, Ward met a local trumpeter, Johnny Lucas, and together they started the San Gabriel Valley Blueblowers, playing frequently around LA.
Here’s Ward Kimball on the subject:
“Some of us used to gather in my office at lunchtime to listen to my records of jazz legends. We decided to really get into the spirit of the music by playing along with the records. Then one day the phonograph broke down right in the middle of ‘Royal Garden Blues’. Undaunted, we kept right on playing and found to our amazement that we sounded pretty good all by ourselves!”
This group became the Firehouse Five Plus Two, to advertise that they had seven members, and began playing paying gigs, but they kept their day jobs. You know, the ones where they were Disney animators in Disney’s Golden Age.
Anyway, this audio is from lacquer instantaneous disks, which are even more fragile than normal vinyl disks, so he shipped them off to the Northeast Document Conservation Center and had them digitize the audio. And I have to say, they’re good-quality recordings, all things considered. I’ve paid actual money for much worse.
So these weren’t meant for public consumption. The credits to the “Outhouse Oaters” and the “Farthouse Fuckheads” proves that much. And I can’t imagine Walt allowing anything credited to the “Jackoff Jackrabbits” to go out under the Disney label. Just guessing here.
But the real standout, the Cinderella Surprise, is a song cut from Cinderella, the “Work Fantasy” where Cinderella imagines having a whole army of Cinderella clones to boss around. Psychological and slash fiction possibilities aside, the recording comes with spoken lead-in and is quite catchy.
Here’s the whole package in a form that’s easier to download, on the Internet Archive.