How Pianist Vince Guaraldi’s Music Became the Soundtrack to ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas’ (Exclusive)

It might be the most famous jazz album in the country — Vince Guaraldi’s soundtrack for A Charlie Brown Christmas, which first aired 60 years ago in December.

Jason Mendelson — the son of Lee Mendelson, who produced many Peanuts specials including A Charlie Brown Christmas — tells PEOPLE that though the now-classic 1965 holiday special was the first Peanuts movie to air, it wasn’t the first animated Charlie Brown work made.

“Charles Schulz and Bill Melendez, the animator and director, and Lee Mendelson and Vince Guaraldi had made the year before a documentary called A Boy Named Charlie Brown, which is the same name as the feature film that they got the Oscar nomination for, but it’s not the same thing,” Jason explains. The documentary was never released. 

Lee, who died on Christmas Day in 2019 at the age of 86, got a call from CBS, not to buy the documentary but to make a new Christmas special. 

“My father’s response to CBS was, ‘Of course,’ ” Jason says. So he called Schulz, who was known to friends as Sparky. “Sparky said to Lee, ‘Did you sell the documentary?’ And my father said, ‘No, we didn’t, but I sold Charlie Brown Christmas.’ And Sparky said, ‘What’s that?’ And my father said, ‘Something you and Bill and I have to write this weekend.’ ”

Jason says he thinks A Charlie Brown Christmas has resonated 60 years after that first airing because of the “perfect amalgamation” for Schulz’s philosophy, Melendez’s simple animation, his father’s ability to put it together “on a shoestring in a few months.”

“And then the music of Vince Guaraldi, which is now ubiquitous with the holiday,” he says.

For the holiday, Craft Recordings is releasing a series of collectible vinyl reprintings of the A Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack. Peanuts also celebrated the 75th anniversary of the very first strip, released in 1950, this year.

Jason says some of the appeal of Guaraldi’s music is that it was “different than everything else that was out at that time, and remains that way and remains ubiquitous.”

“It’s instrumental jazz that has permeated society and the world,” he says. 

Back when making A Boy Named Charlie Brown, it was Jason’s father Lee who called Guaraldi up to see if he wanted to score the film. “Vince jumped all over it. Of course he wanted to do it, because he loved Peanuts, and he knew exactly from that first moment what the sound should be for those characters and those little vignettes they did for the documentary,” Lee says. “The irony is, the only thing that came out from that documentary was his album. It was a huge hit.”

When it came to the Christmas special, Guaraldi was tapped again. “He knew what fit for all of those scenes,” Jason says. He thinks the special’s magic lies in the fact that the collaborators “didn’t have time to mess it up and they trusted each other.” He notes, “They all worked together until the day they died.” Guaraldi died in in 1976 at the age of 47.

Jason was born in 1978 and got involved in the family business before he realized what a big deal it was. “One of my earliest memories is recording the voices for Peanuts in the studio with my dad,” he says. “I just remember thinking, ‘This is really weird, but it’s what my dad wants me to do, so let’s do it.’ ” The characters he voiced included Rerun Van Pelt and Peppermint Patty. It was only when he was in his preteens that he began to appreciate that his dad had helped make him part of an American institution.  

As an adult, Jason has produced Peanuts specials and now he and his brother Sean try to carry out their dad’s legacy. “I’m the luckiest person in the world with my brother and the rest of my family that we get to continue to work on and celebrate this stuff for now 60 years,” he says. 

As for the A Charlie Brown Christmas music, Jason says, “It brings us back to a feeling of nostalgia and childhood, but also it is completely timeless.

“It’s for children, right? But it’s not really for children. It’s for everybody.”