A Tuneful Tribute to Jim Henson

A Dixieland band played at his memorial service; no one was to wear black. When Muppet genius Jim Henson died of pneumonia in 1990 at the age of 53, he left instructions that he be remembered with smiles, not tears.

That spirit can be found in a happy new album, “Jim Henson: A Sesame Street Celebration,” a collection of 20 years of songs in which Henson gave voice to Kermit the Frog, Ernie and a few lesser-known Muppet characters. On audiocassette, the album is being released Wednesday on the Golden Music label in cooperation with the Children’s Television Workshop.

“It’s not a sad album at all. The songs are life-fulfilling and delightful,” said Cheryl Henson, Jim Henson’s daughter and vice president of the prodigious Jim Henson Productions empire.

Producer Christopher Cerf, one of the original “Sesame Street” songwriters and the originator of the tribute album, agrees. “We wanted to make sure this wasn’t a maudlin album in any way,” he said. “We wanted people to remember what a wonderfully warm, funny guy Jim was, not just to think how sad it was that we lost him. And we wanted it to be a joyous children’s album. That’s why it’s called a celebration rather than a memorial album.”

Still, there is an undeniable poignancy in some of the songs. “It is a little difficult to listen to,” said Children’s Television Workshop founder Joan Ganz Cooney, “because it’s so much Jim. My favorite song is ‘I Don’t Want to Live on the Moon’ that Ernie sings. It’s haunting in this context. . . . It’s not a sad song, but it resonates in a very particular way.”

It’s likely there will be a tribute to Henson on “Sesame Street” at some point, Cooney said. “Any time is right” to remember him. “His work is here, it’s ageless.”

“I guess that’s what’s so sad and perplexing,” Cerf said. “He’s still so very much here and yet he’s not. You can’t write another song for Kermit, yet here are these 20 songs (Henson sang) that will be heard and every day his wonderful characters are beamed into millions of households.”

(Cheryl Henson assures those who “have commented on Kermit’s voice being different on ‘Sesame Street’ ” that it is indeed Jim Henson’s voice. “Kermit and Ernie are only seen in rerun inserts.”)

The album includes two of “Sesame Street’s” best-known signature songs, Joe Raposo’s “Bein’ Green” as sung by Kermit and Jeffrey Moss’ “Rubber Duckie,” sung by Ernie. Nine other selections have never been released before.

Raposo’s “African Alphabet,” which so memorably teamed Kermit with Ladysmith Black Mambazo, has special meaning for Cheryl Henson. It was part of the 1990 televised tribute to the late Raposo, “first broadcast on May 16, the day my father died,” she said. “We just sat and watched that special and when that song came on at the end, I thought, ‘This is so beautiful.’ ”

But because Cerf is also producing a tribute album to Raposo, due out next year, “there was some discussion as to whose album ‘African Alphabet’ would be on.

“I hadn’t been sure whether I should save it for the other album since Joe wrote it,” Cerf said, “but it was one of Jim’s last really major productions for ‘Sesame Street’ and was one of Joe’s as well. It seemed wrong to leave it off of this one.”

Others involved in the song selections were “Danny Epstein, who runs the music department at ‘Sesame Street,’ ” Cerf said, “Jeff Moss, one of the original writers of the show, John Stone, who is still directing and is one of the main creative forces behind the show and Pat Raposo, the widow of Joe Raposo, who was the show’s first musical director and another tragic loss.”

Moss, who had just received his copy of the album and was scanning the album’s contents, said, “I’m looking at this list and I see 20 years of my life move before me. ‘Five People in My Family’--that was the first song I wrote for ‘Sesame Street’ and the first song that the Muppets sang on the show.

“ ‘I Don’t Want to Live on the Moon,’ when we did production, Jim came over to me and said in that soft voice”--Moss suddenly sounded uncannily like Henson--” ’this one’s going to be a classic.’ ”

“Jim didn’t have a great voice,” Moss said. “He wasn’t a wonderful musician. He just had such a perfect sense of what something meant and he knew instinctively how to get it across. You hear that funny little voice singing a note that might not be on pitch and it can break your heart.”

Moss, 48, who still writes for the show, credits Henson with creating “one of the few places where musically we were able to stretch ourselves as far as we could.”

Because of the creative versatility Henson established, Cerf said, “they can create a character for whatever song you make up; there’s even a drawer labeled ‘Bilingual Fruit.’ And even the silliest songs Jim would study and listen to and record over till he got it right. Sometimes you couldn’t tell what wasn’t right about it, but he could. He and Frank Oz would ad-lib little lines or bits of business that made the thing more creative than you ever imagined it.”

“The wonderful thing was his concentration and dedication to the material,” Moss said. “He wouldn’t leave the microphone till he was happy and you were happy. There was a laser-type concentration about him; he wanted to make it as good as he possibly could.”

Cerf first approached the company with the album idea just after Jim Henson died, according to Cheryl Henson, but the then ongoing negotiations for a Disney merger postponed its production.

The proposed merger involving Disney’s purchase of the Henson firm’s licensing and publishing businesses was thrown into disarray at Henson’s death.

But “almost as soon as the Disney relationship was no longer going to happen,” Cheryl Henson said, “this was one of the first projects we gave the go-ahead to.

“It means so much to us to get these songs out there in the world, because they express my father’s joy and love of life. It’s wonderful to have him at his most playful.”