Laurence Juber (left) and Tommy Emmanuel (right) both contributed to Poppin’ Guitars.

Poppin’ Guitars (Solid Air Records) offers a delightful mix of styles, from gentle ballads to Kenny Sultan’s ragtime treatment of “There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow” to Greg Hawkes’s ukulele version of “You’re Sixteen,” a 1960 hit for Johnny Burnette and later for Ringo Starr. Each arrangement takes a familiar song and gives it an unexpected twist. Al Petteway, who contributed a beautiful version of “Hushabye Mountain” from Mary Poppins, said he grew up with most of those songs. “I loved hearing what all of the guitarists did with them,” Petteway says. “It made all of that music fresh again for me.”

In addition to the album, a limited-edition DVD provides a behind-the-scenes view of Tommy Emmanuel recording “Winnie the Pooh” at Laurence Juber’s studio, along with discussions between Juber, Emmanuel, coproducer James Jensen, and Richard Sherman, as well as Juber performing his stunning version of “A Spoonful of Sugar.” As the opening track of the album, Emmanuel’s arrangement sets the mood, beginning gently with his trademark harmonics before evolving into a playful and joyous romp through the Hundred Acre Wood.

Stories in the Songs

Not surprisingly, arranging these tunes presented some challenges. “We were always doing something to tell stories,” Richard Sherman says. “These are little bits of stories, not just a melody out of the blue.” That meant the guitarists had to tell these stories without words, but there were other challenges as well. “There’s a little extra pressure involved when you know that one of the composers is going to hear your treatment of his song,” says Jim Tozier, who covered “The Slipper and the Rose Waltz.” But Sherman was enthusiastic about the results. “They had to make something with melodic lines alone,” Sherman says. “They told their own stories. I’m thrilled because they made so many wonderful individual statements within the material.”

The guitarists on the album didn’t opt for simple arrangements of the melodies, instead choosing to interpret the whole recording. Doug Smith’s beautiful arrangement of “Feed the Birds” from Mary Poppins is a case in point. “The song is not only beautiful but has a real sense of wonder,” Smith says. “I wanted to convey that at the beginning by repeating the first two chords of the chorus, C and Em, which sound great in the C G D G B E tuning. I start with a bit of the chorus because that’s the first thing you hear when Mary Poppins starts. I wanted to get the coda as close as I could to the movie version, and I also tried to occasionally get a bit of what the orchestra did into the arrangement.”

Although some tracks on Poppin’ Guitars overdub a second guitar, the closing tune is the only full-fledged duet. Mark Hanson and Smith’s arrangement of “It’s a Small World” serves as a showcase of duet arranging techniques and also exemplifies the personal connections many of the artists felt with these tunes. “It’s a Small World” was written for the 1964 New York World’s Fair (it later became part of a Disneyland ride), where Hanson first heard it. “Having grown up a couple miles from Disneyland, I always think of the ride and that façade that has a giant clock that’s constantly ticking, with it chiming on the quarter hour,” Smith says. That clock is prominently featured in their arrangement. “We love the intro—Big Ben chiming—which is also echoed at the end,” Hanson says. “The beauty of the sound, my Big Ben harmonics over Doug’s eighth-note harmonics ostinato, really pulls the listener in.”

From there, Smith and Hanson pull out all the stops to keep the short and simple melody interesting and varied, moving from a delicate music-box-like version of the chorus, through several styles—mimicking the effect of moving through different cultures on the ride. “Doug and I work out duets in a variety of ways, and we used all of them in ‘It’s a Small World,’” Hanson says. “Doug made up the intro, I wrote the uptempo fiddle-tune craziness near the end, and we worked out much of the rest of it together. The idea of playing the verse and the chorus melodies simultaneously came from my wife, Greta Pedersen, who has used the technique with her children’s choruses.”

From Orchestration to Fingerstyle

Some guitarists were less familiar with the tunes they arranged. Tozier began his arrangement of “The Slipper and the Rose Waltz” by tracking down a copy of the movie and listening repeatedly, since he didn’t know the tune. Although the song’s complex orchestration was difficult to emulate, Tozier made a useful discovery. “Fortunately, the same melody is also used for the vocal tune ‘He Danced with Me/She Danced with Me,’ sung by Richard Chamberlain and Gemma Craven after the ballroom scene, which made it easier to focus on the melody and the important chord changes,” Tozier says. The tune was a stylistic departure for Tozier. “One of the neat things about the melody is that it builds up tension through a series of half-step intervals, with the tension releasing in the last few notes of each line,” he says. “It was such a departure from the Celtic tunes I’m used to arranging.”

Poppin’ Guitars is clearly a labor of love by all involved, and if there’s a common theme, it’s “fun,” which is perhaps best represented by Mike Dowling’s quoting of Baloo the bear (“Get mad, baby!”) from The Jungle Book in his arrangement of “I Wan’na Be Like You.” (For a transcription, see the March 2010 issue page 80.) Sherman had a mirthful reaction to Dowling’s line. “I heard it and I giggled,” Sherman says.

Doug Young is a contributing editor to Acoustic Guitar.