It’s a story that has become almost legendary. But it’s much better, in fact, because it’s true. On many a Friday afternoon at the Walt Disney Studios during the mid-1960s, Walt Disney would call brothers Robert and Richard Sherman to his office. As the songwriters entered, the boss would say, “Play it.” They knew what he meant.
Richard, the younger of the Shermans, would sit at the piano and together the brothers would sing “Feed the Birds,” a song they’d written and composed for Marry Poppins (1964). “[We’d] sing it for him,” Richard would later recall, “and he’d go, ‘That’s what it's all about. Have a good weekend, boys.’ Then he’d send us home.” These regular occurrences led the Shermans to believe that “Feed the Birds” was Walt Disney’s favorite song.
Throughout the story of Mary Poppins, young siblings Jane (Karen Dotrice) and Michael (Matthew Garber) Banks are enchanted by their nanny Mary Poppins’ (Julie Andrews) ability to illuminate facets of everyday life with magical qualities. A piece of chalk art on the sidewalk becomes a musical outing in the countryside. A session of afternoon tea becomes a rollicking laugh fest in the air. But these adventures are contrasted by dispiriting conditions at home, where their attempts to grow close to their father (David Tomlinson) are met only with aloofness and severity.
When Mary Poppins suggests the children accompany Mr. Banks to his office at a local bank, Jane and Michael are elated, imagining all the wonders of the city that their father will show them. Mary Poppins then clarifies that “sometimes a person we love, through no fault of his own, can’t see past the end of his nose…. Sometimes a little thing can be quite important.”
She takes out a snow globe that depicts St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, past which their father commutes to work. She then sings the tale of an elderly woman who sits at the foot of St. Paul’s, offering little packets of breadcrumbs at “tuppence a bag,” tuppence being the vernacular speech for “twopence,” an English coin valuing two pennies.
“Come feed the little birds, show them you care, and you'll be glad if you do,” Mary Poppins sings. “Their young ones are hungry, their nests are so bare, all it takes is tuppence from you.” It’s a simple entreaty. For only two pennies, you can both feed the birds and provide a meaningful gesture to a kindly stranger. Above, the cathedral looms with its statues of “saints and apostles” who look down with smiling approval. “Though her words are simple and few,” Poppins continues, “listen, listen, she's calling to you. Feed the birds, tuppence a bag….”
The excitement at seeing the Bird Woman and desire to feed the birds, and their father’s insistence on continuing on to his bank and learn about his work, kicks off the film’s third act during which Jane and Michael inadvertently cause a bank run, Mr. Banks loses his job (later to regain it), and the family ultimately comes together in mutual understanding of love and simple enjoyment.
A slow and gentle song, “Feed the Birds” differs most of other songs in Poppins, many of which are lively numbers of the English music hall tradition. Critics in 1964 took notice, calling it “pensive and melodic” and a “gentle, poignant” song that “offers a fine change of pace.” A Salt Lake City newspaper reported that “one of the most popular sequences in the Disney hit is that involving the ‘bird woman.’ This scene features the number, ‘Feed the Birds,’ one of the most wistfully sweet selections in a Disney movie.”
Yet despite its unusual tone, “Feed the Birds” is at the heart of Mary Poppins, both figuratively in its importance to the story, and subliminally as a consistent emotional thread. It’s the first musical cue heard at the film’s beginning, and later, when Mr. Banks makes the walk to meet his fate at work, the sweeping orchestral reprise of “Feed the Birds” is almost more impactful than the earlier vocal performance by Julie Andrews.
It was the first song Robert and Richard Sherman wrote for Mary Poppins. Early during their tenure writing songs at Disney, Walt introduced them to P. L. Travers’ novel of the same name, which had been published in 1934, launching a series of Poppins books. The Shermans came back with a handful of initial songs inspired by moments in the first book. “We asked Walt if we could have a half an hour of his time,” Richard Sherman would remember, “and we played a few song ideas we had. He was very impressed with what we were coming up with. At the end of this meeting, he said, ‘Play me that Bird Woman song again.’”
From the beginning, “Feed the Birds” stood out to Walt, and it was after that meeting that he offered the brothers contracts to be staff songwriters at the studio, something no one else had ever been offered before. It seems that his decision was also encouraged by their mutual admiration of specific chapters in Travers’ book, including that entitled “The Bird Woman.”
In a book that is enigmatic, funny, illusory, charming, mythical, and poetic all at once, “The Bird Woman” is one of the briefest chapters in the novel Mary Poppins, buried three quarters of the way through. The children visit the Bird Woman at St. Paul’s, although with Mary Poppins rather than their father. No explanation is given as to why they are so fascinated by her, not unlike a child eager to meet Santa Claus. All the Woman says is “Feed the Birds” and “Tuppence a Bag.” “Over and over again, the same thing, in a high chanting voice that made the words seem like a song,” Travers writes. “And as she said it she held out little bags of breadcrumbs to the passers-by. All round her flew the birds, circling and leaping and swooping and rising.”
It's not entirely clear where Travers’ derived her inspiration for the Bird Woman, although breadcrumb vendors were common in London. The birds are specifically noted to be doves and pigeons, and curiously, Mary Poppins is a bit dismissive of them. The birds in return taunt the nanny, and one of them takes a rose off Mary Poppins’ hat and places it atop the Bird Woman’s own rough-hewn cap. At another moment, Travers describes a bird sitting atop the Woman’s head, an image directly adapted into the Disney film.
According to professor of children’s literature Patricia Demers, the Bird Woman is “an almost biblical figure” who exemplifies Travers’ own “storyteller’s desire to embrace and possibly heal all.” Travers’ biographer Valerie Lawson would compare the Bird Woman to other elderly characters in the Poppins books, like the Balloon Woman in 1935’s Mary Poppins Comes Back (and adapted for the 2018 sequel film, Mary Poppins Returns, as played by Angela Lansbury). “All the old people in the Mary Poppins books appear to be happy – crones who have found the meaning of life.”
Although Walt and the Sherman Brothers intended to make what they saw as necessary diversions from Travers’ source material in their adaptation, the power of the Bird Woman proved alluring, and ultimately essential to their vision. “When we were reading various stories written by Mrs. Travers,” Richard Sherman recalled, “we came across the Bird Woman…. And we said to each other, ‘That’s the metaphor for the whole film.’ A little extra bit of kindness – it doesn’t take much. After all, a tuppence is no money at all. There’s a great statement there that describes the whole picture. Mary Poppins teaches the family how to stick together and do nice things for each other….”
It's well-known that the collaboration between P. L. Travers, Walt Disney, and the latter’s creative team was challenging, to say the least. “Mrs. Travers was passionate about her dislike for our work,” Robert Sherman wrote in his memoir, Moose. “When she heard Dick sing ‘Feed the Birds,’ she insisted that a woman could not sing it. ‘The song was written for a man’s voice. A woman won’t be able to hit the lower notes,’ she stated firmly. Finally, we asked one of the third-floor secretaries to sing the song while Dick accompanied. The secretary did a good job and we thought we had finally won our point. Then Mrs. Travers pulled another one out of her ‘hat.’ ‘The song I hear is “Greensleeves” [a traditional English folk song]. In fact, really, “Greensleeves” is the only song which should be in the picture.’”
In a way, the Disney song almost inadvertently adopts some of the characteristic elements of Travers’ books: simplicity, clarity, and a sense of heightened reality, what Professor Demers calls “everything inside something else.” The simplicity, however, holds deeper truths that Travers leaves open to interpretation. “[...] Mary Poppins plunges into episodes, which might seem mere magical escapades to some,” Demers notes, “but which remain cheering, promise-filled realities to the wise.” What Travers herself might have even missed was how the Shermans encapsulated some of this unexplainable wisdom in one of the film’s songs.
It should be noted that analysis of this sort is anathema as far as P. L. Travers’ was concerned. “I’m not an answerer,” she once said, to which the writers Brian Sibley and Michael Lassell would elaborate, “It was not, Travers insisted, that she refused to answer all the questions people put to her, but that she did not know the answers.” Until the end of her life, Travers remained adamant that the Mary Poppins character appeared in her imagination by surprise. “To Travers, magic wasn’t something that existed apart from everyday life or in opposition to everyday life,” Sibley and Lassell wrote. “For Travers, the reality of the everyday included both magic and the mundane.”
Human connection was an essential theme that both Travers and Walt shared in their respective work. “Faith I have, in myself, in humanity, in the worthwhileness of the pursuits in entertainment for the masses,” Walt would explain. “But wide awake, not blind, faith moves me. My operations are based on experience, thoughtful observation, and warm fellowship with my neighbors at home and around the world.”
With all this in mind, it’s fitting that the Shermans took inspiration for “Feed the Birds” not only from Travers’ writing but from Walt himself. “Many times in the 1960s,” Robert Sherman wrote, “when I would search for the inspiration for a particular song, I would find my spark by asking the question: ‘What would Walt’s view be on the matter?’ or ‘How would Walt say it?’ So many of Dick’s and my classic songs are directly inspired by that great man. ‘Feed the Birds,’ ‘There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow,’ ‘It’s a Small World After All,’ ‘Enjoy It!’ and years later, ‘One Little Spark,’ could all be phrases borrowed from Walt’s own heart and mind, were he to have spoken in meter and rhyme.”
Walt took special care to ensure that the “Feed the Birds” sequence in Mary Poppins would be memorable. As Robert Sherman would explain, “One of the more beautiful moments in the history of movie making occurred as we were casting and filming the ‘Feed the Birds’ sequence. It’s one of those rare instances where life and art became one in the same thing.”
During production of the Disney film in the summer of 1963, actor Jane Darwell was 83 years old. With a film career that stretched back to as early as 1913, she was among the most respected actors in the industry, with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance of Ma Joad in 1940’s The Grapes of Wrath. She was living at the Motion Picture Country Home, a noted residence for retired film actors and artists.
“Walt offered her the part of the Bird Woman, but in doing so, he also treated her as the star she had once been,” Robert Sherman recalled. “He sent her a script and a letter via special messenger (as opposed to US Mail) and had a limousine and driver pick her up once for a meeting and then again on the day of the shoot. Miss Darwell was tremendously excited to be a part of Mary Poppins and must have felt gratified to have been remembered after so many years away from the limelight. I think it was a particularly poetic thing of Walt to have done this. After all, as Walt said referring to ‘Feed the Birds,’ ‘That’s what it’s all about,’ doing just a little extra and going just a little bit out of your way to make someone feel special. Sometimes it can make all the difference in the world to a person.”
Pinocchio’s (1940) “When You Wish Upon a Star” may continue to be the anthem of the Walt Disney Company and its ongoing legacy, but perhaps Walt’s own personal anthem is the subtle and numinous “Feed the Birds.” Richard Sherman would comment that its story of “being kind and loving” is “what his life was all about, really.”
“I couldn’t begin to guess what personal life experience led Walt to connect so deeply to my lyric or to the music which so perfectly accompanied it,” Robert Sherman concluded. “But I do think that this song summed him up. He was just a simple man – a simple, wonderful man who understood that the greatest gift life bestows upon a person is the chance to share with others.”
–Lucas Seastrom
Lucas O. Seastrom is a writer, filmmaker, and contracting historian for The Walt Disney Family Museum.
Image sources (in order of appearance):
- Robert Sherman, Richard Sherman, and Walt Disney behind a piano, 1963; courtesy of the Walt Disney Archives, © Disney
- (L-R) Richard and Robert Sherman, 1965; courtesy of the Walt Disney Archives; © Disney