It was on the album The Sesame Street Book & Record, which won the Best Recording for Children Grammy in 1971, beating the song, which had also been nominated in the category.
The Architect of Rock n’ Roll Takes a Bath
Little Richard performed the most recognizable cover of the song, which he played on a 1995 episode and on the Sesame Street album Splish Splash: Bath Time Fun. Cerf doesn’t know if Little Richard asked to cover “Rubber Duckie” or if it was suggested to him. “But I know he was very happy playing it and he also on that same day played a song I wrote for him about the character Rosita. I tried to write it so that it was like ‘Lucille’ because it was a girl’s name. And he knew that, but he would flatter me and asked me if I had any hints about how to play it. I idolized Little Richard as a teenager, so I said, ‘I can’t believe you’re asking me how to play this and I won’t tell you, you just do it.’”
Putting More Ducks in a Row
Cerf, who also wrote for National Lampoon from its very first issue, was close friends with that magazine’s co-founder Henry Beard. During a Caribbean vacation Beard’s stepdaughter Astrid Cravens “found out that there was a weird subgenre of reggae called ‘rubber duck reggae,’ and it was a hit on the island where we were,” Cerf recalls. “And she said, ‘You should do a rubber duck reggae song for Sesame Street.’ So when I got back to New York, I told Norm Stiles, the head writer, about this and he said, ‘Let’s do it.’” As a result, Cerf wrote “Do de Rubber Duck.”
“I don’t know if it’s really rubber duck reggae,” says Cerf. “I’m not sure what differentiates rubber duck reggae from other kinds of reggae. But it was very popular on the show.”
Cerf says it’s not hard to write a follow-up to a song. “I like to have an idea of something that somebody wants or needs before I start,” he says. “If you said to me, go write a song about anything you want, I might just sit there and stare at the piano for an hour and not get any ideas. But if I know I have to write a reggae song about a duck, I know exactly what to do. So I think, for me it’s not hard to write up a specific subject, including a follow-up and parodies are always fun for me to do.”
Cerf’s next dip into his buoyant muse, “Put Down the Duckie” wasn’t a follow up by strict definition. “It wasn’t like we were trying to redo “Rubber Duckie” all the time,” Cerf says. “Almost everything on Sesame Street is research-driven and it’s designed to teach something in our curriculum. The research people asked us to write a song about the problem of sometimes if you want to do something you need to put something else aside so that you can concentrate on it.”
The song came to life when he and Stiles “we were out to lunch [and] probably had a glass of wine or two by the time that idea came along. I realized that the duck squeaked as well as the saxophone would squeak if you played it wrong, which led to many lyrics and before you know it we had a song.”
The Legacy of “Rubber Duckie”
Sesame Street uses “music to teach, we also teach about music,” Truglio says. “We also teach about the fundamental components of music. When you think about tempo, and pitch, and dynamics, and literacy too, it’s rhyming, and vocabulary words. But we also love music for music’s sake. We want to make sure children get exposed to a wide array of music.” After finishing up the celebration of its 50th season, “Sesame Street continues to be an experiment. It’s constantly changing and evolving based on the media landscape, but more importantly, based on the needs of kids today.”
Warner Music Group’s Arts Music now has a deep catalog of Sesame Street recordings across digital streaming and download platforms available, along with brand-new compilation titles on CD and vinyl formats.
But all the way back in 1969, Cerf was working at Random House’s kids’ books division, and knew Moss and Raposo when Sesame Street premiered. “Once I saw it and saw the Muppets, I said, ‘I’ve got to be involved in this, if there’s any way,” he says. “It turned out they wanted someone to help start their Broken Record division. When I got here, Danny Epstein, the music supervisor, said ‘Don’t quit your day job, it’s TV. Random House will be there for years and we may be just a year.’ I think Danny was wrong.”
