Vids › The Weirdness, Part 2

James Baskett – Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah

1946 · Directed by Harve Foster & Wilfred Jackson

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The story

This is the happiest song attached to the most uncomfortable movie Disney ever made. James Baskett sings it as Uncle Remus in Song of the South (1946), a film that mixed a live-action story with animated Br'er Rabbit tales. Allie Wrubel wrote the music, Ray Gilbert the words, and it won the Academy Award for Best Original Song, Disney's second after When You Wish Upon a Star. Legend has it Walt Disney made up the word himself. Author Ken Emerson thinks the chorus owes something to Zip Coon, a pre-Civil War folk tune in the Turkey in the Straw family.

Baskett was a vaudeville and radio man from Indianapolis who had worked with Bill Robinson and played Broadway with Louis Armstrong. He also voiced Br'er Fox. In 1948 he got an honorary Oscar for Uncle Remus, the first Black male actor to win an Academy Award. He wasn't allowed at the film's own premiere in Atlanta, which was segregated by law. He died that same year, at 44.

The movie was a problem from day one. The NAACP and critics objected to its picture of happy plantation life, and Disney has kept it in the vault ever since – last in US theaters in 1986, never released on home video in North America. Bob Iger called it fairly offensive. Splash Mountain, the log flume built on its characters, closed in 2023 and was rethemed as Tiana's Bayou Adventure. The song has outlived all of it, covered by everyone from Johnny Mercer to Bob B. Soxx & the Blue Jeans, whose Phil Spector-produced version went top ten in 1963.

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