MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
You may not know the name Leslie Bricusse, but you almost certainly know some of the songs he's written.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "PURE IMAGINATION")
GENE WILDER: (Singing) Come with me, and you'll be in a world of pure imagination.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WHAT KIND OF FOOL AM I?")
UNIDENTIFIED SINGER #1: (Singing) What kind of fool am I who never fell in love?
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
UNIDENTIFIED SINGER #2: (Singing) Marie, my my (ph).
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "IF I COULD TALK TO THE ANIMALS")
BOBBY DARIN: (Singing) If we could talk to the animals, learn all their languages.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LOOK AT THAT FACE")
BARBRA STREISAND: (Singing) Look at that face. Just look at it. Look at that fabulous face.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ONCE IN A LIFETIME")
UNIDENTIFIED SINGER #3: (Singing) For once in my lifetime, I feel like a giant.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GOLDFINGER")
SHIRLEY BASSEY: (Singing) Goldfinger.
KELLY: The Library of Congress recently acquired the Leslie Bricusse papers. And critic Bob Mondello says he wanted to see them because some 60 years after his heyday, the composer/lyricist is having a moment.
BOB MONDELLO, BYLINE: In "A Quiet Place: Day One," a woman who may be the last human survivor on a Manhattan infested with aliens checks her iPod and pulls up Nina Simone.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "FEELING GOOD")
NINA SIMONE: (Vocalizing).
MONDELLO: She needs a song to express defiance...
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "FEELING GOOD")
SIMONE: (Singing) And I'm feeling good.
MONDELLO: ...How as her world lies in ruin, she exalts in being alive. Sentiments Leslie Bricusse put to music 60 years ago seemed perfect.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "FEELING GOOD")
SIMONE: (Singing) Fish in the sea, you know how I feel. River running free, you know how I feel.
MONDELLO: There's something about a Bricusse tune, whether it's this one, also popping up in the Netflix series "Obliterated" to help a bomb diffuser steady his hand, or "Pure Imagination" crooned by Timothee Chalamet's Willy Wonka last year to tie him in firmly with the Gene Wilder originals.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "PURE IMAGINATION")
TIMOTHEE CHALAMET: (Singing) There is no life I know to compare with pure imagination.
MONDELLO: Bricusse often wrote lyrics for other composers' music. "Pure Imagination" and "Feeling Good" he wrote with Anthony Newley. And other times, he wrote both music and lyrics. He was a master of many styles, all of them entertaining, and it turns out that's every bit as true of his papers in their new home.
MARK EDEN HOROWITZ: So I'm taking you down to our stacks.
MONDELLO: Mark Eden Horowitz is a senior music specialist at the Library of Congress, where the Bricusse papers join those of Leonard Bernstein, Richard Rodgers, the Gershwins.
HOROWITZ: We estimate our holdings, the music division, at between 25 and 27 million items.
MONDELLO: The Bricusse collection contains scripts, musical scores, notes for ideas on shows that never came together, recordings. He was a completest, and he saved everything.
HOROWITZ: For instance, I believe, all recordings of "Doctor Dolittle" - "Bobby Darin Sings Doctor Dolittle"...
MONDELLO: And Sammy Davis Jr. and the film soundtrack.
HOROWITZ: ...The French version - "Extravagante, Doctor Dolittle," maybe it's Italian; I don't know - Japanese, the Chipmunks...
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "IF I COULD TALK TO THE ANIMALS")
ALVIN AND THE CHIPMUNKS: (Singing) If we could talk to the animals...
MONDELLO: But where the Bricusse collection is remarkable is in its notebooks.
HOROWITZ: Just sort of drugstore notebooks, but he lived his life in these things. Altogether, I've counted about 250 beautifully calligraphied, most pages are numbered and often dated and indicate where he was in the world at the time, you know, Acapulco on November 3, 1986. And then he does these amazing calendars.
MONDELLO: In at least five or six different colors.
HOROWITZ: Well, it's who he met those days. This is Elizabeth Taylor week, whatever that meant. "The Pied Piper," a project that I don't know that ever happened, "The Boy Who Was Always 6." He's constantly working on 10 or 12 projects at a time that he's trying to bring to fruition.
MONDELLO: And it's not as if the ones that didn't pan out were less work.
HOROWITZ: For a long time he was working on a musical version of "Henry VIII." I swear he considered 30 different titles, one of which was "The King And I And I And I And I" (laughter).
MONDELLO: There are lots of fun discoveries. Bricusse's lyrics sound so right that it's hard to imagine they didn't just spring from him that way. But the notebooks were where he polished them. Take page 58 in the one where he's working on "Goldfinger." He has - heart of gold, this heart is cold, web of sin, but don't come in. But he has too many goldens, so he got rid of the very first one and turned an OK line classic.
HOROWITZ: He had - the man with the golden touch - and has a line through golden with an arrow pointing to Midas.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GOLDFINGER")
BASSEY: (Singing) He's the man, the man with the Midas touch.
MONDELLO: Much better with the next line he already had.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GOLDFINGER")
BASSEY: (Singing) A spider's touch.
MONDELLO: That'll be a fun find for somebody's dissertation. Mixed in with that sort of thing is marginalia about theater, movies, budgets, life, seemingly whatever was on his mind. Horowitz reads a passage.
HOROWITZ: I mean, here he gives you...
(Reading) On the following pages is a situation report of the various projects written and unwritten, produced and unproduced, successful and failed, active and in limbo, proposed or in treatment or first draft form, partially completed, etc., etc., which to a greater or lesser degree, retain interest for me.
MONDELLO: I'm sorry. Who is he writing that for?
HOROWITZ: Himself - he asks himself questions. He puts down what he's thinking, asks himself, should he be thinking that? Why is he thinking this? What should he do about it? His thoughts about everything, which is ideal for researchers.
MONDELLO: I'm curious. Did George Gershwin do this?
HOROWITZ: No. I've never seen a collection with this much organized detail.
MONDELLO: So a treasure drove, but also one in which the detail is sometimes puzzling - blocks of letters, say, in some of the margins.
HOROWITZ: He would write out melodies next to his lyric sketches, but as lettered notes - so C, A, B flat, C, A, E flat, that kind of thing, as letters.
MONDELLO: I'm intrigued, the man who wrote all these songs that we all sing couldn't write music or didn't write music.
HOROWITZ: He didn't write musical notes on sheet music the way most composers do. He wrote the alphabetical letter that represented the notes.
MONDELLO: And can you translate that into sound?
HOROWITZ: I think so.
MONDELLO: He takes one of the notebooks we've been looking at, and heads for a nearby room that has an upright piano, where he places the notebook on its music stand.
HOROWITZ: Song 12 from "Roar Of The Greasepaint," and you see - bird flying high, he has G, B flat, C, D, D, G, B flat, C, D, G, B flat, C, D, F, D, D, C, D. There are different lyrics here than we know - lazing, floating, having fun, you know what I mean, crickets chirping in the field. So those are lyrics I've not seen before. I don't think ended up in the final song. And if you want to hear the song.
MONDELLO: Horowitz has also brought the published sheet music for "Roar Of The Greasepaint," which he plays as I thumb through the notebook, looking again at the color, the density of ideas and words.
HOROWITZ: (Playing piano).
MONDELLO: These pop songs were Leslie Bricusse's life's work. The notebooks at the Library of Congress, perhaps, inadvertently feel like art themselves.
HOROWITZ: (Playing piano).
MONDELLO: There's an ornateness to this. Was he also a design person?
HOROWITZ: His wife was an artist, and they collaborated on some things together. But clearly, yes, he has some sense of design and color, and he seems to want to keep things lively and interesting and attractive. And I think he's an entertainer in every sense. He wants people to be bubbling, joyous. I think he's always looking for the rainbow, for the magic.
MONDELLO: Judging from the notebooks that have found a new home in the Leslie Bricusse collection at the Library of Congress, he found it. I'm Bob Mondello.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "FEELING GOOD")
SIMONE: (Singing) Stars when you shine, you know how I feel.
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