INTERVIEW: Family musicians Sharon & Bram promote peace with new song
Photo: Sharon & Bram are one of the most popular family folk artists of all time. Photo courtesy of artists / Provided by Waldmania PR with permission.
Sharon Hampson and Bram Morrison, better known as Sharon & Bram, are two family musicians who have been bringing smiles and important lessons to younger listeners for more than 40 years. For most of their career, they were in a trio called Sharon, Lois & Bram with Lois Lilienstein, and their impactful contribution to family entertainment in the United States hit its peak with Nickelodeon’s The Elephant Show, which ran on the network in the 1980s.
It’s likely that most people who grew up in the 1980s remember The Elephant Show and its catchy theme song, “Skinnamarink,” which Sharon, Lois & Bram actually recorded on their first album, One Elephant, Deux Éléphants, in the late 1970s.
Today, Sharon & Bram continue to create music and honor the legacy of Lois, who died a few years ago. This year the duo has released a number of singles, including “Everybody Talks,” which discusses the issue of peace. The songs have been compiled into the new album Sharon & Bram and Friends.
“These are all songs that we’ve known of one way or another for many, many years,” Bram said in a recent phone interview. “They’re all songs that were written by Joe Hampson, who was Sharon’s late husband, who was many, many things, including being a really good songwriter. He wrote these in the early days, in the ’60s and ’70s, and they were recorded by the group that he was part of — a folk group, the Travellers — in Canada. And they have kind of lain by the wayside. I thought that they were too good to be forgotten, and so we put our touch to them. And we’ve recorded them, and we hope that we can give them a new life. And some of them are about human relations, and some of them are more political, about peace, for example.”
Sharon finds the songs relevant for today’s society, and there was an excitement when she and Bram got back together in the studio. It had been a while, and this was actually the first time they were in a recording session as a duo.
“We haven’t recorded in a long, long time,” Sharon said. “We hadn’t recorded since we were a trio, so it’s been many years. It was very exciting for us to get back into the studio and bring new life to these songs, as Bram has suggested, but the industry is different than what we are accustomed to. We’re accustomed to a record or a CD, products of that sort, and, of course, now the music is all streaming. And it’s available for people to download on their favorite download sites, so we hope that they will do that.”
What Sharon & Bram love about these songs, and their long legacy of bringing entertainment to families, is that the tunes can work on two levels. The easy-to-listen-to beats and rhythms are infectious for children, and the messages behind the lyrics can win over parents and adults as well.
“That’s been our byword right from the very beginning in 1978, that it’s got to work for both the kids and the parents and grandparents,” Bram said. “We are family entertainers, and we want everybody to get something from it. Now the children may get something different, but that’s OK.”
Sharon added: “I think it’s really important within a family for people to talk to each other. You can’t have a great relationship with your children when you try to sort out problems when they’re teenagers. You have to start when they’re young, and hopefully the kind of issues that we have raised in the music that we’re putting out now are things that families can talk about.”
The original trio formed in 1978 after playing together at the Mariposa Folk Festival in the Toronto area. They were each working as individuals, playing folk music for children and visiting schools. Then the three came together and thought it would be a good idea to complete a recording. What came of their efforts was One Elephant, Deux Éléphants, an album with a bilingual title for a bilingual country.
The recording was pushed as a “children’s record for the whole family,” a moniker that stayed with them for the rest of their career.
“That has been our focus, but when we put out that record, the intention was to make a record and then go back to our individual careers,” Sharon said. “And we indeed did that for a short while, but it was really the response to the record that launched the career, a career that was unexpected for us and certainly not 40 years of a career. But luckily we get to do something we love to do. People on the other side of what we do love to receive it.”
Today, Sharon & Bram are retired from touring, but they like remembering the good old days and also recording these new songs for the many fans they have amassed over their illustrious career. No doubt many of those fan memories come back to their successful TV series, The Elephant Show.
“It didn’t happen right away,” Sharon said of the show’s influence. “We started The Elephant Show in 1984, and it was immediately across Canada. And it created a response to the career that just grew and grew, and then in 1988, Nickelodeon picked it up and started to run it. And our career changed dramatically when that happened. Prior to that, we’d be in the United States occasionally for some gigs, but when the show went on Nickelodeon, the career exploded. We went to everywhere imaginable across the United States — all the beautiful big outdoor venues, beautiful indoor venues. It was just remarkable.”
Bram added: “We’re talking about Lincoln Center and the Kennedy Center. We’re talking about state fairs and colosseums with thousands of people, beyond any expectation that we could ever have predicted. … There was no business plan. There was no marketing plan. We had no meetings about, hey, what would be a good idea to catch people’s attention? What we wanted to do is be ourselves and do the music and have the conversations with each other and with the children. That felt right to us.”
Sharon said there was no agenda to The Elephant Show. The scripts were not intended to educate children about this lesson or that lesson. The young viewers simply learned by watching Sharon, Lois & Bram treat one another with kindness and respect.
“I think that was very appealing,” Sharon said. “We had great writers, and we all collaborated on the show. We came up with good things. … I think the music was central to it and the way we treated each other. We were real people behaving in just decent, kind ways, and I think that resonated.”
The song “Skinnamarink,” based on a traditional children’s song, helped the trio win the hearts of viewers. The tune became their calling card on television and during live shows. How the signature song landed in their laps is quite an interesting story.
“Some of the songs that we’ve performed we learned from children, and this particular one came from a cousin of Lois’ in Chicago, a young cousin,” Bram remembers. “Lois was in Chicago visiting her family, and she asked Lisa, ‘Did you learn any good new songs at camp this summer?’ And she sang ‘Skinnamarink,’ and Lois thought that’s a really nice song. It’s a nice catchy tune and really good important lyrics, and she taught it to us. And we liked it a lot, and we put it on the first recording in the middle, not at the end. Lois sang it. Sharon played the harmony. I played the ukulele part on the high-strung guitar, and we had no idea that when we sang it at the end of our very first concert, just because it felt right, that that was going to set the pattern for the rest of our lives.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Sharon & Bram’s new single is called “Everybody Talks,” off the new album Sharon & Bram and Friends. Click here for more information.
