Larry Morey was a busy man in 1934. He contributed lyrics to several of Disney’s Silly Symphonies, including The Grasshopper and the Ants, Playful Pluto, and The Goddess of Spring. “The World Owes Me a Living,” written with composer Leigh Harline for The Grasshopper and the Ants, was used in the 1934 Shirley Temple film Now and Forever. In 1938 he collaborated with composer Albert Hay Malotte on the title song for Fredinand the Bull which won an Academy Award for Best Short.

In 1937 Disney presented his first feature-length cartoon, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Morey acted as both sequence director and as lyricist with composer Frank Churchill. The film was nominated for a Best Score Oscar. The eight songs that Morey and Churchill wrote for the film include “Whistle While You Work,” “Heigh Ho,” “With a Smile and a Song,” “I’m Wishing,” and the song that was to become a jazz standard, “Someday My Prince Will Come” which was famously performed by Miles Davis in 1961. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs holds the distinction of being the first soundtrack ever issued since film music was re-recorded for release to the public prior to then.

Morey worked with Churchill again on The Reluctant Dragon (1941) which provided a behind-the-scenes look at the Disney studio as the staff was at work on a cartoon about a shy dragon. With Perce Pearce, Morey adapted the book for 1942’s Bambi and scored the film with Churchill. Both the score and the song “Love Is a Song” were nominated for Oscars. In 1949 Morey received another Oscar nomination along with composer Eliot Daniel for “Lavender Blue (Dilly Dilly)” which was sung by Burl Ives in the film So Dear to My Heart which mixed live action and animation.

- Sandra Burlingame