Music and Stories - Jungle Book "The Bare Necessities"

    This is an excerpt from the Disney film The Jungle Book, released in the US in 1967, directed by Wolfgan Reitherman.  Born in Germany in 1909, Reitherman served in the US Air Force during World War II, seeing action from Africa to China, for which we was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.  He began working for Disney in 1934, and is responsible for other Disney classics such as The Aristocats, The Sword in the Stone, 101 Dalmations, The Rescuers, and Sleeping Beauty.  I reckon if I was forced to say, The Jungle Book would be my favorite of these greats.    

 

    This movie is based on the novel of the same name published in 1894 by Rudyard Kipling.  Kipling was born in what is now Mumbai, India in 1865, and for a time shared the earth with Reitherman.  Kipling was of English descent, though born in Bombay, and grew up in a Southsea foster home after being brought to England by his parents when he was six.  His was a haunting childhood, described in his stories "Baa Baa, Black Sheep" and Stalky and Co.  As an adult, he moved back to India to be a journalist and writer, and was married.  His wife and he later moved to Vermont, then England, where he died in 1936. 

 

    The song was composed by an American folk singer born in 1916 named Terry Gilkyson for an earlier rejected version on the movie.  It was the only song to remain from that version.  It's sung by Phil Harris, who did the rest of Baloo's voice, and the director's son, Bruce Reitherman, who also voiced the rest of Mowgli.  It's so great that the voice actors were also the ones singing, there was a stretch of my childhood where that was not the case, but it seems to be coming back.

 

 

    It would be easy to believe that this song is about wanting to live an easy life. Though it appears to be sung by a fat and lazy bear, the physical feats demonstrated by Baloo when called upon are evidence of a vigorous life.  The song hearkens to a simpler, slower, yet fuller life.  Today most of us move so fast and have so much more than our progenitors, but seem to enjoy life so much less.  We're overfed, oversexed, overstimulated, running from work to one kid's sport to another and another, over newsed, and so paranoid.  We lack satiation, we don't have truly intimate connections, we neglect to take the time to actually be with our families, we lack understanding of the nuances of the world around us, and if you ain't exactly on my page than you must be trying to burn my page how dare you!  We're going through this world so fast we can't even enjoy being in it.  If we can't skip the ad we immediately pick up our phone to scroll, and even during the boring parts of a movie we ain't even seen yet we scroll.  We are crippled by the pace of our world, and the electronics we use to turn those cogs.  

 

 

    If one cared to look, they could see the parallels between the life Baloo exalts and the life many "primitive" rural peoples live, or used to.  There were no work hours, we worked when the environment said to work.  If the sun was up and the fish were nearby we were trying to catch them.  If the meat animals were near by and the weather would allow their preservation we chased them.  When the fish were gone but it was still too warm to hunt big game is the time to gather firewood.  When the old people said this year's hatchling ducks were old enough to fly south we hunted them.  There was a time for everything, and time for everything as well.  Yes, such a life so close to the bounty that swims, walks, or flies by is fraught with negatives.  The salmon run may fail, the caribou may not come by, a late wet spring could kill the wild bird eggs.  And even when the salmon run is strong there's is still monumental work to be put in; the effort to catch them, clean them, dry them, smoke, them, and if they're a few weeks late then the black flies show up before the fish are dry so you have to monitor them and pick off the eggs until they've dried enough for the smokehouse.  It is no small task to harvest a village's worth of caribou, to braid thousands of smelt with grass to hang and dry.  But the result is there in your hand and then in your belly.  The result of such work is real, palpable, edible.  Not ethereal or ephemeral like a social media following.  But the failures are real as well.  And maybe that's the kind of pressure under which humans are meant to thrive, maybe that's when we do our greatest, like Baloo when he defends Mowgli from Shere Khan.  

    During the youth of the United States of America, when "civilization" was creeping westward and the relatively fast paced life of the European Americans was clashing with the nomadic hunter gatherer lifestyle of the "Indians" of the West, many white people "went Native."  Mountain men left "civilization" to be free of it and make their living from fur and meat, they lived with the Natives.  Cynthia Anne Parker survived the massacre of her family by Comanche, and became a Comanche herself, only do die in despair after being torn from her "Indian" family as an adult and failing to thrive after being "liberated." (Gwynne, 2011)  Her half breed son, Quanah Parker, was the last great war Chief of the Comanche, his band put to shame the mighty US Army, evading capture while raiding both Native and White settlements, all with their women and children along for the ride.  Cynthia Anne Parker is an extreme case to be sure, but our history is littered with many less extreme examples of "going Native" and struggling when returned to white society.  

 

    It's not just a song about easy living sung by a fat lazy bear.  Harris' smooth baritone is begging us to enjoy our life.  The tempo is too fast to be about sloth, and the amount Baloo has to eat to maintain that figure requires work and technique to acquire.  The smooth texture, the harmony, the high timbre of the whole expression demands we grab the reins and slow down the chariot of our lives, so that we may savor the prickly pears of each moment.  We don't need to fly from one engagement to the next as fast we can like the buzzing bees that live for nothing but to provide for their queen.  We are not such creatures.  We must slow down a little, detach a little from our phones, from the 24 hour news cycle (Huff, 2022,) and suck from the teat of life and enjoy it.            

 

 

 

 

Reitherman, Wolfgang, director. The Jungle Book. 1967. 

 

IMDb. “Wolfgang Reitherman | Animation Department, Director, Producer.” IMDb, IMDb.com, www.imdb.com/name/nm0718627/?ref_=tt_ov_dr. Accessed 29 Nov. 2023. 

 

“The Bare Necessities by Baloo the Bear and Mowgli .” Song Facts, www.songfacts.com/facts/baloo-the-bear-and-mowgli/the-bare-necessities. Accessed 30 Nov. 2023.

Gwynne, Samuel C. Empire of the Summer Moon. Constable, 2011. 

 

Huff, Charlotte. “Media Overload Is Hurting Our Mental Health. Here Are Ways to Manage Headline Stress.” Monitor on Psychology, American Psychological Association, 1 Nov. 2022, www.apa.org/monitor/2022/11/strain-media-overload.