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Fraggle Rock behind the scenes, on set. Songwriter Phil Balsam with Phil Fraggle.  Courtesy of The Jim Henson Company

Songwriter Philip Balsam, on the set of Fraggle Rock, with Phil Fraggle.Fred Phipps/Courtesy of The Jim Henson Company

Philip Balsam, the composer-musician who created the music for the international children’s television show Fraggle Rock, died on March 31. He was 79 years old.

Or perhaps he was 80. The only child of Polish Jews fleeing their homeland during the Second World War came into this world in a cabin in the wilds of Siberia. Humble beginnings have rarely been humbler; proper paperwork was not a priority. “We were never really certain of his age,” his wife, Carol Hall, said.

What was certain was that he was a genius melodist with a sunny disposition and an unrelenting curiosity and sense of wonder. “He radiated joy and light,” Fraggle Rock producer Larry Mirkin said. “It was a show about our interdependence with one another and our need to understand differences, and Phil fit into that ethos.”

Fraggle Rock was an Emmy Award-winning series created by The Muppets mastermind Jim Henson and co-produced in Toronto with CBC Television from 1982 to ‘87. It aired on HBO in the United States and appeared in numerous other countries and languages. A fantasy meant for the whole family, the show featured five happy songsters whimsically named Gobo, Boober, Mokey, Wembley and Red.

The anthropomorphic Fraggles were musical creatures, as was Mr. Balsam, who wrote a staggering 194 original songs for the series, mostly in collaboration with his friend and lyricist Dennis Lee. The show’s catchy, exuberant theme song, Down in Fraggle Rock, managed to crack the Top 40 chart in the United Kingdom.

“We would leave a story meeting, and Phil would have a completed song in his head by the time he got home,” said Mr. Lee, a renowned poet celebrated for his 1974 book of children’s rhymes, Alligator Pie.

The songs Mr. Balsam wrote with Mr. Lee (and others, including author Tim Wynne-Jones) were not meant to teach children. Rather they were character songs of the musical theatre kind, written to move the plot forward or to help a Fraggle express feelings that could not be as communicated as charismatically with the spoken word.

“The songs have to be short and simple,” Mr. Balsam said in 1984. “And it’s much more difficult to write a simple song than a complex one.”

Mr. Balsam strenuously avoided the limelight, to the point of refusing to travel to Los Angeles when the 1984 album Jim Henson’s Muppets Present Fraggle Rock, which he co-produced with Don Gillis, was nominated for a Grammy Award.

“It was one of the biggest arguments he and I ever had,” his wife said. “I really wanted to go.”

Although the album lost out to Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends, there would be a trophy in Mr. Balsam’s future. He wrote the music for the Young People’s Theatre production of Jacob Two Two Meets the Hooded Fang, a musical adapted by Mordecai Richler from his own children’s book. It won a Dora Mavor Moore Award in 1984 for best original musical.

In his review of a later production, The Globe and Mail’s Ray Conlogue praised a “musically sizzling show.”

Smitten by Elvis Presley’s Heartbreak Hotel, Mr. Balsam had first picked up a guitar as a Toronto teenager. “He almost bought a banjo, because he didn’t know the difference,” his wife said. Where Mr. Presley had “found a new place to dwell,” so did young Mr. Balsam, who spent more than a year in tuberculous sanatorium. “He told me he didn’t mind it, and that he played the guitar there,” she recalled.

In 1964, his wife said, Mr. Balsam wrote and sold the rights to a song that became a pop hit in Canada: Shirley Matthews’s recording of Big Town Boy was a stomping Phil Spector sound-alike that lifted spirits and filled dance floors. American songwriters Eddie Rambeau and Bud Rehak were credited for writing the song. “I believe he used the money to buy a Triumph Spitfire,” his wife said. “He used to say he bought the car for a song.”

In addition to being melodically gifted, he graduated from the Ontario College of Art (now known as the Ontario College of Art & Design University) and worked as a graphic designer for the publishing company Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

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Songwriter Phil Balsam. Courtesy of the Family

Family photo of Mr. Balsam. His father, Harry Balsam, was a theatre actor in Poland; his mother, Frieda Balsam, was a rabbi’s daughter and one of 14 children.Courtesy of the Family

As a child, he was given the choice of a cap gun or a Brownie camera he had seen in a storefront window in Toronto’s Kensington Market. His choice of the camera was the beginning of a lifelong passion for photography. In the 1970s, pictures he took using the new Polaroid SX-70 were so artful and unique they were used in an advertisement that showcased the camera’s capabilities – capabilities that even the Polaroid Corporation had not anticipated.

Indeed, the photographs were so good that the Office of Consumer Affairs did not believe the pics were authentic and, so, pulled the ads.

On the personal side, Mr. Balsam was known to be unfailingly genial to all. “Phil was a great listener who had a capacity to empathize with people who came from different places and spaces and mindsets and capabilities,” Mr. Lee said. “He had a talent for deep, abiding friendships.”

Open this photo in gallery:
Songwriter Phil Balsam. Courtesy of the Family

When the Fraggle Rock producers began looking for songwriters, they envisioned a team of them. But there was no need for more than Mr. Balsam and Mr. Lee, who were able to supply the two to three songs required each week.Courtesy of the Family

Despite a wide-open personality, Mr. Balsam was uncomfortable in the spotlight. He was an expressive singer and talented guitarist who retreated from the front man responsibilities in the part-time garage band that bore his name, the Balsamettes. “He sat in the back by the drummer with a big, floppy hat on and played lead guitar,” Mr. Wynne-Jones said. “It was hard to see him at all.”

As a child walking to school or the local library, young Phil would routinely wander into Toronto’s exclusive Wychwood Park neighbourhood. He was taken with a 300-year-old beech tree, which he would stop to sketch. He continued to walk through the park as an adult. One day he and his wife spotted a for-sale sign in front of a bungalow on the same property as the tree that fascinated him in his youth.

“We put in an offer on the house the next day and bought the house,” his wife said. “The tree is a bit faded now, in rough shape. It’s turned into a giant bush, really. It’s still there, though.”

His official date of birth was Dec. 23, 1943, and his given name was Faivel. His father, Harry Balsam, was a theatre actor in Poland; his mother, Frieda Balsam, was a rabbi’s daughter and one of 14 children.

After the war, for four years the family lived in Bad Reichenhall displaced persons camp in the American zone of occupied Germany. If war was hell, peace was no picnic for the child. He nearly fell into a well once, and was sickly in general. His mother fed him care-package cream of wheat four times a day.

The family finally boarded a ship to Canada in 1950. The boy assimilated quickly: Coca-Cola was the first thing he said in English, after a sailor introduced him to the all-American soft drink. He chose the name Philip himself, after Prince Philip.

Settling in Toronto, his father found work in a clothing factory. He was a poor sewer who soon began buying the factory’s leftover fabric, or, in Yiddish, schmatta. His father eventually opened a store on Queen Street West called Balsam’s Bargain Centre. (Years later, when explaining his puppet-music career, the composer would say, “I write songs for schmattas.”)

As an adult, Mr. Balsam would look after the store when his parents went to Florida for winter holidays. After each day, he would enthusiastically cross out the date on a calendar, as a prisoner might. “He loved the store,” his wife said, “but he hated working there.”

He hated working any traditional job, actually. Mr. Balsam made the decision early in his adult life that he would work hard enough that he could retire in his 30s to pursue his creative passions. Which is more or less what happened.

“When we began dating, I noticed he never talked about work and he never went to work,” his wife recalled. “I thought maybe he was a pimp or a drug dealer.”

The couple met in 1979, when Ms. Hall took an art class taught by Mr. Balsam. He would hold up her attempts at art in front of the class as examples of what not to do. “We would both laugh our heads off, and we soon started dating,” she said.

When the Fraggle Rock producers began looking for songwriters, they envisioned a team of them. But there was no need for more than Mr. Balsam and Mr. Lee, who were able to supply the two to three songs required each week. The two of them lived close enough to each other that Mr. Balsam would drop tapes of his melodic ideas though Mr. Lee’s mail slot.

“We worked very hard, at odd hours, and we both enjoyed the intensity of it,” Mr. Lee said.

Once the songs were written, Mr. Balsam recorded demo versions in his basement home studio and turned them over to the Fraggle Rock music director.

Mr. Balsam had no children, but he had all the time in the world for the kids in the Oakwood-St. Clair neighbourhood who were musically inclined. Shawn Hall of the blues duo the Harpoonist & the Axe Murderer and singer-songwriter Annabelle Chvostek were among the musical prodigies who grew up near Mr. Balsam on Biggar Street.

“He would let us play around in his home studio, which, to us, was Shangri-la,” said Ms. Chvostek, who was nominated for a Juno Award in 2013. “He was very present and encouraging and gave me a lot to consider and to go on.”

A voracious reader, Mr. Balsam had a particular interest in medical books. Such was his aptitude for the subject that friends and family would phone him first whenever they were sick. “People called him Dr. Phil,” his wife said.

When diagnosed in 2021 with giant cell arteritis, a disease that causes the inflammation of blood vessels, he naturally consulted his stash of Merck Manuals. He had recently felt well enough that he bought a new guitar, but his health soon took a turn for the worse. In his last days, his wife fed him cream of wheat, the same dish his mother had nourished him with as sick child in the refugee camp. “He didn’t want to eat much,” his wife said. “It was filling.”

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