rhythmic line. Most overtly, however, Joe Raposo's sonic trademark was his seemingly obsessive, and often exhaustively authentic, live replication of the tonal quality and exact playback cadence of the 20th-century self-operating player piano when composing for and performing on a grand, baby grand or upright piano. He appears to have specifically tuned his Children's Television Workshop pianos not only to blatantly mimic the player piano in its antique tonality, but to achieve and then maintain what became a signature ragtime tack or saloon-piano sound by them. Raposo's considerable stylistic ambition during his tenure as music director lent Sesame Street its trademark extreme musical diversity. For The Electric Company, particularly for songs he composed for the Short Circus, he led CTW to pop-record production values and generally strongly enforced an adult musical sophistication for all content he supervised. Given an unusual creative freedom in the Music Department at 1970s CTW, Raposo toggled from convincing country ballads (e.g. "The Ballad of Casey MacPhee," which depicted Cookie Monster as a heroic train engineer caught in a mountain avalanche) and authentic hillbilly ("It's a Long, Hard Climb, But I'm Gonna Get There" and "My Favorite Letter P" among others) to blues elegies of considerable emotional and tonal complexity, like "New Life Coming" and "Bein' Green." Raposo also evidenced skill as an American funk composer, making frequent and arguably credible musical allusions (on 1970–1974 Sesame Street) to the underground black soul and funk performers of his day. Themes written for muppet Roosevelt Franklin and the segment H exhibit some of Raposo's most convincing soul and funk composition and arrangement; the former contains clear allusions to the Philly Four and Lee Dorsey while the latter attempts coupling a convincing African-American Seventies funk bassline to the cycling musical structure of a European round, all while still somehow retaining his signature high end accents along the upper melodic ramparts of the composition. Raposo also made several stylistic allusions to jazz-funk organist Louis Chachere in compositions Fat, Cat, Sat and Some, All, None, and on both selections played the Hammond B-3 like Chachere, but using its leslies as a comedic device as would have Raposo's idol, Spike Jones. Vocally, Joe Raposo was a tenor, possessing an unusually warm, buttery attack and an easily identifiable, very stable, mellow trademark vibrato. Personal life Raposo was married twice. He had two sons, Joseph and Nicholas, from his first marriage. He had a