One of the best things about the holiday season is the beautiful music that is played and sung during festivities and on the radio. The carols and songs of the season certainly help to put us in a mood to celebrate and also help us recall the cherished memories of past holidays — moments that mean the world to us. Everybody has a favorite carol or holiday song and most have many songs that they love to hear at “the most wonderful time of year.” As with any creative endeavor, many of the songs have a story about how they came into being that is as fascinating as the song itself.
During the holiday season of 1940, legendary song writer and composer Irving Berlin was vacationing at the La Quinta Hotel in La Quinta, California. Because of its sultry year-round climate, La Quinta California was a popular resort area for Hollywood notables to spend the holidays, playing golf and tennis and even swimming and getting tanned. Berlin loved La Quinta and found it very stimulating to his creative juices. He claimed that several of his best songs were written during his stays at the La Quinta Hotel. One December day while relaxing by the pool, he overheard three Hollywood types reminiscing about the Christmases of their childhoods: Christmas times with lots of snow and heavy winter clothing. Cold winds and ice skating. Fir trees and snowmen. This wasn’t the first time that Berlin had such bemoaning at the warm summer retreat. He, too, remembered the cold and snowy holidays of his boyhood and really didn’t miss them a bit. One of the things he found fascinating was that despite their professed longing for an old-fashioned wintery Christmas, none of these movie people ever went back to frolic in the winter snows that they claimed to miss so much. Instead they stood next to the pool in their swimsuits and sandals, smoking cigarettes and sipping cocktails, complaining about how un-Christmasy Southern California was. On this particular occasion, however, Irving Berlin decided to take the sentiments that he had heard expressed and turn them in to a song. That song was, of course, “White Christmas.” He wrote the lyrics over a two day period. However, the melody had been written by Berlin for a song in 1935. It was first performed a year later by Bing Crosby during his Christmas Day 1941 radio broadcast on the NBC Kraft Music Theater. In July of 1942, Crosby released it as part of the Holiday Inn movie soundtrack and in August of 1942 the movie was released. At first, the song was not a hit but as the Christmas holiday season arrived, the song became more and more popular, particularly with the service men who were stationed overseas. By Christmas 1942 it was the most requested song on the radio and it won an Oscar for Irving Berlin at the 1943 Academy Awards Ceremony as the Best Movie Song of 1942. It has been a Christmas mainstay ever since. According to the Guinness Book of Records it is the most successful song ever recorded with over one hundred million copies sold.
Gene Autry didn’t like the song and really didn’t want to record it but his wife Ina did like the song and told him he should record for the 1949 Christmas season. The song was “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” and it had been around since 1947. Songwriter Johnny Marks had composed the song based on The Christmas Book written by Bob May for Montgomery Ward Books in 1939. Bob May also happened to be the brother-in-law of Johnny Marks. “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” had been the most popular of the line of children’s Christmas books put out every holiday season by Wards from 1934 to 1947. After the Wards Christmas book line was dropped, Marks was able to get rights to use the title. Marks was unsuccessful in trying to sell the song to Bing Crosby, Rosemary Clooney, or Perry Como (Crosby would record a version in 1950). Columbia Records signed Autry to record some Christmas records for a five year period in 1947. The first of these was “Here Comes Santa Claus” in 1947 written by Autry himself. “Up on the Housetop” was the 1948 entry, so Gene needed a new song for 1949. To Autry’s surprise, the record was a major hit and the most requested Christmas song of the 1949 holiday season. The flip side, “If There’s No Snow for Christmas,” has been largely forgotten. Rudolph has become part of the Christmas lexicon and while it has been recorded by many artists, Gene Autry’s version is still the number two all-time bestselling Christmas record. So sometimes it’s just a matter of putting the right voice with the right song. Marks admitted later that the version he sold to Autry was different than the one offered to Crosby. “I changed the lyrics because I realized it’s wasn’t a good song. Then I changed the tempo and Gene adjusted it.”
Two days before the Christmas of 1818, Father Joseph Mohr, the priest of the parish of Oberndof bei Saltzburg, a village in Austria, was told by his organist that the church organ had a broken piece that rendered the organ unplayable. Furthermore it would be impossible to locate a replacement part for the broken piece before the Christmas Eve service so there could be no organ music for the service. Father Mohr went to the nearby village of Arnsdorf to see his friend Frances Xaver Gruber, a schoolmaster and the choirmaster of the Arnsdorf Church. Father had with him a copy of the lyrics of a Christmas hymn he had been working on since 1816. He asked Herr Gruber to compose a melody for the lyrics that could be played on a guitar. The result was the beloved Christmas carol “Silent Night.” It was officially published in 1820 with an English translation published in 1859. The original song had a faster tempo, almost dance like tune, as opposed to the lullaby-like tempo familiar to us today. “Silent Night” is perhaps the world’s best know Christmas carol, having been translated into about 140 languages.
Every song has a story behind it. Many songs have been written for a specific event, or with a particular musician or recording artist in mind. But they all enhance our enjoyment of the holiday season and serve to remind us of the reasons why Christmas and the holidays mean so much to us.
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