Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)

Pictured above are arranger Jack Nitzsche, Darlene Love, and producer Phil Spector.

Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) was first recorded, and became available for a short time, 50 years ago as part of the "A Christmas Gift for You from Philles Records" album. Although it is a well-known song today, it did not receive very much recognition for many years. A few other songs from that LP did enjoy some popularity on Top 40 radio stations in the 60's, but that song did not.

For one thing, the LP was released the day of the JFK assassination and that Christmas season was a little subdued (despite The Beatles breaking out in the USA on east coast stations with I Want To Hold Your Hand just before Christmas).

Another reason is the album went out-of-print very quickly, making the song unavailable. Good copies of the LP were much sought after by collectors and there was no ebay, no internet, no Goldmine, and very few used record stores in those days. I recall finally finding one for myself in the late 60's at Skippy White's in Boston and I suspect it was an "unofficial re-release".

Around 1972 The Beatles re-released the LP, officially, on their Apple label, but with a different name and jacket, and that too went out-of-print fairly quickly. 

Although it was a well-known Christmas classic to music enthusiasts of that era, I don't think it really got popular with the general public until the 1980's. Better late than never.

Let's take a look at the song and recording.

It was written by the great wife-husband (at that time) team of Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry. 

That's them in the middle between fellow "Brill Building" writers Neil Diamond and Bert Burns (who was also a great producer and wearer of really bad rugs).

Greenwich and Barry had intended the song for Ronnie Bennett of the Ronettes, but Spector didn't feel she could give it the emotional blast it required, but there was someone else in the studio who could: Darlene Love of The Blossoms, who at that time were also posing as The Crystals on the west coast.

Some of the cream of the LA based studio musicians collectively known as the Wrecking Crew played on the song. Leon Russell on piano, Hal Blaine on drums, Steve Douglas honking that great baritone sax. Helping to create the Spector Wall of Sound were heavy-weight guitarists Barney Kessell, Tommy Tedesco and Bill Pitman! Also listed on guitar is Nino Tempo....although he his much better known for his sax playing...and sometimes singing.....and for having a hot sister. And who played the jingle bells, you ask? Well, I wasn't going to mention it, but since you asked, it was Sonny Bono. Backing up Darlene were all the ladies of The Ronettes and Crystals (east coast and west coast) plus a 17 year old young lady who went by the name "Cher".

 

Even though it took many years for the song to become a Christmas pop classic, Spector knew a good thing when he heard it and he knew right there in the Fall of '63 that it was a great song, so as long as everyone was already in the house he decided to record a non-Christmas version of the song too.

 

The song was never released.

The Ronettes, The Crystals, The Blossoms all sort of faded away by the late 60's. Things change. Around that time Spector started battling his own personal problems. Darlene never completely left the business. She raised a family and worked recording sessions doing backing vocals where she met and maintained contact with many people in the business. In the early 80's she began performing again a little bit around LA. One of her fans, Steve Van Zandt, aka Miami Steve of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band, talked her into going to New York and doing some performances there which led to some work in stage musicals and film scores. In the mid-80's New York showbiz scenester Paul Shaffer, leading the house band on Late Night with David Letterman, thought it would be great to get Darlene on the show to do this song each year on the last show before Christmas and she's been doing it ever since. Each year the production seems to get bigger and bigger. They even bring in the baritone sax used by the late Steve Douglas on the original recording. There are many clips of these performances available on youtube. No doubt this has been a huge boost to the popularity of the song.

Also, in 1987 while doing a sound check in Glasgow, the tapes were rolling and caught a very decent performance of the song by U2. They later embellished the tape by having Darlene dub backing vocals onto it and that recording received a lot of airplay 20 - 25 years ago and that also helped increase the popularity of the song.

 

In 1992, Steve Van Zandt wrote a Christmas song for Darlene called All Alone At Christmas and they were joined in the studio by other members of the E Street Band to record it.

 

I believe Darlene is making her annual Christmas appearance on Letterman this Friday night. 

 

Happy Holiday

Only time for a quickie. For the past 50 years Happy Holiday by Andy Williams has been a popular recording during the Christmas season. 
As with the previous entry, White Christmas, Happy Holiday was written by Irving Berlin and originated in the 1942 film Holiday Inn sung by Bing Crosby with Marjorie Reynolds lip syncing to the recorded vocal by Martha Mears. In this context, the song has nothing to do with Christmas and is featured in a scene that takes place on New Year's Eve. You can watch the clip on youtube by clicking the link below.

Happy Holiday from Holiday Inn 1942

 With the success of the film, Bing recorded the song in 1942. Despite being a snappy number, it seemed to remain in 1942, most likely due to the fact it was not a Christmas song per se.

 A couple years later The Williams Brothers sang with Bing Crosby on his hit Swinging On A Star and a year after that they began working with Kay Thompson at MGM. At Christmas 1945 Kay performed a song she wrote called The Holiday Season. The next year Kay Thompson and The Williams Brothers began a run of about 6 years as the biggest nightclub act between the Pacific and Atlantic. During performances around Christmas time, they often performed The Holiday Season, but they never recorded it. A 50-second snip of the song exists, but that's it. Kay Thompson and The Williams Brothers all went their separate ways in 1953 and 10 years later Andy Williams, then a major star on TV, released his Christmas Album. Although his popular recording is usually called Happy Holiday and is most certainly a Christmas song, it is actually a mix of Irving Berlin's Happy Holiday and Kay Thompson's The Holiday Season with generally the Happy Holiday chorus being used with the verses of The Holiday Season. And 50 years later you still can't get through the Christmas season without hearing it several times.  

 

White Christmas

White Christmas was written by Irving Berlin around 1940 and it was first performed by Bing Crosby on his radio show on Christmas day 1941. On the 29th of May 1942, Bing recorded the song with the John Scott Trotter Orchestra and the Ken Darby Singers and it was released on July 30 as part of an album of 3 discs containing songs from the film Holiday Inn. 

Now you know why 12-inch LP's were called "albums" in the USA. The original 78 rpm albums contained multiple 10-inch singles just as a photo album contains multiple photo's. When Columbia Records introduced the 33 rpm 12-inch long playing disk that contained multiple songs on a single disc, the name carried over.

Anyway, the film Holiday Inn was released on August 4, 1942 and in the film Bing sings the song with actress Marjorie Reynolds, only Reynolds is only lip syncing to what was actually sung by Martha Mears. You can view the clip on youtube.

Bing Crosby & Marjorie Reynolds in Holiday Inn

Helped by the exposure of the song in the film, the record became a big hit from late October 1942 into early January 1943 and won the Academy Award for best new original song that year. With tens of thousands of military personnel in the South Pacific and other bases and displaced workers in factories and shipyards, the lyrics had a special meaning to many people during the war years. 

Bing didn't go it alone in 1942 though. He had competition. There were about another half-dozen or so releases of the song by other people too. 

This one, by Gordon Jenkins & His Orch. featuring Bob Carroll, reached #16 on the hit parade. It was recorded the day the Bing Crosby record was released.

 

Reaching #18 in Billboard was this version done by Charlie Spivak & His Orch. featuring Garry Stevens, reportedly recorded the same day as Bing's version, May 30.

 

Freddy Martin & His Orch. featuring Clyde Rogers made it to #20 in Billboard.

 

There were other recordings as well, but with materials shortages due to the war and a long musician's union ban on recording, there wasn't much done with the song until after the war.

Frank Sinatra managed to record it on 14 November 1944 and it was popular Christmas hit that year as well as the following two years. I'm going to skip over that record though.

In 1946 Jo Stafford was probably the first woman to record the song (although Kay Thompson performed it on CBS radio in 1945).

 

Following that holiday season, Decca Records realized that the metal master of Bing's 1942 recording was wearing out, so on the 18th of March 1947 Decca once again brought together Bing with the same John Scott Trotter Orchestra and Ken Darby Singers, plus added some flutes and a celesta to brighten up the opening, and recorded the song again attempting to make it sound like the original recording as much as possible. This is the recording you hear every Christmas season since.

 

Around this time many of the big singers began recording the song and it became a Christmas standard. It's been recorded hundreds of times since and nearly all the recordings do not stray far from the very first one. However, there are always those out there looking to give something a new twist. Charlie Parker was performing a jazzed-up version by 1948 and in October of that year the vocal group The Ravens, featuring the bass vocal of Jimmy Ricks (top left in the photo) and the tenor of Maithe Marshall, recorded an excellent rhythm version of the song.

 

That record was very influential on The Drifters when they recorded the song on 4 February 1954 featuring the bass vocal of Bill Pinkney and the tenor of Clyde McPhatter. The song became a big hit on R&B radio stations and among R&B enthusiasts for many years and then hit the pop mainstream big time in 1990 when it was featured in the holiday movie Home Alone.

 

Ernest Tubb had a hit on the Country & Western charts with White Christmas in 1949, but he sang it pretty straight and only the pedal steel guitar and lead guitar gave it a C&W feel, so I'll skip over that in favor of this 1954 recording by Red Foley which really gives it a hillbilly bop workout.

 

Things changed a lot in the mid-50's with the development of rock 'n' roll and the commercialization of the previously untapped teenage market. Certainly the best known version of White Christmas to come out of that era is the 1963 recording by Darlene Love from what's become known as the Phil Spector Christmas Album. What makes this version unique is the use of the seldom ever heard opening Irving Berlin wrote for the song - only Darlene uses it as a bridge in the middle of the song.

 

White Christmas continues to be featured on every Tom, Dick  & Mary's Christmas CD. A search of my music hard drive turned up 77 versions. 

Today.......some 72 Christmas seasons down the road from 1942, Bing Crosby's record remains the all-time best selling single record - according to Guinness World Records. That's not Christmas records.....that's all records. 

The Christmas Song

The Christmas Song, sometimes referred to as "Chestnuts Roasting On An Open Fire" after the opening line of the lyrics, was written in 1945 by singer Mel Torme and Robert Wells.

In May 1946 the Nat Cole Trio (Nat "King" Cole piano & vocals, Oscar Moore guitar and Johnny Miller bass) were playing at the Trocadero club in Los Angeles.

The trio was managed by Carlos Gastel, who was also managing Mel Torme & His Mel-Tones.
One night after the final set by the Trio, Mel approached them with a Christmas song he had co-written and sat down at the piano and played it for them.
They were very enthusiastic about the song and did it several times themselves. In later years Cole stated that Oscar Moore did the Jingle Bells line on his guitar at the end of the song the very first time they attempted to play it and, as anyone with ears knows, that became a part of the song ever since.
In the following weeks it was decided that the Trio would record it, but both the Trio and manager Gastel were emphatic that it needed more orchestration than the Trio could provide.
However, Capitol Records wouldn't hear of it, so on the 14th of June, 1946, when the Trio was in New York City performing at Kelly's Stable, they had them record the song at the WMCA radio studios. Upon hearing the playback for the first time, Nat proclaimed his unhappiness with it and finally convinced Capitol it needed more music than the Trio could provide. Capitol chose not to release it.

The Christmas Song (June 14, 1946)

 

On 19 August 1946, the Trio returned to the same studio to record the song again, only this time Capitol agreed to add a not-very-big orchestra of four violins, a harp and drums. 

The Christmas Song (August 19, 1946)

 

The recording was released around Thanksgiving 1946 and it became an immediate cross-over hit, something that was very uncommon at that time. Of course, by cross-over it meant that white people were listening to and buying a recording by black people. Yes, sounds a bit ridiculous,  but that's how it was at that time.

For the next seven years, the King Cole Trio's recording of The Christmas Song remained a holiday hit across the USA. However, both recordings in 1946 were made to mechanical masters so on the 24th of August 1953, Capitol had Nat "King" Cole, now a star on his own, record a new version on magnetic tape and for the next 8 years that recording would be what was found in the record shops every Christmastime.

 

Eight years later, on the 30th of March, 1961, Capitol had Nat record The Christmas Song a fourth time so that it could be recorded onto either a 3 or 4-track machine from which a stereo master could be made.....and to this day 52+ years later, this is the version of The Christmas Song by Nat "King" Cole that you hear every holiday season.

 

 

Nat "King" Cole died on the 15th of February 1965. Since 1946 hundreds of people have recorded The Christmas Song, but Nat was the first, and in my mind the song always was and will always be, a Nat King Cole song.

Sleigh Ride

Sleigh Ride is another very popular song around the holidays that makes no mention of Christmas at all, except in a few cases of altered lyrics where the singer substitutes "Christmas" for "birthday" in reference to the party at Farmer Gray's.

Originally an orchestra piece, Sleigh Ride was written by Leroy Anderson between 1946 and 1948 and first recorded by the Boston Pops in 1949.

Leroy Anderson was an interesting man in possession of a level of intelligence that exceeded the average man and he applied that gift to music and language. 
The son of Swedish immigrants, he earned Bachelor's, Master's and PhD degrees at Harvard and also studied at the New England Conservatory of Music. He was fluent in 9 languages and served in military intelligence during WWII and Korea.

So, the Boston Pops recorded it in 1949 and Anderson issued his own recording of it in 1950. Both recordings sounded nearly the same.
Also in 1950, based on the popularity of the 1949 Pops recording, Mitchell Parish wrote lyrics for it and they were first recorded by The Andrews Sisters. Also recording the song with vocals for Christmas 1950 was later popular TV host Merv Griffin.
Throughout the 50's the song remained popular with both singers and orchestra's. Probably the most well-known recording from that period was done in 1958 by Johnny Mathis. 55 years later it's still often heard on the radio and in stores and restaurants.
Five years later it was recorded by The Ronettes for the previously mentioned Phil Spector-produced LP A Christmas Gift For You. For many years that version was certainly a runner up to the Mathis version in terms of popularity.

It's interesting to note that the bridge of the song (Giddy Up - Giddy Up, etc), as originally composed proved to be very difficult for singers. Mathis had to change the key and tempo and The Ronettes dropped it all together and sang only the verses.

The Boston Pops and Leroy Anderson's original recordings were mechanical affairs and they both re-recorded the song onto 2-channel magnetic tape in 1959. Those are the versions you usually hear today. I had the original red-vinyl Pops 45 rpm record from 1949 until about six years ago. It had a lot of snap, crackle and pop, but I can say it is very difficult to tell the difference between the 4 recordings made by the Pops and Anderson in 1949, 1950 and 1959. The 1959 recordings are much cleaner but they only seem to differ in a slight variation of tempo.

64 years after making its debut, Sleigh Ride remains in the top 10 of performed Christmas songs with the 1959 Leroy Anderson recording still the most popular instrumental version and the 1958 Mathis recording the most popular vocal performance based on data from airplay monitoring services.

Leroy Anderson - Sleigh Ride (1959)

 

The Andrews Sisters - Sleigh Ride {first vocal} (1950)

 

Johnny Mathis - Sleigh Ride (1958)

 

The Ronettes - Sleigh Ride (1963)

 

Merry Christmas, Baby

From Blue Christmas to Christmas blues........

Merry Christmas, Baby has been recorded a surprisingly number of times in the first dozen years or so into this century. I'm not sure who inspired the flurry of activity, but it may have been the recording released by Bruce Springsteen back in 1978.

The song was first recorded in Los Angeles in 1947 by Johnny Moore's Three Blazers featuring Charles Brown on vocal.

 

 

 

It remained popular over the next several Christmas seasons and as one record label was bought out by another, the recording appeared on several labels.

On 27 October 1950, the Lionel Hampton Orchestra recorded it with Sonny Parker on vocal.

 

Johnny Moore wasn't done with the song and neither was Charles Brown.
Around 1952 Moore recorded it again when he was with Modern Records and had his common law wife, Mari Jones, do the vocal. I don't believe this recording was ever issued until 2007.

 

By the 4th of September 1956, Charles Brown was performing on his own and was doing a recording session in New Orleans with many of the legendary NOLA studio musicians and he recorded the song again. This time it was released on Aladdin Records, and 5 years later on Imperial after they acquired Aladdin.

 

Up to this point the song had remained outside of the mainstream pop market. All that changed on the 19th of November 1958 when rock 'n' roll hero Chuck Berry recorded it in Chicago. Chuck's recording, with some great ivory tinkling by Johnnie Johnson, is well known so below is offered an alternate take recorded at that session.

 

The following year, 1959, finds Charles Brown still in New Orleans and still recording Merry Christmas Baby. This time it came out as a single on Teem Records.

 

In fact, Charles would go on to record the song several more times. In 1968 new recordings were issued by both King and Kent Records and in 1970 another version came out on Jewel and he didn't stop there. If you do happen to hear Charles singing Merry Christmas Baby on the radio, it is most likely one of these later recordings, but we're going to leave Charles in the 1950's.

Just as Chuck Berry exposed the song to an entire new market in 1958, in 1964 Ike and Tina Turner turned it into a soul blaster! I was undecided whether to feature the mono version or stereo version of this. The stereo mix somewhat diminishes the backing vocals by The Ikettes, but the mono version compresses the horn section to the point they almost sound like they're in the next room, so the stereo won out. This version of the song even inspired 73 year old Mae West to record a rousing rock 'n' soul version of it in 1966. I thought about adding that to this post, but decided against it. It has nothing to do with the evolution of the song.

 

 In 1967 newly crowned international soul king Otis Redding recorded his own upbeat version of the song with the backing of Booker T. & The MG's. Unfortunately, just as the 1967 Christmas season was getting underway, Otis was killed in a plane crash. The song hit the airwaves at Christmas 1968.

 

Bruce Springsteen tours were a huge event in the late 70's, as they remain all these years later, and Christmas season performances always included some Christmas songs. In 1978 he released a live recording of Merry Christmas, Baby that is an unabashedly tip of the hat to Otis Redding and also opened the song up to yet another semi-generation.