Behind The Christmas Hits with Drew Savage

Drew is joined by Clifton Murray of the Tenors to talk about their new Christmas Album 'Christmas with The Tenors' and their Canada-wide tour!

Join Drew Savage for Behind The Christmas Hits - Season 4 everywhere you get your podcasts!

Behind The Christmas Hits is Presented by Tylenol Arthritis, fast and long-lasting pain relief. This product may not be right for you. Always read and follow the label.

There probably isn't a singer on earth who has a more natural connection to the Christmas Holiday - and then one day - she wrote a song about it!

This is the story of Taylor Swift's Christmas Tree Farm!

Join Drew Savage for Behind The Christmas Hits - Season 4 every Monday throughout the Holiday Season.

Behind The Christmas Hits is Presented by Tylenol Arthritis, fast and long-lasting pain relief. This product may not be right for you. Always read and follow the label.

Do you remember where you were the first time you heard Outkast tell you to 'Shake it like a Polaroid Picture'?

How about when Nickelback told you to 'Look at this Photograph'?

Or when Taylor Swift provided the soundtrack to your Love story?

Join Myles Galloway as he takes you through the biggest songs in the world - with new interviews and newly unearthed archive footage from the artists themselves.

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New Episodes of Behind The Christmas Hits with Drew Savage return this Holiday Season!

Trans-Siberian Orchestra came out of nowhere in 1996 with a song called 'Christmas Eve, Sarajevo, 12-24'. And it just sounded so different than any other Christmas song at the time.

The band was formed by Paul O'Neill, a composer, lyricist, producer and guitar player who literally did everything in the music business, everything from producing albums from Aerosmith to promoting tours for Madonna. 

Paul passed away in 2017, but the band is carrying on his legacy and continues to tour at Christmas time every year. Al Pitrelli is another founding member and acts as the musical director for Trans-Siberian Orchestra. 

Al joins Drew to tell the story of TSO, rock operas, and how Christmas became so important to the band!

Join Drew Savage for Behind The Christmas Hits - Season 3! 

It's a contemporary Holiday classic, but like so many songs that become classics... it happened quite by accident!

This is the story behind the Christmas Hit 'Driving Home for Christmas' by Chris Rea.

Join Drew Savage for Behind The Christmas Hits - Season 3! 

Rob Thomas of Matchbox 20 has released Christmas music before, but last year he put out his first FULL Christmas album titled "Something About Christmas Time".

Usually making a Christmas album means you've got to get in to that Christmas spirit in May or June to record the songs - that might be tough for some... but not for Rob Thomas!

Join Drew Savage for Behind The Christmas Hits - Season 3! 

There are lots of Christmas Hits that endured for 60, 70 - even 80 years or more, but only one of those was sung by a ten year old! Gayla Peevey's "I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas" We sit with Gayla for the story behind the song!

Join Drew Savage for Behind The Christmas Hits - Season 3! 

It's the series of albums that gave us some of the most recognizable versions of our favourite Christmas songs and became the most successful charitable music project in history.

This is the story behind the Hit Christmas album, A Very Special Christmas.

Join Drew Savage for Behind The Christmas Hits - Season 3! 

The networks thought it was trash. The creators worried that they had ruined one of the most popular comic strips in the world, but instead a legendary special was born, and with it came one of the most iconic jazz albums ever recorded.

This is the story behind the album A Charlie Brown Christmas.

Join Drew Savage for Behind The Christmas Hits - Season 3! 

It's the most successful Christmas album of the 21st Century - and it's from a Canadian who credits another Christmas album for introducing him to a style of music that would make him a superstar.

This is the story behind the album Michael Bublé - Christmas, with words from Michael Bublé himself!

Join Drew Savage for Behind The Christmas Hits - Season 3! 

It's a modern day Christmas classic that hit the top 10 in over 20 countries - including Canada! It's recently been named one of the best Christmas songs of all time.

This is the story behind Ariana Grande's "Santa Tell Me."

Join Drew Savage for Behind The Christmas Hits - Season 3! 

Many of the songs we feature have largely unknown origins - but that is not the case with this song! Still, do you know which singer was still in New York when the recording session began? And who is the one American band featured on this song?

Join Drew Savage for Behind The Christmas Hits - Season 3! 

Darlene Love is a Rock n Roll Hall of Famer - but her most famous song is a Christmas song! Christmas (Baby Please Come Home).

That's not her only Christmas hit though! In this episode, Darlene Love joins us to tell us the story of All Alone on Christmas (From Home Alone 2).

Stay tuned next week for two new episodes of Behind the Christmas Hits!

You know there are some singers that are just so synonymous with Christmas music, that for a lot of people it just doesn't feel like the holidays without THEIR music!

Join Drew Savage as he takes chats with the Christmas Music Legend himself, Johnny Mathis!

Mariah Carey is the voice of one of the biggest Christmas Hits of all time... she should have been the voice of a second!

Join Drew Savage as he takes you through the Christmas hit that is "Where Are You At Christmas."

One of the most famous Christmas Duets of all time only exists because one of the singers wanted NO part of the original idea!

Join Drew Savage as he takes you through the Christmas hit that is "Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy."

One of the most famous Christmas Songs of all wasn't even written about the season... and has an ugly history.

Join Drew Savage as he takes you through the Christmas hit that is "Jingle Bells."

The first big city Christmas song should have been a hit for Bob Hope - but bad timing means Bing Crosby would get credit for creating ANOTHER classic!

Join Drew Savage as he takes you through the Christmas hit that is "Silver Bells."

Rolling Stone declared Darlene Love's Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) The Greatest Rock n Roll Christmas Song Ever!

And who better to walk through this song with Drew Savage than the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer herself - Darlene Love!

A challenge to write a second Christmas as good as his first resulted in a song that achieved even more success!

Join Drew Savage as he takes you behind the Christmas hit that is "Please Come Home For Christmas."

It's the song that helped Andy Williams earn the nickname "Mr. Christmas"!

Join Drew Savage as he takes you behind the Christmas hit that is "The Most Wonderful Time of The Year."

A last minute change of plans in one of the most popular Christmas specials ever meant this throwaway song had a chance to become a classic!

Join Drew Savage as he takes you through the Christmas hit that is "Holly Jolly Christmas."

The only Christmas album by a male singer to debut at #1 turns 10 years old this year - and It's by a Canadian!

Join Drew Savage as he takes you behind the Christmas hit that is Justin Bieber's Mistletoe.

After having the best year of his career, Elton John wanted to say thanks to his fans and give them a Christmas classic.

Join Drew Savage as he takes you behind the Christmas hit that is Elton John's "Step into Christmas."

It's the story behind a Christmas hit by a boyband released at the very peak of their powers.

Join Drew Savage as he takes you behind the Christmas hit that is NSYNC's "Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays."

It's been called a Norman Rockwell painting come to life, but did you know if was written in Canada?

Join Drew Savage as he takes you behind the Christmas hit - It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas!

What song had the longest journey ever to become #1? It's Mariah Carey’s All I Want For Christmas is You.

It was 1993 and Mariah’s then husband and head of her record company, Tommy Mottola, began strategizing with his team about her next career move. To everyone’s surprise, they decided a Christmas album was the way to go. Mariah couldn’t understand why.  Her most recent album, Music Box, had been her biggest success yet - the album sold more than 28 million copies worldwide. An album of Christmas standards felt like a project for way further down the road and not for someone who had only been a pop star for about 3 years. 
 
She thought they were way off with this, but the idea eventually tapped into something that had been present in Mariah since she was a child. Her Christmas spirit. Mariah LOVES Christmas. Something she credits her mom for in those early years. Mariah eventually came around, but instead of just doing covers of familiar songs, Mariah wanted to write something new, and now suddenly, the record label was nervous... but you try telling Mariah Carey “no".

Tommy Mottola wanted something more uptempo – something “rock and roll” like Phil Spector did with Darlene Love and the Ronettes back in 1963.  
 
Mariah has said her true of love of Christmas comes from the hope that’s in the holiday. And that’s where the lyrics of this next song would come from. She began to make a list of all the things she had thought of since childhood but then flipped those feelings into lyrics about lost love. It started as a Christmas song that turned into a love song and then back into a Christmas song.  
 
Mariah says she was in her upstate NY home and put on her copy of It’s a Wonderful Life and blasted it through the house. She went into a room where she kept a Casio keyboard.  Mariah is very honest about this – she says she’s a terrible piano player, but sometimes happy accidents happen…and one did here. She kind of stumbled on the melody and chord progression and recorded it on a cassette recorder.   

Mariah’s account of how the song was written differs from her former songwriting partner, Walter Afanasieff. They had worked together on every album of hers to this point. Mariah told Entertainment Weekly that when she brought the song to Walter, she had already written most of it. Walter says he and Mariah were actually in the room together while he was “plucking it out on the piano.” Walter’s version is that he took care of the melody while Mariah worked out the lyrics. Unfortunately, the two had a falling out over 20 years ago and haven’t spoken since.
 
When it was recorded in the summer of ‘94, Mariah had every square inch of the studio decorated. Trees, ornaments, candles, lights up on the windows – even the temperature was turned way down.   
 
Mariah wanted the song to feel like something she could’ve grown up listening to – something you couldn’t help but be happy listening to. 

No band actually plays on the song. It was entirely constructed on Walter’s computer. The only things that were added were the voices of Mariah & her back-up singers.  

It’s rare that a song grows in popularity almost every single year. After it was released on October 28 1994, All I Want for Christmas is You peaked at #13 on the Billboard Hot 100.
 
On December 16, 2019, it finally reached the top of that chart, setting a record for the longest trip ever to get to #1. It was also the first time a Christmas song has been #1 on the Hot 100 since The Chipmunk Song in 1958. It also became Mariah’s first #1 hit since 2008 and her 19th overall. And it’s the biggest-selling Christmas song on digital platforms ever.  
 
Mariah told the NY Times that after picking it apart for years, she’s finally at a place where she can enjoy it.
 
As for Walter, despite the falling out with Mariah, he pinches himself every year when the song becomes a hit all over again. “My ex-wives, my children and my grandchildren are enjoying a lot of nice things because of that song.”  
 
Whose version of who wrote what and where is closer to the truth? It probably doesn’t matter – Mariah and Walter share equal song writing credit and unlike some other Christmas classics, no lawsuits have ever been filed over it.
 
Mariah calls co-writing this song one of her greatest achievements. That’s not hyperbole. Unless you’re old enough to remember Bing Crosby’s White Christmas when it was brand new in 1942 – there isn’t a Christmas song since that’s done what Mariah Carey’s has.

Mariah Carey Merry Christmas: Columbia Records 1994

How did seeing a group of teenagers dancing to Elvis music on the beach in the middle of summer inspire one of the biggest Christmas hits of all? This is the story behind… Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.

Nobody wrote more Christmas hits than Johnny Marks. His biggest was his first in 1949: Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Over the course of his career, he’d also write Run Run Rudolph, Holly Jolly Christmas, Silver and Gold and Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.

It was 1958 – one year after Bobby Helms had the first rock and roll Christmas hit, Jingle Bell Rock. Johnny Marks was enjoying some summer sun on a New England beach when he saw a group of teenagers listening and dancing to Elvis.  

Marks didn’t write his songs from personal experience – he took what was trendy and put it in a musical formula. When he saw the kids dancing on the beach, he remembered Jingle Bell Rock and thought he’d try taking the vibe of what was happening on the beach and put it in a Christmas setting. Maybe he could have as big a hit with that as Bobby Helms had a year earlier.  

After the song was written and mailed off to Decca Records, Marks even thought Helms should be the one to sing the song. But the record company had other ideas. 
 
According to the Ace Collins book, Stories Behind the Greatest Hits of Christmas, the execs at Decca thought Helms already had a Christmas hit that would likely get airplay again that Christmas. Why not give this new song to someone who needed a hit.   

Enter: 12-year-old Brenda Lee. A prodigy of sorts Decca wanted to make into a star. Her voice was amazing. Did we mention she was 12?  She didn’t sound THAT young. She had recorded a few country songs at this point, but none had been hits. They thought a rock and roll Christmas song would be the perfect thing to put her on the map.
 
So, into the studio she went for a recording session that didn’t start until midnight because the session players all had day jobs. Again…did we mention she was 12?
 
They recorded a few other songs first…sort of us a warm-up…and finally got around to Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree near dawn. Producer Owen Bradley put up a Christmas tree in the studio, strung some lights and turned the temperature down to zero to give it a real Christmas feel.  That session felt like magic. After slogging away all night on other songs, Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree was done in less than an hour. Everyone felt like they had something special, so Decca pushed the song hard to both country and rock radio stations that Christmas.
 
Only…it flopped. There didn’t seem to be much room for new Christmas songs in the late 50’s. Instead of playing Brenda Lee, radio stations leaned on the biggest hits from the year before: Jingle Bell Rock and Elvis’ Blue Christmas. It’s estimated that Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree only sold 5,000 copies in it’s first year and the label lost money. Meanwhile, Johnny Marks was furious that his song was wasted on a child singer.  

But a funny thing happened. Owen Bradley believed in Brenda Lee and wasn’t giving up on her being a star. Over the next two years, he’d keep bringing her back for more recording sessions and eventually, those sessions produced country hits like Sweet Nothings and I’m Sorry. By the time Brenda Lee was 15, she had become the star Owen Bradley believed she could be. So, at Christmas time, 1960, it was a no-brainer.  After putting two songs in the top 10 that year and having a Christmas song already in the bank, Decca Records went back to the radio stations that ignored the song the first time – only, they didn’t tell them it was an old record. Instead, they positioned it as a new holiday song from one of the hottest new acts of the year. They went for it and finally, years after it was recorded, Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree was finally a hit.
 
Johnny Marks would continue to write Christmas songs for the rest of his career.  In fact, he started his own publishing company called St. Nicholas Music. A company that still exists today and run by his son Michael.  

Thanks for joining us. If you enjoy hearing the stories behind your favourite Christmas hits, please hit subscribe!

With Research from: Stories Behind the Greatest Hits of Christmas by Ace Collins

Rudolph and Frosty teamed up for a TV special in 1979, but their relationship goes back a lot further than that. In fact, you could say the song Frosty the Snowman is a direct sequel to Rudolph.

Gene Autry had made Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer a huge hit in 1949 and like the true businessman he was, he wanted to do more of the same. Remember, this was a singer who eventually became the owner of a Major League Baseball team – Gene Autry was savy.  
 
Enter songwriters Jack Rollins and Steve Nelson. Their idea for a sequel was not to do another Christmas song, but a song for a different holiday. They thought about the potential…of Easter. So they wrote a song about the character from the Thornton Burgess books called Here Comes Peter Cottontail.  

Autry recorded it while Rudolph was still a hit and released it around Easter of 1950. It too was a hit, peaking at #5 on Billboard.  

But as Christmas started to roll around again, the businessman in Autry wanted a new hit for the holiday season. Because of his recent string of success, all the top songwriters of the day pitched songs to Autry. Some of the songs submitted were even team-ups between Rudolph and Peter Cottontail.  
 
Rollins & Nelson kept banging away at it but weren’t having any luck with a new concept…until Jack had a thought. For so many people, Christmas meant snow on the ground.  Kids loved to build snowmen. What if a snowman could come to life?

Unlike Rudolph, where the song was based on a book, the character of Frosty was created for the song. Even though Autry was looking for a follow-up to Rudolph, there’s no actual mention of Christmas in Frosty’s lyrics. In the classic TV special, Frosty says “I’ll be back on Christmas Day”, but that was done for the special…and not in the original lyrics.  Lots of winter imagery – but not a single mention of Christmas.  
 
There were some doubts about the song. Executives at Columbia Records felt that much like other holiday songs that recurred in popularity, Rudolph was poised to be a hit all over again in 1950. They were worried that the living snowman might be overshadowed by everyone’s favourite reindeer.  

They were kind of right. While Frosty was hardly a flop, Rudolph did do better on the charts again in 1950 than Frosty did. However, this was just the beginning of the legend of Frosty.
 
Do you remember Little Golden Books?  A series of children’s books that are still published today? Golden Books worked with Rollins & Nelson to create a backstory for Frosty for a children’s book. That’s when Frosty really started to take off…reaching even higher levels in 1969 with the TV special from Rankin/Bass production – a special that STILL airs on TV every single year. Jimmy Durante’s version for the special might actually be regarded as the definitive version of the song in the minds of many, but it was Gene Autry that first brought the snowman to life.  

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How did the fallout of a performance at the 1968 World Series lead to the only English line in the biggest Spanish Christmas song of all time? This is the story behind…Feliz Navidad.

Not many iconic Christmas songs have been written after 1970, but Feliz Navidad is one of them. It was written and recorded by Puerto Rican singer/songwriter José Feliciano. José was recording a Christmas album and producer Rick Jarrod told him he should write an original to include on it.  

José felt the idea was kind of pointless as he thought there were too many good ones out - but he gave it a shot. The melody came first, and didn’t take long to write…and then came the Spanish lyrics. José then decided that the song needed English lyrics if it was going to get airplay. 

Two years earlier, José learned about the kind of pushback artists from different ethnic backgrounds could face from white audiences.  
 
In 1968, José performed the Star Spangled Banner before Game 5 of the World Series between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Detroit Tigers in Detroit.
 
José opened for Frank Sinatra the night before in Vegas and then took a Red Eye to Detroit to sing the anthem the following night. It was the first time anyone had heard the anthem in a way that was different from how exactly it had been written.  
 
José has said that he thought he was being patriotic by showing that only in America could a “poor blind kid from Puerto Rico” make this happen.  

It sounded beautiful – but not everyone thought so at the time. No one had heard an arrangement of the American national anthem like that before. There was no crowd reaction during the performance. There were some polite cheers afterwards, but then José says he started to hear the boos. And it didn’t end there. Televisions stations across America got lit up with complaints, service clubs wrote resolutions and it was a major story on the nightly newscasts.

Afterwards, José lost airplay and live gigs.  He had trouble getting his songs back on the radio…and he remembered this fall-out when recording Feliz Navidad.  So he added in a line in English that was simple enough: “I wanna wish you a merry Christmas, from the bottom of my heart.”

There are only 20 words in both English and Spanish in the entire song. Its perfection is in its simplicity. The song’s popularity continues to grow. Feliz Navidad is the 8th biggest-selling Christmas song in Canada in the digital age, between 2003 and 2016, outselling songs like Last Christmas and Jingle Bell Rock in that same time period.

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It was a Christmas hit that literally had to be rescued from the trash! This is the story behind…Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.

It was written for Judy Garland’s 1944 movie Meet Me in St. Louis. The film was notable for a couple of reasons: the song and for being where Judy and the film’s director, Vincent Minnelli, met and fell in love. They married in 1945 and then Liza Minnelli was born the next year.
 
The movie tells a year in the life of the Smith family beginning in 1903 and leading up to the World’s Fair the following year. Meet Me in St. Louis became the second-highest grossing film of 1944 and had a hugely successful soundtrack with three hit songs – hey, that’s just like Flashdance!

Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas is heard after Garland’s character, Esther, becomes engaged to the handsome boy next door, John Truitt, at a fancy Christmas Eve ball – however, their engagement means, they have to move from St. Louis to New York – something that doesn’t sit well with Esther’s 5-year-old sister, Tootie.  
 
Songwriter Hugh Martin wrote a melody for the song but threw it away after being unable to figure out what to do with it. When I say threw it away, I mean, in the trash to be taken out by custodial staff. After telling his writing partner, Ralph Blane, what he had done the next day, Blane insisted they start going through trash cans because that melody was too good to throw out. Blaine once told NPR “thank the lord we found it.”
 
That said, Judy Garland had some major problems with the original lyrics and refused to sing them. She thought they were far too sad and gloomy and needed some hope & optimism. Hugh Martin wrote in his biography, The Boy Next Door, he refused to rewrite it and stood by the song as it was. That’s when Garland’s co-star, Tom Drake, came to Martin and said “I’ll think you’ll be sorry if you don’t do this.” So Martin went home and wrote the version heard in the movie.

How sad were those original lyrics? Well, the line "Let your heart be light / Next year all our troubles will be out of sight" was originally written as "It may be your last / Next year we may all be living in the past.”  
 
There was a lot of pain in those original lyrics – something that wasn’t often expressed in Christmas music back then. But Judy Garland wasn’t alone in her feelings that it was too sad. In 1957, Frank Sinatra tweaked the line “Next year all our troubles will be miles away” to the now more commonly heard “From now on our troubles will be miles away.” Suddenly, a wish for a better tomorrow became more of a celebration of the present day.  Depending on how the music is arranged, you can still get those melancholy feels…but any hint of the pain in Martin and Blaine’s original lyrics…was now gone.  
 
Ralph Blane passed away in 1995. Martin lived until he was 96 in 2011…and he liked to keep up with who was recording new versions of their song every year. He told Entertainment Weekly he enjoyed Sarah McLachlan and James Taylor’s…and called Twisted Sister’s version “a hoot.”

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It is not at all a stretch to say that this is one of the most important songs to ever be recorded in music history. This is the story of White Christmas.

Written by Irving Berlin and sung by Bing Crosby for the 1942 movie, Holiday Inn. Crosby played Jim Hardy – an entertainer who turns his farm into a vacation spot that would only be open on holidays. 

Irving Berlin was commissioned to write a song about each of the different major holidays.

Legend has it that he told his musical secretary back in January 1940 to type up the lyrics to a song he had written over the weekend in La Quinta, California, just outside Palm Springs. He said, tongue-in-cheek, “not only is it the best song I ever wrote, it’s the best song anyone ever wrote.”  

Once the call came for Holiday Inn, he pulled White Christmas out of his trunk.  
 
During production of the movie, and still months before it would be released, Bing Crosby sang the song for the first time on his live radio program on Christmas Eve, 1941, 18 days after the attack on Pearl Harbour. Crosby announced that he would debut a new Irving Berlin song from his upcoming movie. He wouldn’t actually record the song in a studio until the following May.

When the movie premiered in August of ‘42, it was the Valentine’s Day song “Be Careful, it’s My Heart” that was released as the first single. And looking back, few critics even mentioned White Christmas specifically in their reviews. Remember – there was a song for every holiday.  
 
Some people think Christmas music starts earlier now than it used to. Well consider this, White Christmas was released on October 3, 1942 and was #1 on the Billboard chart by Halloween. It remained at #1 until January 1943. In fact, it’s wild success is credited by some for shifting the entire focus of the music business. During the 30’s and early 40’s, selling sheet music was huge. That’s how the writers of the tin pan alley era, including Irving Berlin, made a lot of their money. With the enormous success of Bing Crosby singing White Christmas, people didn’t want to learn how to play it – they wanted to hear to Bing sing it. 

Copies of the song would be bundled up and sent to troops overseas. Christmas 1942 was American servicemen’s first holiday away. Some have wondered if the US had entered the war sooner, would the song have struck the same chord that it did in 1942? 
 
Whether it would have or not, doesn’t really matter. White Christmas became the world’s best-selling single of all time. 50 million copies sold…and that’s just the Bing Crosby version. If you add in everyone else’s, it’s over 125 million. 
 
The song would usher in a new wave of Christmas music. Prior to White Christmas, traditional hymns like Silent Night or novelty songs like Santa Claus is Coming to Town dominated the season. The success of White Christmas directly led to more nostalgic feelings of home expressed in songs like I’ll Be Home for Christmas and Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.   
 
It won the Oscar for Best Original Song of 1942 and of course, inspired a movie of it’s own with Bing, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen in 1954.   
 
Over the years, Bing Crosby recorded a few different versions – the one heard most often now was recorded in 1947. If you hear the flutes at the beginning, you know that’s the version you’re listening to. 

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This is the story of Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!

Lyricist Sammy Cahn and composer Jule Styne were meeting with their publisher on one of the hottest days of the year at Hollywood & Vine in July 1945.  A time before most people had air conditioning.   It was reportedly Cahn who said to the other two men that it was too hot to work and they should really head to the beach, to which Styne replied: “why don’t we stay here and write a winter song?”
 
The two songwriters were very different. Styne has been described as a workaholic where Cahn was much more carefree. Opposites attract and not just in love. As a song-writing team, they received 7 different Academy Award nominations for Best Original Song including one win for a song sung by Frank Sinatra in the 1954 movie Three Coins in a Fountain. On this particular day in July of ’45, Styne won the argument and the two stayed at the restaurant to write a song about snow.  

While they were in California at this time, they had both lived in New York and began exchanging stories of being snowed in. Why repeat the sentiment “let it snow” three times?  Why not just once? Or even five times? Cahn once said “because three times is “lyric”.
 
It is a pretty simple song though and some have speculated over the years that if a less accomplished song writing team had written it, it may have gone unnoticed…but as mentioned earlier, Styne and Cahn had cred. 
 
Vaughn Monroe was the first to sing the song. Monroe was a bandleader born in Akron, Ohio, but what was unusual about him, was that he was also his orchestra’s lead singer. Benny Goodman didn’t sing. Glenn Miller didn’t sing. Vaughn Monroe did. He was a good looking guy who had the nickname of “the baritone with muscles.”

Vaughn Monroe and his orchestra recorded the song on Halloween Day, 1945. Timing was perfect. World War II had ended in September – soldiers were home and romance was in the air. While there’s no actual mention of Christmas in the lyrics, the song was an instant success, reaching #1 on the Billboard chart and staying there through February 1946. The song was so popular, three other versions of the song also made the Top 20 before that same winter was over.  
 
Imagine. Four different versions of Watermelon Sugar on the chart at exact same time. That’s how popular Let It Snow was that winter.
 
And it’s never not been popular. Some songs, like Santa Baby, have cycled out of favour for a time. Not Let It Snow.  Frank Sinatra in 1950. Ella Fitzgerald in 1960. Michael Buble in 2003. It’s a Christmas hit that might not have a true “definitive” version, but the song itself has always been a favourite. 
 
Quick note about the original recording artist, Vaughn Monroe – the baritone with muscles. He would have another chance to record a Christmas classic a couple of years later, but he TURNED DOWN the opportunity to be the first to sing Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. That went to Gene Autry.

Thanks so much for joining us – there are lots more stories and videos ahead, so don’t forget to subscribe!  

This Christmas hit was first recorded on October 4, 1943 by Bing Crosby. It was written by lyricist Kim Gannon and composer Walter Kent for soldiers who were overseas for the holidays but longing to be home. Or…was it?  

This is the story of I’ll Be Home for Christmas.    

Many songs featured on Behind the Christmas Hits were not immediate hits and took time to grow in popularity. Not this one -  It was released one year after Crosby’s iconic White Christmas came out and was an immediate hit, peaking at #3 on the Billboard charts.  
 
It was also a hit with the men & women of the armed forces. Yank – a magazine for American GI’s – said Bing Crosby and this song accomplished more for military morale than anyone else of that era. While American troops loved the song, over the UK, it was banned by the BBC, thinking that emphasizing the separation of troops from their families would actually lower morale instead of boosting it.  

But who exactly is responsible for the song? That’s been a muddled mystery, as documented by Ace Collins in his book Stories Behind the Greatest Hits of Christmas.

Just before Christmas 1942, three songwriters went for dinner in NYC: Kim Gannon, Walter Kent and Buck Ram. Ram mentioned a song he had written for his mother while away at school almost 20 years earlier. It was called “I’ll Be Home for Christmas (Through Just a Memory).” The dinner ended and the friends went their separate ways, although when he got home, Ram noticed that he didn’t have his copy of the lyrics he showed his friends.  
 
Flash forward to summer 1943 – Kent and Gannon are in a songwriting session together and come up with something called “I’ll Be Home for Christmas (If Only in My Dreams).” Instead of a song about a son missing his mother while away at school, Kent & Gannon wrote a song about a soldier off to war missing his family at home. The song was copyrighted and sent to Bing Crosby, who loved it immediately. In 1943, there was no such thing as keeping a Bing Crosby song on the “down-low” so it wasn’t long at all before Buck Ram learned of it and remembered his missing lyric sheet.  

Lawsuits were filed and things got ugly, but as the court proceedings unfolded, it was determined that the only thing the two songs shared was a title – the lyrics were completely different and conveyed different messages. Ultimately, the court decided that instead of stripping credit from Gannon & Kent, Ram’s name would be added and that royalties would be split three ways.  

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The role of the reindeer who saved Christmas was played by a young Canadian woman! 

This is the story Behind the Christmas Hit…Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.

The song Rudolph was written by Johnny Marks and first recorded by Gene Autry in 1949…but one of the reasons the song endures is because of the television special produced by Rankin Bass Productions in 1964. It has been broadcast on network television every year since, making it the longest continuously-running Christmas special of all time.  

The animation for the story of Santa’s newest reindeer was done in Tokyo and most of the voice work was produced in Canada…at the RCA studios in Toronto. And the cast was virtually all-Canadian too. 

Hermy was voiced by Paul Soles, who would go on to be the voice of Spider-Man in the 1967 cartoon series.

Yukon Cornelius was voiced by Larry Man – you might remember him as “the boss” in a series of TV commercials in the 80’s & 90’s for Bell.

And…much like Bart Simpson…the voice of Rudolph was performed by a female actor.  Her name: Billie Mae Richards.Billie Mae sadly passed away in 2010  but we have some archive interview footage with our own Drew Savage!

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The first Christmas standard ever introduced by a black singer would go on to become the most performed Christmas song ever.  This is the story behind…The Christmas Song.  

The story of how it was written is a famous one. In 1945, Mel Torme and Bob Wells would take turns going over to each other’s houses to write songs. On one smoking hot July day in Toluca Lake, California, Mel went to Bob’s house and found a spiral pad of paper sitting on the piano with four lines scribbled down. “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire – Jack Frost nipping at your nose." 

Mel asked “what’s this?” And Bob said it was so blistering hot, he tried writing some wintery verse to mentally cool him off. Mel said you haven’t just cooled me off – you’ve written a song here.
 
Mel wrote the melody and helped Bob finish the lyrics…and 45 minutes later, they had a song.
 
They drove over to Van Husen Publishing to share it with the decision makers there, who weren’t impressed.

The same afternoon, they drove over to Nat King Cole’s house. They played it and Nat said “play it again.” After the second play, Nat said “that’s now my song.”

Mel Torme was a successful singer in his own right, so you’d think he have some regret over not keeping this for himself. Mel’s son James, also a jazz singer, has said that his dad’s solo career  hadn’t taken off yet…and that he and Bob recognized that in 1945, Nat King Cole was becoming the man. He was exploding in popularity and to have him sing it would give the song it’s best chance to succeed.  
 
Nat King Cole recorded FOUR different versions over the years, starting in June 1946. Cole’s record label, Capital Records, wanted him to stand and sing, but Cole decided to sit and play the piano himself while singing. 
 
He wasn’t happy with the way things went, so despite strong objections from his label, Cole went back into the studio to re-record it in August. That version added a small string section and while it was a hit that Christmas, it’s not the version that’s most played now.  

Cole would record it again in 1953 again adding a full orchestra, but we didn’t get the now iconic version until 1961. Every time Cole would go back to the studio to re-record it, he would add more players and in ’61 that trend continued…but this time, it was recorded in stereo. And according to what Mel Torme wrote in his autobiography, the rest could be called our financial pleasure.  
 
If Nat King Cole’s is the most famous, who’s version comes in second?  Going by chart performance, that would be Christina Aguilera, who recorded it for her My Kind of Christmas album 20 years ago. Her version peaked at #18 on Billboard’s Hot 100.
 
But there have been so many versions over the years. Frank Sinatra, Michael Bublé, John Legend, Doris Day, Justin Bieber, James Brown and countless others.  So many versions that according to Broadcast Music Inc – a performing rights organization – The Christmas Song is now the most performed Christmas song ever.  

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Today, a Christmas hit written by a Canadian band for a big budget Christmas movie starring a Canadian actor! Today, it’s the story of Green Christmas by the Barenaked Ladies for the movie How The Grinch Stole Christmas! 

For this story, we hook up with the guitarist, lead singer and songwriter for Barenaked Ladies, Ed Robertson.

Ed Robertson tells us about how the song came to be, being a big fan of Ron Howard, and tells us all about his memories of writing the song.

Ed and Drew talk about their love of the Grinch Movies, and how they had to cut a special deal to even get the song recorded!

The guys talk about the rerecord for 'Barenaked for the Holidays' and get in to a little bit of banter around the band's cover of the iconic 'Do They Know Its Christmas?'!

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Donny Hathaway recognized that the Black experience was underrepresented in Christmas music, so he decided to change that. This is the story behind…This Christmas.

The song Donny Hathaway would find was written 3 years before its release in the middle of a blizzard by a Chicago postal worker named Nadine McKinnor.  

Nadine would keep a notebook full of lyrics she’d jot down as they came to her. She told the Chicago Tribune that these lyrics were about her love affair with the season – the swirl of music, department store windows and the lights on the south side of the city. Nadine and her co-workers were sorting mail in the middle of a blizzard. 58 cm of snow had fallen in a 24 hour period. They were looking to pass the time, so Nadine started singing the lyrics to the song that would become This Christmas. 

Nadine has said she didn’t have civil rights in mind when she wrote the lyrics…and even hoped that one day an artist like Andy Williams would record it. But her boyfriend at the time would be the connection between her and Hathaway. He was doing some decorating at Donny’s home & office and overheard him and his manager talking about looking for new material. 

McKinnor recounted her first meeting with Hathaway for The New Yorker – she went to that same office that was being redecorated a few days later and started to sing from her notebook.  The same notebook she sang from for her co-workers at the post office. She said she sang four or five songs for Donny, but This Christmas was the one that instantly got his attention. Quote: “I tore the page out to give him and I never got it back.”

Nadine had envisioned the song to be sung in a style similar to Nat King Cole’s The Christmas Song – it was Hathaway who, as Nadine puts it, gave it its magic and infused it with his gospel roots. That’s entirely where the improvised line “shake a hand, shake a hand” comes from. While so many Christmas songs of the previous 25 years had been about nostalgic feelings of home, there’s nothing nostalgic about This Christmas. It doesn’t look back at all. It’s upbeat and now. “This Christmas. Will Be. A very special Christmas. For me!”

Recorded in Chicago in the fall of 1970 and released that November, This Christmas was not a hit.  

Donny Hathaway was never as famous as Marvin Gaye or Stevie Wonder, but his work was respected and inspired future generations of songwriters like Alicia Keys, Lauryn Hill and Justin Timberlake.  

However, the impact of This Christmas wasn’t really felt it was included in a re-release of a compilation album from Atco Records in 1991 called Soul Christmas. And then the covers started coming. Destiny’s Child, Chris Brown, Usher, Mary J Blige, even Donny’s daughter, Lalah Hathaway has recorded it.  

Lawrence Ware – the co-director of the Centre for Africana Studies at Oklahoma State University once said it’s almost like a rite of passage for black singers to record This Christmas.

Sadly, Donny Hathaway didn’t live long enough to see This Christmas become the Black Christmas anthem it did. He died under mysterious circumstances after having dinner at Roberta Flack’s house in January 1979. Hathaway fell 15 stories from his Central Park hotel room in what was ruled a suicide, despite no note being left and many people close to him swearing that he wouldn’t have killed himself. 

For Nadine McKinnor, the song’s success has provided her with a good place in life. After years of hard work in several different offices, she was successful in her legal challenge to become the song’s co-publisher. Nadine is now retired and earns over $70,000 a year in royalties.  

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John Lennon wasn’t one to do things small.  Whether it was his activism or his music, he wanted to touch as many people as possible...which is probably why it’s no surprise that he set himself a goal to write a Christmas song that would last forever. 

Here’s the story of how a slogan from a billboard campaign would go on to fulfill Lennon’s lofty ambitions. Today, Behind the Christmas Hits features John Lennon’s Happy Xmas (War is Over).” 

All four Beatles have recorded solo Christmas songs but John Lennon’s was the first. According to Yoko Ono, she and John loved Christmas music. Whether it was Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer or White Christmas, there were always holiday songs playing when their son Sean was young. And it was John who’d put up most of the decorations.  
But this is a Christmas song that’s also a protest song.
 
It began with John and Yoko’s famous “bed ins” in March 1969 to protest the Vietnam War. The first was at the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel and the second was at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal.  
 
As Christmas drew closer that year, John & Yoko decided to take their campaign in a new direction. They would buy billboards in Toronto, New York, Hong Kong and nine other cities with the message: WAR IS OVER…IF YOU WANT IT. In smaller letters along the bottom it read “Happy Christmas from John & Yoko.”

That wasn’t a promotional campaign, teasing the release of a new song. It was simply a message to the world. War is Over...If You Want It was an anti-war slogan that had been used in other songs like The Unknown Solider by The Doors.  But still...there was no idea to record a song using that slogan...at least...not yet.
 
The song wouldn’t come for another two years, after Lennon’s biggest success as a solo artist. Imagine was John’s first #1 hit in Canada and around the world since leaving The Beatles.

When reflecting on Imagine’s success, John said he now understood what you had to do to make your viewpoints heard. Quote: “Put your political message across with a little honey."
 
He would go back to the words used in the billboard campaign as the foundation of a song that promoted unity and optimism for Christmas. 

The song was recorded in October of ’71. The legendary Phil Spector was the producer. Before dressing up in costume to go trick or treating on Halloween Day, 30 kids from the Harlem Community Choir, between the ages of 4 and 12, came in to record their backing vocals.  It was released just about a month later - on December 1 — not as part of an album, but as a green see-through vinyl single. However, because it came out just 3 1/2 weeks before Christmas, it wasn’t a hit that year at all. A year later, when the song was finally released in the UK, people started to take notice.  
 
John once said he always wanted to write a Christmas record that would last forever. That was during a radio interview in the mid-70’s and before the song had become what it is now.  

The song has been covered by countless other artists and Lennon’s original has re-entered the charts numerous times, including in 2019, peaking at #42 on Billboard’s Hot 100. John Lennon never did record another Christmas song, but that doesn’t matter - he succeeded in his goal to write one that would last forever. 

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This song is a pretty polarizing Christmas hit, but boy do a lot of people love it! Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.

For this episode, Drew Savage sat down with Irish Rovers Founding Member George Millar! George walks us through the history of the song, and some fun facts behind the hit.

George Millar explains how they Irish Rovers were not the first to record the song, but the first to release it Nationally. 

George tells us about the Canadian Connections to the song, its folk roots, how simply the songs came together and of course- what GRANDMAS think about the song!

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George Michael loved Christmas. For years, he would have a big, boozy dinner party with about 25 of his closest friends on Christmas Eve. Some years, they’d even go out carolling after dinner.  Imagine: George Michael showing up at your front door at 10 o’clock on Christmas Eve singing Silent Night. It should be no surprise that a guy who loved celebrating the season so much would write a future classic.

This is the story of #LastChristmas.

George & Wham! partner Andrew Ridgeley were watching soccer together at Michaels’ parents’ house when the inspiration struck.  Andrew Ridgeley recalled in an interview with British newspaper The Mail on Sunday, that they were having a bite to eat during the game when, almost unnoticed, George went upstairs and didn’t return for about an hour.  When he did, Ridgeley said he was so excited, it was like he struck gold…which, in a way, he had.  
 
George didn’t live with his parents, but his old keyboard was still there…and he used it to write Last Christmas. The two went back upstairs and George played the chorus for Andrew, who described it as a moment of wonder. 

The timing of this inspiration came at a critical time for Wham! Earlier in ‘84, after a legal dispute with their original record label, Inner Vision, George and Andrew signed with Epic Records and had more creative control. And George…took full control.
 
When recording the song Everything She Wants, George and sound engineer, Chris Porter, wound up in a studio in Paris with no band and no producer. Chris says that’s when George realized he could do everything himself. Later, when recording Last Christmas in August of ’84, not even Andrew Ridgeley was allowed in the studio. That’s right – it’s another Wham! song where Andrew Ridgeley is nowhere to be found. George played a Roland Juno-60 synth and a LinnDrumm drum machine himself. Porter has said he wanted to play the sleigh bells but George wouldn’t even let him do that – if it was going to be on the record, George had to play it. 

The video for Last Christmas was the last time George appeared on camera without a beard.  
 
You know, based on what Andrew Ridgeley wrote in his book Wham, George Michael & Me, we could do an entire episode on the making of the video alone. All of the people in it were real life friends of George & Andrew’s.  Wham’s back-up singers Pepsi & Shirley were there as was Martin Kemp, the bass player for Spandau Ballet. They went on an absolute tear. On their first night at the chalet, Andrew says everyone jumped naked into a swimming pool. One unnamed friend swallowed half a gallon of water and got terribly sick…in the pool. 
  
While Last Christmas has been one of the most popular Christmas songs of the last 40 years, it has never reached #1.  

Christmas 1984 was the same year Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas was released and it was the song to dominate the charts that season. George, of course, sang on that song – but Andrew no-showed the recording session. He dismissed a vaguely worded FAX from their management team as being of little importance, so while George, Bono, Boy George and the rest of British pop royalty were making history, Ridgeley says he was at home having a bacon and egg sandwich. 
 
Ridgeley said in his book that he and George were conflicted about the fact Last Christmas was kept out of the #1 spot by Band Aid. Chart success was important to George, especially as he was planning his solo career. All proceeds from Last Christmas were also donated to African famine relief efforts that year, but this undertow of disappointment was real. A disappointment that the song had become what Andrew describes as a “Trivial Pursuit” answer to the question: what is the biggest-selling single NOT to get to #1 in the UK.

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Was Dominick connected to the mob?  It’s time to explore the story behind one of the most polarizing Christmas songs of all time: Dominick the Donkey.

Written by Ray Allen, Sam Saltzberg & Wandra Merrell, Dominck was recorded by Lou Monte.
 
Monte grew up in New Jersey and started singing & playing guitar in clubs when he was 14. He paused his career in the early 40’s to enlist in the Army, but upon his return, business began to pick up.  He got his own radio show in Newark in 1948 and started appearing on local TV.  He went from the smaller clubs in New Jersey to the big rooms in Manhattan.  Most of Monte’s humour centred around being raised in an Italian family, which led to the nickname of “Godfather of Italian Humour.”
 
Dominck wasn’t the only Italian animal he sang about – Monte also had a hit with Pepino the Italian Mouse, which sold over a million copies. There was also Pepino’s Friend Pasqual, the Italian Pussy Cat and Paulucci the Italian Parrot.  
 
Dominick was released in 1960 and the circumstances surrounding it’s recording sound like something out of a Scorsese movie. The rumour that has not-so-quietly followed the song around from the beginning is that “made men” from the infamous Gambino Crime Family, financed the recording of the song…and then aided in it’s distribution to get it into record stores.  It doesn’t appear that Lou Monte was ever investigated to the extent Frank Sinatra was, but those rumours were there.  Now…despite whatever alleged associations it had, Dominick was not a hit.  It took a LONG time for that to happen. 
 
For decades, it was more of an underground, cult hit…with people’s initial reaction being more of surprise that the song even existed and had been around for as long as it had.
 
But Dominick officially achieved “hit” status when The Chris Moyles Show on the BBC launched a campaign to get it to #1. It came close, peaking at #2 on the iTunes chart on December 19, 2011.

In recent years, other artists and authors have tried to expand Dominick’s universe. In 2016, author Shirley Alarie released two children’s books about Dominick. And in 2018, Jersey native Joe Baccan dropped “Dominooch” – a song about Dominick’s son taking over the “family business.”
  
No doubt the song is polarizing – it frequently finishes at or near the top of “worst Christmas songs” lists. But those who love it, love it a lot and it’s hard not to appreciate its unlikely long and winding journey to becoming a “legit” Christmas hit.

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You’d be hard pressed to find a Christmas song that’s been written about as much as this one, yet at the same time, little is actually known about it’s origins or how the artist even feels about it.  We’re talking about Paul McCartney’s Wonderful Christmastime.

Paul was the third Beatle to record a Holiday song.  John Lennon was first with Happy X-Mas, George Harrison was second with his 1974 original Ding Dong Ding Dong. 
 
Recorded in August 1979 for his solo album McCartney II, it became Paul’s first solo single since his band Wings was formed. 

Wings hit the road for their final tour together that fall and even played Wonderful Christmastime during some of the later shows on that tour.  None of the band members play on the recording of the song, but they are in the video that was filmed at the Fountain Inn in Ashurst, New Sussex.  
Over the years, people have tried to make the argument that it’s actually the worst Christmas song.  

In 2014, USA Today ran a piece saying McCartney’s efforts on the song were “akin to being the writer of an Adam Sandler movie.”  Conversely, a quick Google search will yield you a bunch of results from people now writing defence pieces on the song.  
 
Paul wrote Wonderful Christmastime himself and played all the instruments on the recording.  Keyboards, synthesizers, guitar, bass, drums, percussion…oh…and he produced it, too.  As a result, he receives royalties as a performer and a songwriter…and doesn’t have to share them with anyone.  Forbes estimates the song nets McCartney between four and five hundred thousand dollars every year.
 
That plays into the speculation that McCartney was motivated to do the song all by himself because of his horrible financial experience with EMI Records.

So…with all this talk…what does McCartney think?  Did he write it in 10 minutes?  What was he thinking at the time?  How does he feel about it now?  It’s hard to tell.  There are old comments about how he’s embarrassed by the song, yet, he still plays it live. 
 
Harry Styles loves the song – he’s performed it live in concert numerous times including during an appearance on BBC1’s Live Lounge.
 
So…is Paul truly embarrassed by it…or is it more rock and roll to say you are…but then laugh all the way to the bank every December?

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The lyrics to one of the most popular Christmas hits of all came as bittersweet recollections from a lyricist who had just lost his brother.  This is the story of Santa Claus is Comin' to Town.

Santa Claus is Comin' to Town is one of the early original Christmas hits of the 20th Century.  Written by J. Fred Coots and Haven Gillespie, the first recording was believed to have been made in October 1934 by a banjoist named Harry Reser. 
 
Eddie Cantor was a popular performer in Vaudeville shows at the age of 15.  Over the next 15 years, he became a star on Broadway and had several hit records.  He was also the host of a daily radio show…and by 1933, he was the highest paid radio star in America AND the top box office draw at the movies.  
 
This was during the depression and Eddie felt strongly that the world needed a bright, upbeat Christmas song to feel good about.  For months, he tried to write one of his own, but nothing clicked.  

This is where Haven Gillespie came in.  A part-time newspaper writer from Covington, Ohio who was also trying to make it as a songwriter. Eddie Cantor started to call around to music publishers looking for unreleased Christmas songs.  Edgar Bittner was a music publisher at Leo Feist Inc. in New York City.  He called Gillespie to his office and pitched him to write something for Cantor.  Gillespie once said Bittner told him he a vocabulary that children could understand – Gillespie didn’t quite know how to take that…so he passed.  But on the subway ride home after the meeting, he had a thought.  He remembered something his mother used to tell him when he was a child.  Not only did Santa know when kids were sleeping – he also knew when they had been bad or good.  He pulled out an envelope from his pocket and began to write down other images he had as a kid – how his mother’s warnings would keep him and his siblings in line.  And that’s when he remembered his mom pointing a finger at his brother, Irwin, and saying “you better watch out…you better be good, because Santa Claus is coming.” Irwin had just died in Kentucky weeks earlier, so the recollection was bittersweet.

For the rest of the ride home, Gillespie would continue to write about his childhood…but he didn’t have a melody…so he turned to his composer friend, J. Fred Coots.  He was the one who noticed the rhythm in what Gillespie was writing and started banging away at the piano.  
 
24 hours later, Gillespie and Coots went back to Edgar Bittner and presented the song, which was immediately sent to Eddie Cantor.  
 
Cantor didn’t love it right away, but his wife did…and that was the stamp of approval it needed. 

Before ever performing it live on his show, Eddie recorded it in the studio so the records were ready to go.  He also worked with the publisher to print and distribute the sheet music to stores to sell, knowing that once the song was out there, people would want to know how to sing & play it themselves. Eddie Cantor was right.  During his live Broadcast from the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in November 1934, Eddie performed the song live for the first time.  And within 24 hours of that performance, 30,000 records and 500,000 copies of the sheet music had been sold.

Despite it’s instant success, Gillespie always struggled with the song as it reminded him of his late brother Irwin, who died just before getting the call from Edgar Bittner to write something for Cantor’s show.
 
The song is a classic and in 1970 was turned into an animated TV special.

Countless versions have been recorded, but Bruce Springsteen’s has been the most popular of the modern era.  It was recorded live in 1975, but wasn’t released until Bruce allowed it be included in a Sesame Street compilation album in 1982 called In Harmony.  It didn’t really become popular until the Born in the USA album came out and Bruce made it the b-side of the single My Hometown in 1985. 

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What do you do when driving to work?  If you’re Liz Mitchell, the lead singer of Boney M, you sing your next big hit for the first time.  This is the story behind…Mary’s Boy Child/Oh My Lord!

For this episode, Drew Savage sat down with Boney M’s original lead singer, Liz Mitchell! Liz Mitchell walks us through the history of the song, and some fun facts behind the hit.

Mary’s Boy Child Oh My Lord this was about as instant a hit as you could get. Mary’s Boy Child was recorded originally in 1956 by Harry Belafonte and Oh My Lord was written later by Frank Farian from Boney M.

Liz Mitchell explains that the first time she ever sang Mary’s Boy Child was in the car ride on the way to the studio to work out how it would sound.

Liz Mitchell talks about the video and the white fur coats, and where they came from - and that Boney M performed Mary’s boy child, in the coats outside in the red square in Moscow.

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What began as a Christmas present to a high school crush in 1944 turned into a #1 Christmas hit more than 25 years later.  Here are things you didn't know about Merry Christmas Darling, by The Carpenters.

Merry Christmas, Darling was recorded in 1970 by The Carpenters.  It went to #1 on Billboard’s Christmas chart in 1970, 1971 and 1973.  

It started off as a high school crush.  The original lyrics were written in 1944 by an 18-year-old named Frank Pooler about a girl he had a crush on at the time.  

Frank Pooler was a high schooler in Onalaska, Wisconsin.  In the summer of ‘44, Frank spent all his free time with a girl he was smitten with – the younger sister of the Onalaska High School Band and Choir director.  

Even after the summer was over, Frank kept thinking about this girl.  Frank hadn’t written many songs, but he wanted to write one for her.  He once told The LaCrosse Tribune newspaper “I was 18 and the hormones were raging.”  Unfortunately, before he gave her his present, they broke up.  But Frank held on to those lyrics.    

Flash forward 22 years, Frank was a choral director at California State University at Long Beach and there were two siblings in his class: Karen and Richard Carpenter.  

The Carpenters were having some success getting local gigs and asked their professor if he had ideas for something they could do at Christmas.  They were tired of singing the same standards over and over and wanted something new.  Pooler passed on lyrics to the Christmas song he wrote when he was a teenager.  Richard Carpenter took the lyrics, but wrote a different melody for them. The song we now know was co-written by two 18-year-old guys, a generation apart.

The Carpenters went on to a lot more than just playing local gigs and by 1970, they charted their first two hits: Close to You and We’ve Only Just Begun.  

Still tight with his music teacher, Richard Carpenter called Frank Pooler and invited him to a recording studio at A&M Records.  When Frank arrived, Richard pushed play and Frank couldn’t believe it.  He didn’t recognize it right away but about 10 seconds later, he was totally floored.  

Frank Pooler died in 2013, but before he did, he had a chance to track down that girl he wrote the song for.  Again, telling The Lacrosse Tribune, that they got together and the subject of the song came up.  She knew that he had written the song, but Frank asked her if she knew he had written that song about her.  She said “no…but now I have a treasure.”     

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Rolling Stone calls it the greatest rock and roll Christmas song ever but it went largely unnoticed for a decade after coinciding with a tragedy.  This is the story behind…Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) -  Presented by Pizza Pizza!

It was recorded in 1963 for the album A Christmas Gift to You from Phil Spector.  The album gave Phil’s signature “wall of sound” treatment to well-known Christmas songs like Frosty the Snowman, Winter Wonderland and White Christmas.
 
The one original song on the album was Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) with Darlene Love on lead vocal and Cher on the backing vocals.  

It was meant to be the album’s lead single, but it was released on November 22, 1963 – the same day US President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.  The song never charted and the album was not the success Spector envisioned.  
But Spector thought he had something with Darlene Love’s incredible vocal performance, so after Christmas he brought Darlene back and they recorded a new version called Johnny, Please Come Home.  Same music. Just different lyrics to tell a similar story without any reference to Christmas.  That really didn’t work out either and the song virtually vanished for almost a decade.  
  
The album was re-released in 1972 on Apple Records – the label founded by The Beatles – and that’s what sent it on it’s path to becoming a Christmas classic.  It peaked at #6 on Billboard’s album chart that year – while that’s it’s highest chart position to date, it re-entered the chart as recently as 2019, peaking at #12.

Artists are often asked how they feel about singing songs year after year that have been out for so long.  When Darlene Love sings live, you expect to hear her sing Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) – but she’s not tired of it. Possibly because she didn’t sing it live for the first 20 years it was out.  

As told in the Oscar-winning documentary, 20 Feet From Stardom, Darlene was a background singer back in the day and never had the chance to perform the song live.  It wasn’t until the 80’s that she’d perform the song regularly.  
 
On his last show before Christmas, from 1986 – 2014, David Letterman would bring Darlene Love on his show to sing the song.  During her final Letterman appearance, she finished the song standing on Paul Schaefer’s piano and did not come down when Dave came over to thank her.  She reportedly stayed on top of the piano because she didn’t want to cry if Dave hugged her after that final performance.  
 
Darlene still sings the song live on TV every year – since Letterman wrapped up his nightly show, she now performs it annually on The View.  
 
Darlene was involved in the recording of another version of the song for the 1987 charity album A Very Special Christmas. U2 did a faithful cover of the original and asked Darlene to sing the backing vocal.  Darlene Love, now in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, is the only singer to ever back up U2 and Elvis Presley.  

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It’s considered the first rock & roll Christmas song, but exactly who is responsible for that is a question that still doesn’t have a definitive answer!  Here are things you didn't know about Jingle Bell Rock.

By 1957, the rock & roll sound was about to hit Christmas music…even if no one actually intended for that to happen.

Jingle Bell Rock was first recorded by country singer Bobby Helms.  He is not recognized as the song’s author, but he and guitarist Hank “Sugarfoot” Garland would both claim right up until their deaths that they co-wrote it.  

You might not know the name Hank Garland, but you’ve heard him play.  Jingle Bell Rock, Wake Up Little Susie, Pretty Woman -that’s Hank Garland.

The official songwriters of record are Joseph Beale and James Boothe.  Both worked in the newspaper business, but would also pitch song ideas to Hollywood producers.

Helms and Garland always maintained that the song Beal and Booth wrote was called Jingle Bell Hop and was just awful.  

The last line of the first verse “now the jingle hop has begun” is a line that likely remained, but much of what was recorded was not on the original page.  
Helms passed in 1997, but he told the Indianapolis Star in ’92 that Jingle Bell Hop was so bad that he didn’t want to record it until after he and Garland rewrote existing lyrics, reworked the melody, upping the tempo and the bridge.  "What a bright time, it's the right time, to rock the night away”…they say they wrote that from scratch.

Paperwork likely played a huge role how things unfolded from there.  Session players would often come up with things on the fly and not take notes, so there’s no paper trail tracing the changes they made to the song…but plenty of people have come forward saying they witnessed Helms and Garland working their magic.

Hank passed in 2004, but his younger brother, Billy has taken up his cause.  It’s estimated that as much as $100 million in royalties were never paid to Bobby Helms and Hank Garland.

Jingle Bell Rock was released on November 28, 1957, debuting at #6 on the charts for that week and has been a Christmas favourite ever since.  

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Let’s get into the story behind Santa Baby!

Santa Baby was first recorded by Eartha Kitt and released in 1953.  It was written for a musical comedy film called New Faces.  

In August of that year, lyricist Joan Javits and composer Phil Springer went for a meeting at New York’s famous Brill Building and were asked if they could write a Christmas song for Kitt to be included in the movie.  Javits suggested “Santa Baby” for a title and then Springer went to work on the melody.

The song’s arrival was announced in an ad in Billboard magazine proclaiming it “1953’s Big Christmas Record.”  But it faced a lot of controversy.  On November 14, 1953, Eartha Kitt performed the song for King Paul & Princess Frederica of Greece while they were attending a banquet in NYC.  Politicians in attendance thought the lyrics of the song were inappropriate for the Royals and made their feelings known to reporters covering the event.  The Royals weren’t bothered a bit, but the word was out that this sexy Christmas song was out of line…and Santa Baby was banned in some southern US states.

In a classic case of controversy creating even more attention, Santa Baby became the best-selling Christmas song of 1953. 

A year later, the publishers wanted a sequel.  Have you ever heard This Year’s Santa Baby?  It featured updated lyrics about the things on the wish list for Santa.  And that wasn’t the only new version of the song.

In the early 80’s, Springer & Javits had the chance to buy back the publishing rights.  Javits reportedly wasn’t interested in being a rights holder, so she sold her share to Springer who then became the sole rights holder for Santa Baby.  The first thing he did was to pull back on all the updates and focus on the 1953 original as the definitive version of the song and would only allow new recordings to use those original lyrics.

Still…Santa Baby’s come back wasn’t immediate.  Not until…1987.

In the years following Madonna’s recording of the song for the charity album A Very Special Christmas, there was all kinds of interest that led to it being featured in everything from The Simpsons to The Sopranos…and new versions recorded by Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande and Michael Bublé. Bublé has been the one singer Springer has allowed to bend the rules and slightly alter the lyrics.

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The signature part of a classic Elvis song was just supposed to be a joke.  It’s time to go Behind the Christmas Hits: Blue Christmas.
 
Blue Christmas is NOT an Elvis original.  

The lyrics were written by Jay Johnson, who was working on a Christmas music radio show in the late 1940’s.  

 Billy Hayes wrote the melody and it was first recorded by country singer, TV host and actor Doye O’Dell in 1948.  
 
Several other versions were recorded over the next few years, including one by Ernest Tubb that went to #1 in 1950.  

But you almost NEVER hear any of these any more…and that’s because of Elvis. Millie Kirkham was one of the back-up singers for the recording session with Elvis – she sings the “wooo-wee-wooo” part of the song.  In an interview with the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in 2012, Millie said Elvis never wanted to record Blue Christmas.  

When producers told him it was on the schedule and he had to do it, Elvis turned to the musicians and said “let’s get this over with – just do anything, do something silly.”  And that’s when Millie started to go “wooo-wee-wooo” and did it throughout the entire song.  At the end of the recording session, they all laughed.
 
Elvis recorded Blue Christmas in 1957 to be included on the simply titled “Elvis’ Christmas Album.”  Fans loved it, but it wasn’t available as a single for another 7 years.  When the single was released in December 1964, it went to #1 on Billboard’s Christmas Singles Chart and would be re-released every year for the rest of Elvis’ career. 

It was such a big hit, that the songwriters, Johnson & Hayes, estimated they generated more royalties in the first year of Elvis’ version than they had in all of the other versions in nine years combined.  
 
The song’s popularity was the reason why Elvis’ manager, Colonel Tom Parker, went to NBC in May of 1968 to pitch a TV special.  At the time, there hadn’t been any TV specials focused on a single performer – they always featured multiple artists – so the idea that this would focus on just one was something people hadn’t seen before.  Parker’s idea: have Elvis sing nothing but Christmas songs.  NBC went for it and the special was on the production schedule for that June.
 
Now…the special didn’t go exactly as Parker pitched it.  Director Steve Binder and producer Bones Howe decided the special should tell more of Elvis’ life story through the lyrics of his other songs.  But the special was going to air in December and Parker continued to insist that Elvis do a Christmas song…and he did.  In fact, he did two:  I’ll Be Home for Christmas and Blue Christmas.  But I’ll Be Home for Christmas was cut and never aired.  Blue Christmas made the cut  and the audience loved it.  People were shown crying during the performance and even grunting along while Elvis was singing the song.  (0:32-0:34 from video)
 
Elvis recorded many different Christmas songs in his career, but his performance of Blue Christmas for his 1968 “comeback” TV special is the only video footage that exists of Elvis singing ANY Christmas song.  It recently placed 7th in Rolling Stone’s Reader’s Poll of the Best Christmas Songs of All Time.
 
One final note: Blue Christmas also has special meaning for another legendary artist.  It’s the last song Bruce Springsteen ever performed with the Big Man, Clarence Clemons.  In December of 2010, to promote The Promise: The Darkness on the Edge of Town Story, the E Street Band played a set at the historic Carousel House on the boardwalk of Asbury Park, New Jersey.  They performed several songs from Darkness but ended the night with a version of Blue Christmas.  Clemons died 6 months later without ever playing with Bruce again.  

Facing an illness that would ultimately take his life, lyricist Richard Smith wrote what he believed was his best work.  Here are things you didn't know about the Christmas hit Winter Wonderland.
 
Winter Wonderland is rare among Christmas songs in that it’s one of the most famous, but there’s no real consensus on who’s version is the definitive version. 

Perry Como made it a top 10 hit.  Ella Fitzgerald re-imagined it with a jazz flavour and the Eurythmics gave it an 80’s new wave vibe.  But which is the definitive version?  

Written in 1934 by lyricist Richard Smith and composer Felix Bernard. The landscape that inspired that original Winter Wonderland was the town of Honesdale, Pennsylvania. It’s a small town – only 4,100 people live there now…let alone back in 1934. 
 
The lyrics come from a beautiful moment experienced by a man ravaged with a terrible illness.  Richard Smith was just 33 and was seeking treatment for tuberculosis in Scranton.  He opened the window in his room and what he saw reminded him of the winter scenes in Honesdale Central Park – the park across the street from the house he grew up in. A half-dozen kids were playing the snow.  They had a snowball fight and built a snowman. Smith watched for over an hour until the sun started to set and the kids went home.   
 
He picked up a pencil, wrote down what he had seen and expanded those thoughts with memories of his own youth…and some about young love.  A few hours later, he had what he thought was a poem…and what he thought was his best work.
 
Richard recovered enough for a time that he was able to leave the hospital and reunited with his friend and professional piano player, Felix Bernard.  Felix knew this poem was something special and if he could find the right melody they might be able to attract a major act to record it.    
 
Later in 1934, the Richard Himber Orchestra recorded it, but that wasn’t the first “hit” version.  Canada’s Guy Lombardo heard the Himber recording and was instantly taken back to his own childhood in London, Ontario.  He and his Royal Canadians immediately recorded their own version of the song, which was released by Decca Records that December and peaked at #2 on the pop charts.  Hearing Guy Lombardo – a bandleader with over 70 hits – record his song and make it a hit, gave Smith the feeling that he would have a legacy after his time here was over.  Richard Smith died less than a year later…on his 34th birthday: September 29, 1935.  
 
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