Sleigh Rides, Jingle Bells, and Silent Nights: A Cultural History of American Christmas Songs

By Ronald D. Lankford

When Bing Crosby’s "White Christmas" debuted in 1942, no one imagined that a holiday song would top the charts year after year. One of the best-selling singles ever released, it remains on rotation at tree lighting ceremonies across the country, in crowded shopping malls on Black Friday, and at warm diners on lonely Christmas Eve nights. Over the years, other favorites have been added to America’s annual playlist, including Elvis Presley’s "Blue Christmas," the King Cole Trio’s "The Christmas Song," Gene Autry’s "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," Willie Nelson’s "Pretty Paper," and, of course, Elmo & Patsy’s "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer."

Viewing American holiday values through the filter of familiar Christmas songs, Ronald Lankford examines popular culture, consumerism, and the dynamics of the traditional American family. He surveys more than seventy-five years of songs and reveals that the “modern American Christmas” has carried a complex and sometimes contradictory set of meanings. Interpreting tunes against the backdrop of the eras in which they were first released, he identifies the repeated themes of nostalgia, commerce, holiday blues, carnival, and travesty that underscore so much beloved music. This first full-length analysis of the lyrics, images, and commercial forces inextricably linked to Yuletide music hits the heart of what many Americans think Christmas is--or should be.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Florida
• Release date: Oct 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9780813047829

Book preview

1

The American Christmas Song

The

way in which

Christmas has been

defined in America reveals

much about our values.

Alan Dundes,

Christmas as

a Reflection of American

Culture

Our

hit-parade

tunes and our jazz are

quite as representative of our

inner lives as any old ballad is of a

past way of life. As such, these popular

expressions, even though produced by

skillful technicians, are a valuable means

of taking stock of our success or failure in

developing a balanced existence.

Marshall McLuhan, The

Mechanical Bride

Music

has been, is,

and will continue to be an

integral part of our daily lives. It

is vital to our beliefs, our rituals, our

work and our play. It is both a reflection

of and a formative part of the fabric and

needlepoint of our culture and history.

Timothy E. Scheurer, American

Popular Music, volume 1

IN 2006, ASCAP (the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) released a list of the top twenty-five most popular Christmas songs from the previous five years.¹ While the list didn’t include every popular holiday song (it included only songs published by ASCAP), it did offer a good snapshot of the kinds of songs that have sustained popularity with American listeners. What was perhaps most surprising at the time was how little the holiday song market had changed in sixty to seventy years: familiar Christmas classics, both in their original and rerecorded versions, dominated the list. Seventeen of the twenty-five songs were first introduced between 1934 and 1954; another five between 1955 and 1964. One song, the Carol of the Bells, has multiple origins—popular lyrics were added in 1947 to the 1904 Ukrainian composition. The two newer songs date from 1970 and 1984.

Several songs remain popular in versions by their original performers. Bing Crosby, for instance, remains on the ASCAP list with White Christmas (#5), Gene Autry with Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (#10), and Nat King Cole with The Christmas Song (#1). Bobby Helms continues to be associated with Jingle Bell Rock (#6) and Brenda Lee with Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree (#14). The original version of The Little Drummer Boy (#8) by the Harry Simeone Chorale and Orchestra remains the most popular as does Burl Ives’s version of Holly Jolly Christmas (#18), Andy Williams’s It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year (#11), and José Feliciano’s Feliz Navidad (#15). From White Christmas in 1942 to Feliz Navidad in 1970, these songs represent a rich mine of Christmas music history that remains, to millions of listeners, contemporary.

Newer versions of these classic Christmas songs, versions recorded later than the original issue or hit, are equally represented on the ASCAP list. Most of these, however, were versions recorded before the time period in question, 2001–2005. In other words, while many of these rerecorded songs are newer than the original versions, they nonetheless qualified as older, favored versions of classic Christmas songs that have remained popular.

FIGURE 1.2. Nat King Cole, ca. 1947. Black and white negative. Gottlieb Collection, Library of Congress.

The Pretenders’ Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas (#2), the Eurythmics’ Winter Wonderland (#3), Madonna’s Santa Baby (#25), and John Mellencamp’s I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus (#20) were all issued in 1987 on A Very Special Christmas (one of a series of compilations that raised money for Special Olympics). Elvis Presley’s Blue Christmas (#16) and Here Comes Santa Claus (#22) date from 1957, while the Ronettes’ Sleigh Ride (#9) dates from 1963.

While the ASCAP list evinces a strong connection to yesteryear, it also reveals a less tangible result: these songs, in both old and new versions, remain vital to the American celebration of Christmas. Americans, the list suggests, cannot imagine celebrating Christmas without their favorite holiday songs performed by their favorite singers: without Blue Christmas and Elvis, without White Christmas and Bing Crosby, it would not be, to millions of Americans, officially Christmas.

Why did these songs play such a vital role within an American Christmas during the 1940s and 1950s, and why do they (especially since the 1980s) continue to evoke nostalgia for a lost time and place today? Perhaps the most obvious reason—though a reason that clarifies little—is that we simply like Christmas songs and have gotten into the habit of listening to them from Thanksgiving to New Year’s. Many of us have grown up within a Christmas tradition or a culture that places great importance on that tradition, making it difficult to avoid holiday music, even if we wished to do so. As children, we listened to our parents’ favorite holiday albums—perhaps Johnny Mathis’s Merry Christmas (1958), the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965), or Alabama’s Christmas (1982)—and later passed along these very same LPs, now CDs or downloads, to our own children or nephews and nieces. Listening to these holiday albums makes us feel good, reminding us of earlier Christmas memories with family and friends and linking us to both the past and the present. Because we know popular Christmas music as well as we know any music, we can join in the spirit of the season as we hum along, or we can escape into the warm envelope of nostalgia for simpler places and times.

The American connection to Christmas songs, however, runs much deeper than habit and feeling good. By expressing so many aspects of our holiday experience, Christmas songs also reflect American values, ideals, and desires; values, ideals, and desires that were born in the nineteenth century and streamlined in the 1940s and 1950s, and which many attempted to renew during the 1980s and beyond. Working like shorthand, the modern holiday song gives voice to the Christmases we celebrate and those we wish to celebrate. Resting beneath the surface of jolly Santas, winter wonderlands, and roasting chestnuts is an intricate and at times disjointed cultural landscape crowded with the meanings of a modern American Christmas. The songs that most readily evoke those meanings, desires, and anxieties have become classics, songs that Americans listen to year after year because the myths and ideas they represent are part of our mental landscape.

As a reflection of American values and desires, the Christmas song is both multifaceted and endlessly conflicted. On the surface, the idea that the Christmas song is conflicted seems wrong. As a Coca-Cola ad from 1944 stated, The spirit of good will rules the Christmas season.² Surely everyone can embrace the joy that Santa brings, bask in the warm glow of childhood holiday memories, and share the excitement of caroling and decorating a Christmas tree. Besides, modern secular Christmas songs are, for the most part, happy, celebrating the spirit of the season in an affirmative fashion. People listen to Christmas songs because they make everyone feel joyful, not conflicted and confused.

Beneath the surface, however, the American Christmas song is a much thornier hybrid than we imagine. And this paradox has always been and remains true, even when returning to the supposedly more placid days of the 1940s and 1950s when many of these songs first appeared. Underneath visions of winter scenes by Currier and Ives in Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, a dark nostalgia longs for a yesterday that can never be regained. On the flipside of Santa’s much-anticipated arrival in Here Comes Santa Claus looms an army of advertisements, salespersons, and mall displays. While shoppers embrace the abundance and goodwill of the season in Pretty Paper, they are also reminded of the tired, hungry, and lonely who remain social outsiders. Every warm memory has a lonely echo; every well-chosen present, a bill of sale.

Americans would like to spend more time with family and friends in the sanctity of the home (I’ll Be Home for Christmas) but are required to enter the public space of the market as workers, shoppers, and creditors (Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town); Americans wish to reward themselves for another year of hard work with the sensual and social pleasures of feasts, parties, and casual gatherings (Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree), while also contributing generously to favorite charities and dropping loose change into the Salvation Army bucket (If We Make It Through December). While Americans wish to embrace the ebullient and easygoing mood of the holiday, decorating the Christmas tree while sharing a glass of eggnog (It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year), they often find themselves wondering whether the Christmas season—filled with rich food, multiple gifts, and excessive busyness—is too much (Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer).

Holiday songs have served as reminders of these overlapping ideals while allowing a cultural framework for Americans to negotiate conflicts and differences. The process, however, is perhaps an unconscious one. Because Americans have lived with these songs and their contradictory messages for such a long time, it is easy to overlook how intricately they reflect the culture of Christmas. Beneath the familiar melodies and words, Christmas songs reveal a portrait of the American psyche past and present, wishing simultaneously to embrace nostalgia, commerce, charity, carnival, romance, and travesty.

The first theme to emerge in the modern Christmas song was nostalgia. Songs like White Christmas (1942), Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas (1944), and The Christmas Song (Merry Christmas to You) (1946) connected with listeners by offering wistful images of the American past. Against the historical backdrop of sudden change in the early twentieth century, nostalgiatinged songs offered a bridge for those who felt disconnected from preindustrial America. Images of snow and roasting chestnuts also provided Americans a brief respite from shopping for gifts and the pressures of a modern Christmas.

Holiday songs focusing on children and Santa Claus surfaced at nearly the same time as those focusing on nostalgia. In a sense, the gifts that arrived with Here Comes Santa Claus (1947) and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1949) more closely represented the post–World War II American zeitgeist. As a robust economy promised to lift all boats, America expanded into a consumers’ republic. Because these songs were children’s songs, however, they provided psychological cover for middle-class parents: materialism is only embraced indirectly through the benevolent Santa Claus.

By the late 1940s, nostalgia and Santa Claus had to make room for other kinds of Christmas song categories. Songs focusing on the holiday blues and hard times reminded Americans that while many enjoyed the emotional and material fruits of the season, others were alone, financially strained, and in need of charity. Songs like Ernest Tubbs’s version of Blue Christmas (1949) underlined the melancholy side of Christmas loneliness, while Willie Nelson’s Pretty Paper (1963) explored issues of charity and class. While all of these songs had roots in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843), each writer Americanized the message.

Other holiday song categories were perhaps—on the surface— more at odds with mainstream American culture. The carnival strain in the Christmas song had deep roots in pre-Christian winter festivals but would emerge in the mainstream as romantic fare like Winter Wonderland (1934), Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow! (1945), and Baby, It’s Cold Outside (1949). While the carnival tradition had viewed the holiday as an excuse for sensual abandon, these songs more conservatively focused on romance and, on occasion, no more than the suggestion of sex. Interestingly, none of these songs even mentioned Christmas.

Another strain of holiday song—satire—attempted to break all the rules, turning Christmas tradition on its head. While often dismissed as novelty, songs like Yogi Yorgesson’s I Yust Go Nuts at Christmas (1949), Elmo and Patsy’s Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer (1979), and Weird Al Yankovic’s Christmas at Ground Zero (1986) were intended as social critiques. These songs seemingly rejected part or all of the American Christmas experience by transforming the familiar symbols of the holiday into travesties.

It would be tempting to view Christmas songs focusing on charity, carnival, and satire as critical of American prosperity following World War II. For instance, the homeless man in Pretty Paper suggests that the bountiful American system has somehow failed. These nonmainstream categories, however, were less about rejecting the postwar boom than negotiating boundaries. Charity offered a safety net for those who had not yet obtained their slice of the American pie; carnival offered nothing more than a temporary reprieve from social boundaries; and satire merely pointed out pretension and hypocrisy with an eye on reform. Only a rowdy few wanted to do away with Christmas. Everyone else wanted to make it live up to its humanistic promise and the democratic impulse.

It is easy when considering these different categories to view the American holiday song as representing a smorgasbord of disparate values. On the surface, White Christmas and Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer have nothing in common. Even with vast differences, a larger touchstone underpinned all of these categories: home and family. Building on the values supported by the middle class during the nineteenth century, Americans refined the idea of a domestic Christmas through holiday songs during the 1940s and 1950s. The centrality of family and home in the Christmas song was complicated, however, by another touchstone: holiday gifts. While Santa Claus relieved parental guilt over spoiling children, accelerated holiday spending placed increased pressure on family members who paid the bills. Family and home remained most central to the Christmas song (and the Christmas experience), but it was difficult to separate families and homes from an abundance of consumer goods.

Christmas Music Past

Even before Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol in 1843, Christmas culture emerged as an essential part of the nascent middle-class experience in America. During the same time period, there was also a renewed interest in Christmas carols and songs. In America, a number of new carols were written, including It Came upon a Midnight Clear (1849), We Three Kings of Orient Are (1857), and Away in a Manger (1885). Likewise, a number of favorite secular songs were penned, including Jingle Bells (1857), Jolly Old Saint Nicholas, and Up on the House Top (the latter two were probably written between the Civil War and the turn of the twentieth century). While these songs were widely known, they were performed at home on the family’s piano or in church by choirs. In the nineteenth century, listening to music meant listening to live music.

This would change quickly and radically during the twentieth century, thanks to the development of mass media. Instead of hearing Christmas songs in church and performing them at home, Americans would listen to holiday songs on records (at home and on jukeboxes), at the movies, and on the radio. The history of the popular Christmas song is wrapped up in the emergence of new technology that allowed millions of Americans to buy copies of Bing Crosby’s White Christmas and the King Cole Trio’s The Christmas Song. The holiday song, performed by a well-known singer, pressed on a 78rpm record, and sold on the mass market, would create a new category of popular music.

FIGURE 1.3. Thomas Nast, Christmas Station, ca. 1889. Wood engraving. Library of Congress.

Also of note, the Christmas song that became popular during the 1930s and 1940s was, by and large, a secular affair. While the older carols continued to be recorded, religion had been stripped from hits like Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, Winter Wonderland, and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Although new carols were composed, such as The Little Drummer Boy and Do You Hear What I Hear?, these songs were rare exceptions.

Depending on who is relating the history, the popular Christmas song as Americans know it today dates back only to the 1930s or 1940s. There are known recordings of Christmas songs as far back as 1902, but a scratchy version of Jingle Bells sung by a barbershop quartet is hardly what we think of when considering modern Christmas songs.³ And while a number of early attempts at recording holiday material were popular in their day, such as narrations by Gilbert Girard and Harry Humphrey during the early 1920s, they failed to create lasting cultural traditions.⁴ That leaves us with two likely popular Christmas song trajectories that overlap but are nonetheless, I believe, reconcilable.

Billboard author Joel Whitburn contends in Christmas in the Charts that the holiday song received its proper start in 1934. This timeline of Christmas/Holiday songs begins in 1934, when two standards [Winter Wonderland and Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town] were introduced after a long drought of fresh new holiday songs. These two 1934 tunes ushered in the golden era of wonderful secular holiday songs.⁵ Guy Lombardo’s version of Winter Wonderland and George Hall’s version of Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town both became popular in 1934. In The Christmas Carol Reader, William Studwell also points out that Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town (originally written in 1932) was the first in the golden age of American Christmas songs. Between 1932 and 1951, nineteen classics, including It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas, Sleigh Ride, and Silver Bells, became the bedrock of our popular Christmas songs.⁶

The Whitburn and Studwell origin story, however, has a couple of glitches. No Christmas recordings of the 1930s came close to selling the number of copies that White Christmas, The Christmas Song, and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer would sell during the 1940s (and Whitburn’s reference to a long drought is misleading: there had never been a glut of holiday songs in the newer style during the 1920s). Dave Marsh and Steve Propes offer that Prewar America still insisted on taking Christmas straight.⁷ A more tangible issue may have been the Depression (1929–1941). Author Tim Hollis notes that ‘Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town’ first appeared in 1934, but it originally had a little touch of irony in that it seemed to reflect an impossible dream for those struggling with the Great Depression at the time.⁸ Songwriters and singers may have directed more attention toward the Christmas song during the 1930s than in the past, but a slumping economy and poor record sales seemed to dampen the potential for holiday recordings.

Marsh and Propes offer a slightly different history of the American Christmas song in Merry Christmas, Baby. As far as modern Christmas music is concerned, Santa Claus arrived in 1942.⁹ To the authors, the arrival of Santa Claus refers to the appearance of White Christmas on both the pop charts and the Harlem Hit Parade in October and November of 1942. Important changes had occurred between the issue of Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town in 1934 and White Christmas in 1942.