It’s time to consider the most urban of the secular Advent songs from the Golden Age of American holiday music. Like It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas and other songs, it captured the vibrancy, bustle, color, and excitement of the season but set it on the crowded streets of a big city. The other songs captured nostalgia for by-gone Christmases, country villages, and sleigh rides, but Silver Bells, also called City Sidewalks, was set firmly in mid-century America.
Song writing team of Jay Livingston and Ray Evans was commissioned to produce a song for the movie The Lemon Drop Kid in 1950. The pair specialized in songs for films. Their hits included Buttons and Bows from The Paleface, Mona Lisa for Captain Carey, USA, Que Sera, Sera for The Man Who Knew too Much, and Tammy for Tammy and the Bachelor. After Buttons and Bows won an Academy Award for the Bob Hope and Jane Russel vehicle in 1947, Paramount Studios was eager to have the pair work on a number for Hope’s new movie.
Lyricist Evan first called the new song Tinkle Bells, but in an oft repeated anecdote he described being called off by his horrified wife who reminded him of mom slang for wee wee.
As was so often the case, Bing Crosby first recorded the song with Carol Richards while the movie was still in post-production. It hit the charts in October 1950. The song had already been shot for the film as almost a throw away with gruff voiced vaudevillian William Frawley in the lead and stars Hope and Maxwell barely chiming in. With the success of Crosby’s record, the stars were called back to shoot a much more elaborate street scene version with them doing most of the singing.
Released in 1951, The Lemon Drop Kid was based on one of Damon Runyon’s Broadway short stories. The title character was a small-time racetrack tout and swindler who got into a jam with a gangster and had to raise $10,000 by Christmas or he “won't see New Year’s Eve.” The Kid concocted a phony charity scam featuring street corner Santas collecting money for an Old Dolls Retirement Home. Abetted by his trusting girlfriend, he assembled a bunch of old dolls—former girlfriends of cheap hoods, chorines, hostesses at mob joints—and plunked them down in an abandoned casino. Complications arose with both cops and gangsters closing in, but the Kid, determined to win back his disillusioned squeeze and out of a genuine affection for the Old Dolls however reluctantly did the right thing, and everyone lived happily ever after.
Hope reprised the song, which became almost a second theme song behind Thanks for the Memories, on his annual TV Christmas Special in the ‘60s through the ‘90s teaming up with such guest stars as Gale Storm, Olivia Newton-John, Marrie Osmond, Dolly Parton, Reba McEntire, and his own wife Delores Hope on his final original special in 1993.
Frail and unwell, Bob Hope sang Silver Bells with his wife Delores, a former band singer, on his last Christmas special.
Silver Bells has been covered by a host of artists becoming a staple of many holiday albums and seasonal specials. Among the covers were versions by Doris Day, Dean Martin, The Supremes, Elvis Pressley, Anne Murray, The Oakridge Boys, Martina McBride, Mariah Carey, Reba McEntire, and Michael Bublé,
But by the 21st Century the song had become as much a nostalgic piece as the sleigh ride songs of fifty years earlier. Even before the Coronavirus pandemic the urban street scene that Hope and Maxwell strolled with the thick crowds of shoppers, street vendors, cops on the beat, and now embarrassing ethic stereotypes was long vanished, supplanted first by suburban mega malls, and door-buster sales and now by Cyber Monday on-line shopping. Busy street life has been replaced by the isolation of computers and cell phones.
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