Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree by Brenda Lee—Murfin Winter Holidays Music Festival 2023-‘24

 

Brenda Lee's Rockin' Abound the Christmas Tree was recorded and released in 1958 but took two years to first climb to the Charts.

Earlier this Holiday season, I mentioned that Jimmy Fallon had hopes to finally oust Mariah Carey’s perennial Christmas #1 with his new duet with Meagan Trainer.  He made a run but didn’t succeed and the song faded fast.  But this week the ubiquitous pop diva was finally bested by a song recorded 65 years ago by a 13-year-old belter.  Brenda Lee’s Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree had been #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts from 2019 to last year.

Christmas song composer Johnny Marks.

The song was written by was written by Johnny Marks, who also penned Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, A Holly Jolly Christmas, and other holiday classics.  He personally selected Lee to sing the original Decca release when she was only 12 and a diminutive ( 85 Lbs. 4 foot 9 inches tall) belter.  Although he first records had not sold that well, she had attracted attention with performances on radio and country music television.  She was becoming known as Little Miss Dynamite for her powerful vocals. 

Brenda Lee ushered in the era of Rock and Roll Christmas Songs.

Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree is a rockabilly song. The original recording featured Hank Garland and Harold Bradley on guitar, Floyd Cramer on piano, Boots Randolph on tenor saxophone, Bob Moore on double bass, and veteran session player Buddy Harman on drums.  Despite the song’s pedigree and stellar musicians, it did not perform well when released for the ’58 and ’59 seasons.  But in 1960 Lee was a full-fledged star and Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree placed on the Billboard Hot 100 chart for the first time, eventually peaking at No. 14. It continued to sell well during subsequent holiday seasons, peaking as high as No. 3 in December 1965.  

11 year-old Brenda Lee with Elvis Presley on Red Foley's Ozark Jubilee TV show. 

Over the years it was boosted by use in Johnny Mark’s and Rankin/Bass’s 1979 sequel Rudolph and Frosty’s Christmas in July  and Home Alone in 1990, each use introducing the song and singer to new generations.

Lee in 1965 at the top of her stardom.

Meanwhile, Lee’s career flourished first as a Rockabilly and later as a country music star.  She charted many hits and has continued to tour and record.  She was the 16th Greatest Hot 100 female artist of all time. Her success in the 1960s earned her recognition as Billboard’s Top Female Artist of the Decade and one of the four artists who charted the most singles, behind Elvis Presley, The Beatles, and Ray Charles. Among her accolades were Grammy Awards, four NARM Awards, three NME Awards, and five Edison Awards. She was inducted in both the Country Music and Rock & Roll Hall of Fames.  

Lee in her new 2023 video of Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree.

To celebrate the song’s 65th anniversary this year, Lee released a music video in November 2023, featuring her lip-synching to the original recording at a house party with Tanya Tucker and Trisha Yearwood.  The 76-year-old singer is the oldest female artist and oldest artist overall to top the Hot 100, achievement formerly held by Cher and Louis Armstrong.  And the 63 years between the original Billboard listing and its #1 showing this year is a record that can only be broken by her.

 

 

I’ll Be Home For Christmas—Murfin’s Carols for Corona and Winter Holiday Music Festival

                                            I'll Be Home for Christmas by Bing Crosby.

There was a whole genre of World War II separation songs that have become enduring classics of 20th Century popular music.  Think I’ll Be Seeing You, The White Cliffs of Dover, and Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree to name just a few examples.  And of course there was a sub-genre of Christmas songs.  Irving Berlin’s White Christmas, the most popular adult secular holiday song of all time, was written before the American entry into the War inspired by a hot day in Los Angeles.  But its record release by Bing Crosby in late 1941 and his crooning the tune in Paramount Picture’s Holiday Inn in 1942 struck a nerve with G.I.s far from home and many in desert or tropical locations.  I have written about how my Father, W.M. Murfin played it for the men of his Army Field Hospital and its patients in North Africa in ’42.

But another Crosby recording struck an even more direct chord with GIs and their families back home—I’ll Be Home For Christmas and this year of Coronavirus forced separations makes it more relevant than ever.

I’ll Be Home for Christmas was written by lyricist Kim Gannon and composer Walter Kent and recorded on October 1, 1943 by Bing Crosby with the John Scott Trotter Orchestra on Decca Records. Within a month of release, the song charted for 11 weeks, with a peak at #3. The next year, it reached #16.   It soon became a perennial on Christmas radio and after Billboard established a separate seasonal chart for air play it was frequently near the top.  The song was also featured on Crosby’s famous 1945 78 rpm album and it’s LP release in 1949 which has itself been re-released and re-mastered several more times.

The original 1947 78 rpm cover of Crosby's Merry Christmas album.  The more familiar LP release featured him in his Santa cap.

Crosby won his fifth Gold Record and it became the most requested song at Christmas U.S.O. shows. The GI magazine Yank said Crosby “accomplished more for military morale than anyone else of that era.”  But the British feared the song would actually lower morale and initially banned it on the BBC.  After the tide turned in the Allies favor, the ban was lifted.

After the initial release there was a copyright dispute when Buck Ram, later the manager and producer of The Platters said he had previously written a poem with the same name and theme.  Although the lyrics and music of the released version were entirely different, Decca lawyers feared that they could not prove that Gannon and Kent may not have been inspired by the title.  After the initial release Ram was credited as a co-writer and shared in the considerable royalties the song generated.

Bing Crosby on a USO tour in Europe. 

I’ll Be Home for Christmas has been covered by many most notably by Johnny Mathis on his seminal Merry Christmas album in 1958.  Other covers have included The Carpenters, Elvis Presley, Reba McIntyre, Rascal Flats, Josh Groban, Michael Bublé, and Kelly Clarkson.

 As fine as many of those versions are, Der Bingle’s remains the most heartfelt.

You Are My Sunshine—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020

You Are My Sunshine by Jimmie Davis.

We’ve shared a lot of songs about sunshine here at the Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival and they are all about hope and good cheer.  But in one of the most beloved country music songs of all time heartbreak lurks behind a lilting melody. You Are My Sunshine is most closely associated with Jimmie Davis and therein lays an interesting and not always happy tale.

One story is that Oliver Hood wrote the song in the early 1930’s and first performed it at a Veteran’s of Foreign Wars Convention in Georgia.  But was also attributed to one of Hood’s musical associates, Paul Rice of the Rice Brothers and that clarinetist Pud Brown contributed to an arrangement that broke with string band conventions with a Western swing feel.  It was first recorded in 1939 by the Rice Brothers Gang on Decca and the Pine Ridge Boys on Blue Bird. 

Davis heard the song from the Rice Brothers while they were appearing on Shreveport, Louisiana radio station KWKH, the future home of the Louisiana Hayride.  Davis and his collaborator Charles Mitchell bought the song and rights from Paul Rice and put his own name on it, a practice not uncommon in the pre-World War II music business.  Although Davis never claimed to have actually written the song his name was credited on all of the literally hundreds of subsequent recordings of it and did everything in his power to make the song his own.

The sheet music for You are My Sunshine clearly identifies Jimmie Davis as one of the songwriters.

Davis recorded You Are My Sunshine in Decca’s New York City studios with an arrangement that replaced a fiddle lead with steel slide lap guitar and a jazzy clarinets break on February 5, 1940.  It was an immediate regional hit.  Later that year both Bing Crosby and Gene Autry scored top national hits with the song and delta blues guitarist Mississippi John Hurt as well as the ultimate dance band square Lawrence Welk also covered it showing the appeal of the song well beyond it country roots.

The song has been recorded so often that it is one of the most commercially programmed numbers in American popular music across multiple genres.  Just a few of those who have covered the song are Doris Day, Nat King Cole, Ray Charles, Ike & Tina Turner, Andy Williams, The Beach Boys, Aretha Franklin, Anne Murray, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash.

I personally learned the song off of a Gene Autry record as a boy in Cheyenne and it has been in my song circle repertoire of drunken caterwauling.

As for Jimmie Davis, well, he was a piece of work.  He was born as James Houston Davis according to Census records to impoverished sharecroppers on September 11, 1899 in Beech Springs, southeast of Quitman in Jackson Parish in north Louisiana.  He was the youngest of 11 children and neither her nor his parents knew how old he really was, guesses ranged from 1898 to 1904. 

Despite the odds against him Davis managed to graduate from Beech Springs High School and the New Orleans campus of Soule Business College. Davis received his bachelor’s degree in history from the Baptist-affiliated Louisiana College in Pineville, Rapides Parish and a master’s degree from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.  His 1927 master's thesis, Comparative Intelligence of Whites, Blacks and Mulattoes examined the intelligence levels of different races.  Keep that in mind.

During the late 1920s, Davis taught history (and, unofficially, yodeling) for a year at Dodd College for Girls in Shreveport while he began performing locally in the fashion of his idol Jimmie Rogers.  He even began using the name Jimmie instead of James.  Like Rogers many of his early recordings were raunchy blues tunes like Red Nightgown Blues. Some of these sides included slide guitar accompaniment by Black bluesman Oscar “Buddy” Woods.  By the late ‘30’s he was a successful fulltime musician with a strong regional following.

Following the success of You Are My Sunshine, Davis appeared in Western films in Hollywood.  He spent enough time in California that he became part owner of a night club which sometimes featured integrated acts.

Jimmie Davis in his first term as Louisiana Governor.

His folksy demeanor made him a natural at politics. Davis was elected in 1938 as Shreveport’s Public Safety Commissioner, the equivalent of police chief under the City Commission form of government. After four years in Shreveport City Hall, he was elected in 1942 to the Louisiana Public Service Commission, the rate-making body in the capital, Baton Rouge.

State Democratic Party powerhouses tapped Davis to run for governor in 1944 as a foil to the populist Long machine of built by assassinated boss Hughie Long.  Like the Longs, Davis’s base was among the poor “rednecks” of northern part of the state.  The entire campaign was built around You Are My Sunshine which Davis sang at every campaign rally, often from astride a horse named, you guessed it Sunshine.  He won in a landslide.

Davis’s term as governor was not distinguished.  He allowed officials selected by Party regulars and powerful business interests run things and make policy.  He spent much of his term absent from Baton Rouge in California for movies and making continued public appearances as a singer.  As a staunch anti-Longite he managed to get respect from Louisiana liberals, such as they were.  He earned the gratitude of national Democrats by keeping Louisiana from jumping ship from Harry Truman’s 1948 presidential campaign to Strom Thurman and the Dixiecrats.

It's not every low budget western from a Poverty Row studio that could boast of a sitting governor as one of its stars.

Louisiana limited governors to a single non-consecutive term so Davis left office after that election.  He kept his hand in state politics but turned his main attention back to his music career reinventing himself as a White gospel singer performing widely at churches, revival meetings, and religious conventions.  But no matter how many old-timey hymns he included in his performances, he always managed to throw in You Are My Sunshine.

In 1960 Huey Long’s brother Earl Long was finishing up a term as governor and hoped to retain power with an anointed successor while being elected Lt, Governor until he could run again.  Davis was called back to prevent that.  Despite a previous reputation as a relative racial moderate as the Civil Rights Movement swept across the South he reinvented himself as a strict segregationist for a bitter three-way Democratic primary.  Like George Wallace in Alabama, Davis refused to be “out niggered.” 

In his second term Davis proved his segregationist credentials by creating the Louisiana State Sovereignty Commission, which operated from 1960 to 1967. It “espoused States rights, anti-communist and segregationist ideas, with a particular focus on maintaining the status quo in race relations. It was closely allied with the Louisiana Joint Legislative Committee on Un-American Activities.  In this term business interests, especially the gas, oil, and petrochemical industries had even more overt control over state government.  As in 1948 Davis came to the aid of national Democrats by offering tacit support to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, to secure the state’s hold on pending offshore oil revenues.

In his second term as Governor Davis was still riding Sunshine to the Louisiana capitol building in Baton Rouge, the modern skyscraper build by Huey Long.

Davis made one more attempt to return to power in 1971 in a crowded Democratic field, but his populist act was not fooling anybody any more.  He finished a pitiful fourth place in a special December run-off primary with only 11.8 % of the vote.

In 1972 he was said to be on George Wallace’s short list as a vice presidential running mate after Air Force General Curtis LeMay, who got the nod and former Governor Orval Faubus.

In the 1990, after segregationist Democrats realigned themselves with “states’ rights” Republicans Davis endorsed GOP candidates including State Representative Woody Jenkins the U.S. Senate against Democrat Mary Landrieu of New Orleans, and Governor Murphy J. “Mike” Foster, Jr. who was seeking re-election in 1999. Against African-American Democratic Congressman Bill Jefferson of New Orleans.

Davis died on November 5, 2000.  He had suffered a fall in his home some ten months earlier and may have had a stroke in his last days.  He was 101 years old.

No matter what you think of Davis, You Are My Sunshine is still a hell of a good song.

Murfin Winter Holidays Music Festival—Sleigh Ride

While most pop Christmas songs—mostly novelty songs, children’s ditties, and seasonal love songs—may not still be appropriate, winter music that ends up on holiday play lists certainly is.  By far the most popular orchestral piece in that category is Sleigh Ride.  The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) consistently ranks as one of the top 10 most-performed seasonal songs written by ASCAP members and named Sleigh Ride the most popular piece of Christmas music in the U.S. in 2009–2012, based on performance data from over 2,500 radio stations.

Images of sleigh rides like the 19th Century Currier & Ives engraving, and his own New England childhood memories inspired Leroy Anderson to write Sleigh Ride.

Sleigh Ride is a popular light orchestra standard composed by Leroy Anderson who had the original idea for the piece during a heat wave in July 1946 and finished the work in February 1948.  It was first recorded by in 1949 by Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops Orchestra and became the highlight of its annual Christmas concerts.  Fiedler’s successors John Williams and Keith Lockhart have also made multiple recordings with the Pops.

Leroy Anderson had a productive relationship with Arthur Feidler, conductor of the Boston Pops.

Anderson was born in 1908 in Cambridge, Massachusetts to immigrant Swedish parents.  In the late 1930’s he developed a relationship with Fiedler and there after provided the Pops with a steady stream of original compositions. John Williams described him as “one of the great American masters of light orchestral music.”  Among Anderson other signature pieces were Jazz Pizzicato/ Jazz Legato, Blue Tango, The Syncopated Clock, and Plink, Plank, Plunk! Which was used as the theme for the CBS panel show I’ve Got a Secret.  Starting in 1950 Anderson led his own studio orchestra for recordings while the Pops and other light orchestras premiered live performances.

In 1950 lyricist Mitchell Parish wrote words which were first recorded by the Andrews Sisters.  Since then many artists have covered the vocal version.  Johnny Mathis sang the most popular on his 1958 Christmas album.  Parish’s original lyrics referred to a sleigh race to a “birthday party” but some performers including The Carpenters and Air Supply have altered that line to “Christmas party.”  The Ronettes with producer’s Phil Specter’s wall of sound arrangement made a version on their 1963 album which has gone on to regular seasonal air play as well.

Sheet music for the vocal version of Sleigh Ride with lyrics by Mitchell Parish.

Parish went on to write lyrics for several of Anderson’s other orchestral creations.

Anderson himself with his own Pops Concert Orchestra recorded Sleigh Ride on Decca Records in 1950 which became reached Cashbox magazine’s bestsellers chart when re-released in 1952.  Anderson’s version remains the most popular instrumental version based on holiday radio air play.