Here Comes Santa Claus
Here Comes Santa Claus
Right down Santa Claus Lane...
Yeah, good luck with that, if Santa Claus Lane is in Boris Johnson's newly created "Tier IV".
A year ago - the last Christmas of the Pre-ChiCom-19 Era, although we did not know it - I glanced in some amazement at the Billboard Hot One Hundred, and saw that a 72-year-old record by Gene Autry was at Number 28, and a 70-year-old single of his was Number 16. The latter - "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" - we'll be hearing at SteynOnline in the coming week, so I thought today we'd focus on the former - a pre-Rudolph Christmas hit, with no erubescent misfit but only Vixen and Blitzen and all his reindeer pulling on the reins. Usually, round about this time of the year, I salute Irving Berlin ("White Christmas") or Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn ("Let It Snow!") or J Fred Coots and Haven Gillespie ("Santa Claus Is Coming To Town"). But as the Yuletide 2019 hit parade reminds us a big part of the American Christmas is a singing cowboy called Gene Autry. Here he is in the film The Cowboy and the Indians riding the trail with Santa to bring gifts to a schoolful of what the laden wagon calls "the first Americans":
If you're one of the generations of boys who grew up with Gene's Cowboy Code, you'll know the very first rule is: "The Cowboy must never shoot first, hit a smaller man, or take unfair advantage." And Gene didn't. But that didn't mean he couldn't spot an opportunity when it presented itself and when it did over seventy years ago he took a shot and hit a bullseye. He was a modest man who made no great claims for his talent. After all, as he sang in Yodelin' Kid from Pine Ridge (1937), the cowboy...
...don't know much of art
But his song is from the heart
Sing Me A Song Of The Trail...
Gene Autry's songs were certainly from the heart. And, if he didn't know much of art, he knew plenty 'bout business, shrewdly anticipating every major trend in movies, music, broadcasting, and beyond. He was the only singing cowboy to end up owning a baseball team. Back in the Nineties, all the major-league owners were on a bus going somewhere for some promotional event, and the driver got lost and wound up going round in circles in the middle of nowhere and eventually some of the ball-team bosses felt the call of nature and made the guy pull over. As Autry got back on, George W Bush called out to him, "Hey, Gene, you got a great spray for a guy your age!"
No doubt. It's about the only thing he doesn't have a star for on Hollywood's Walk of Fame – that and his contributions to the Christmas songbook. Otherwise, he's the only celebrity to be honored with the full stellar quintet, one star for every category — films, TV, radio, stage and records. Even more impressive, he's the only TV celebrity to wangle his animal his own spin-off series, Champion the Wonder Horse (whose theme song you can hear me play here). As I write, I'm looking across the room at my cat: he's watched me crank out a thousand pieces over the years, but what are the chances of that deadbeat carrying a column of his own? Only Champion pulled it off — not like that loser Trigger, who just wound up stuffed and unmounted in the corner of Roy Rogers's living-room.
Gene Autry was born on September 29th 1907 at a sleepy Texan crossroads called Tioga, and a couple of decades later was working as a relief telegrapher for the Frisco Railroad in Oklahoma. One day, at the railroad station in Chelsea, a passenger came by to send a wire and noticed the guitar propped up against the wall. "You play that thing?" he asked the telegraph operator.
"Sure," said Gene.
"Well, let's hear something." Gene did a Jimmie Rodgers song, and at the end of it the passenger told him he was pretty good and introduced himself: Will Rogers. The legendary humorist had been back visiting his old haunts and, as he often did on the road, had gone to a nearby depot to telegraph his newspaper column. Within a few minutes, the great Broadway star and the lowly relief telegrapher were dueting on "Casey Jones". "You should be on radio," Rogers told him as the train pulled out.
Within a few years, he was – on WLS in Chicago, and thence to Hollywood. There had been cowboys who'd sung before Gene Autry, but he was the first to make "singing cowboy" a viable career path. Nevertheless, it's important to distinguish between the profession's various exemplars. My view of Roy Rogers, who died just a few weeks before Autry in 1998, is broadly that of Bob Hope in the saloon scene in Son Of Paleface (1952). The vamp for "Wing Ding Tonight" heralds the arrival of Jane Russell, shoehorned into a scarlet bodice. Steam begins to rise from Hope's pipe, but Rogers is completely unmoved. "What's the matter?" asks Hope. "Don't you like girls?"
"I'll stick to horses, mister," says Rogers. Hope looks aghast. Autry was wooden in a taciturn, manly, wild-frontier kind of way, but Rogers was often just bland. And Autry had more character in his voice — a kind of nasal ache that sits beautifully on top of steel guitars.
The trail blazed by Autry was followed by dozens of others. Ray Whitley, who starred in some two-reelers for RKO, had a more typical career. Woken at dawn by a phone call telling him to report to the studio for a new assignment, he staggered to his feet and yelped to the missus, "I'm back in the saddle again!" The old cartoon lightbulb went off in his head and he wrote up the phrase as a song in Border G-Man (1938). No one noticed it except Autry, who polished it up, re-introduced it in Rovin' Tumbleweeds (1939) and planted the phrase in the American vernacular.
Rogers, Whitley, Tex Ritter and Fred Scott the Silvery Voiced Baritone all made their screen debuts within a year or two of Autry in 1935; by 1937, Herb Jeffries was even making all-Negro singing-cowboy pictures. But the original was always the best. Pre-Dances With Wolves westerns are assumed to be a "conservative" genre, yet Autry manages to share all Kevin Costner's modish concerns, only not so tiresomely: The environment? The plight of Native Americans? The scourge of big business? Autry's contemporary westerns did it all seventy years ago. In Old Monterey (1939), for example, is a crackling yarn about ranchers and the federal government feuding over military testing in the desert. The social message was alleviated by Gene's genial singing. He took what in the Thirties was a dated regional style and made it America's music.
By 1946, Gene Autry was about as big as any star could get – or so he thought. That year he was asked to serve as Grand Marshal in Hollywood's annual Christmas parade, and he and Champion were thrilled by the response, with throngs of Californians cheering them along the route. Except, that is, for one segment of the crowd: the youngsters. There'd be times when Gene would wave at some child on the sidewalk, only to find the kid staring right through him, as if he wasn't there. They were eyeing the fellow following him: a jolly old chap with a white beard and a red suit, seated in a sleigh. And as the l'il uns cried, "Here comes Santa Claus! Here comes Santa Claus!", Gene Autry had to concede ruefully that there were some stars even bigger than him. And, being the kind of guy he was, he wasn't bothered by it, but inspired. He called his pal Oakley Haldeman, who managed Gene's music publishing business and had been an on-screen trumpet player in various movies of the Thirties, and said he wanted to turn the kids' excited cry into a song:
Here Comes Santa Claus
Here Comes Santa Claus
Right down Santa Claus Lane...
Santa Claus Lane? Where did that come from? Well, as Autry explained, "The parade route jangled right down Hollywood Boulevard, leading to what the promoters called Santa Claus Lane." His song literally recreated the parade scene – except that to millions of boys and girls who've never been near Hollywood, on Christmas Eve every street with a child living on it is "Santa Claus Lane". On the other hand, Oakley Haldeman's daughter claims that her mother came up with the title. Haldeman had been toying with lines like "Santa Claus comes but once a year/Full of good cheer", ands the missus said: "Why don't you just say 'Here comes Santa Claus right down Santa Claus Lane'?"
So they did. As the Haldemans' daughter, Virginia Long, tells it, her dad wrote pretty much the whole thing and Autry just stuck his name on it. But, in my experience, scions of the less famous partners of celebrity songwriters often say that. The truth is "Here Comes Santa Claus" was certainly within Autry's abilities, and it sounds like him lyrically, too. It's a simple tune with multiple verses covering familiar turf:
Hear those sleigh bells jingle jangle
Oh, what a beautiful sight
Jump in bed and cover your head
'Cause Santa Claus comes tonight...
Yet it's also rather distinctive. A few old English songs manage to combine both seasonal merrymaking and the birth of Christ – "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen", for example – but most American songs prefer to hymn the secular pleasures – snow, presents, chestnuts roasting, Jack Frost nipping, etc. "Here Comes Santa Claus" is a rare example of an American Christmas song that also keeps an eye on the bigger picture. Autry was the grandson of a Baptist preacher and there's a Sunday School undertone to parts of the verses. It's just a word or two in the first verse:
Bells are ringing, children singing
All is merry and bright
Hang your stockings and say a prayer...
Praying, huh? By the third verse Gene's getting more explicit:
Here Comes Santa Claus
Here Comes Santa Claus
Right down Santa Claus Lane
He doesn't care if you're a rich or poor
He loves you just the same
Santa knows we're all God's children
That makes everything right...
And by the final verse he's ready for the big message:
Peace on Earth will come to all
If we just follow the light
Let's give thanks to the Lord above
'Cause Santa Claus comes tonight...
It wasn't exactly a Sunday School atmosphere when they recorded the demo on August 28th 1947. "Uncle Art" Satherley, the legendary A&R chief, was in attendance and, as was customary, a cocktail was mixed for him. The song was so catchy that, when they listened back afterwards, the ice cubes from Uncle Art's glass were audibly clinking along with the music. That spurred Gene to use the famous jingle-bell sound on the record. "Here Comes Santa Claus" was his first Christmas record, and a smash:
"Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer", written by Johnny Marks, followed in 1949, and was an even bigger hit. And then came "Frosty the Snowman" and a ton of others, including quite a few Gene wrote himself such as "Sleigh Bells" and "Santa Santa Santa". In fact, Gene Autry may have written more Christmas songs than anybody other than Mr Marks, who, aside from "Rudolph", gave us "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree", "Have a Holly Jolly Christmas", and the most popular settings of both Longfellow's "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day" and Clement Clarke Moore's "'Twas the Night Before Christmas". Marks also wrote a bunch of other songs recorded by Autry – "When Santa Claus Gets Your Letter", and "Everyone's a Child at Christmas". But "Here Comes Santa Claus" is Gene Autry's own gift to the seasonal songbook, subsequently recorded by Bing and the Andrews Sisters, by Doris Day, the Chipmunks, the Jackson Five, the Carpenters, and very memorably by Elvis Presley, a big fan of Autry's:
Elvis' re-accenting of the title phrase has become the template for almost every record since. But I doubt Autry troubled himself much over it. Gene was a genial fellow and a rare example of how transformative likeability can be. Because of him, the record industry dropped the patronizing designation "hillbilly music" and started calling it "country-and-western" in an attempt to hitch all rural music to the popularity of Autry's singing westerns. "C&W" eventually became plain old "country", latterly America's most popular popular-music genre — thanks to Autry's pioneering efforts, and a helping hand from some British songwriters: Michael Carr (from Leeds) and Jimmy Kennedy (from Belfast) wrote the title song for Gene's biggest movie South Of The Border (Down Mexico Way), even though neither man had ever been south of the border at all, unless you count the Irish border. Earlier, Carr with Kennedy's brother had written "Ole Faithful", which Gene sings touchingly to Champion in The Big Show (1936):
When your round-up days are over
There'll be pastures white with clover
For you
Ole faithful pal o' mine...
Gene's round-up days ended in 1998. A couple of years earlier, I was doing a Christmas edition of my BBC show, and towards the end we had a taped segment which I may play a little off this coming week. Along the way, for obvious reasons, we decided to use "Here Comes Santa Claus", and then a bit of "When Santa Claus Gets Your Letter" and "Where Did My Snowman Go?" And the songs had such a different character from the rest of the Christmas repertoire that I thought it would be fun the following year to do a Gene Autry-led holiday TV special and coax him out of retirement to sing "Here Comes Santa Claus" and "Rudolph" one mo' time. Well, we had some small amount of contact and discussion, and then fate intervened. But he was a perfect gentleman, a living exemplar of his Cowboy Code, whose verities we discard at our peril. He died in the Year of Monica, a difficult time for America, when Rules Number Three ("The Cowboy must always tell the truth"), Number Eight ("He must keep himself clean in thought, speech, action and personal habits") and Number Nine ("He must respect women, parents and his nation's laws") seemed to have been pretty much put on hold by the Commander-in-Chief.
Still, as Shakespeare said, even golden lads must come to dust. Or as Gene sang:
Dust, dust
Dust in the sky
Dust on the trail
Dust in my eye...
The sagebrush troubadour is dust on the trail now, but every December he rings out from some radio somewhere, now and forever:
Here Comes Santa Claus
Here Comes Santa Claus,
Right down Santa Claus Lane
He'll come around when the chimes ring out
It's Christmas morn again.
~There's an hour's worth of great seasonal music on Making Spirits Bright, the full-length Christmas CD by Mark and his Sweet Gingerbread gal Jessica Martin. It's a collection of twelve great tracks, from a swingin' romp through Mariah Carey's "All I Want For Christmas Is You" to the dancefloor-packing disco megamix of "A Marshmallow World". Mark & Jessica also offer a "Jingle Bells" that will sleigh you, the jazzily romantic "Snowbound", the merriest "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas" you'll ever hear, plus Santas, glow worms, eggnog, and a couple of New Year numbers, including what the Pundette calls Mark's "perfect" "What Are You Doing New Year's Eve?"
All twelve songs from Making Spirits Bright are available for download at iTunes, Amazon and CD Baby. But don't forget you can also order the full CD in its attractive gatefold sleeve direct from the Steyn Store, where you'll also find many other musical offerings. And, if you're a Mark Steyn Club member, don't forget to enter your promotional code at checkout to enjoy special member pricing.
