If Johnny Marks had written nothing but "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer", he would have gone down in his-to-ree. And seven decades ago it was such a blockbuster hit that anyone would have found it a hard act to follow.
Nevertheless, he did follow it.
The first thing he did was found St Nicholas Music to publish "Rudolph" and any subsequent songs. What sort of songs did he have in mind? Well, the name of his company should have tipped you off: Other Jewish composers and lyricists have written Christmas hits - from Irving Berlin ("White Christmas") and Carl Sigman ("A Marshmallow World") to Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn ("Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!") - but Johnny Marks is the only songwriting Jew to devote his entire career to the production of Christmas songs. (One is mildly surprised that, in his bizarre tirade against "lousy holiday songs by Jewish guys that trash up the malls", Garrison Keillor did not single out for especial scorn the one "Jewish guy" to make "lousy holiday songs" his life's work.)
Initially, Marks stuck with Gene Autry. Although the singing cowboy hadn't cared for "that Rudolph thing" and had regarded it as a one-take afterthought at the end of the session ("Throw it in and let's go"), the phenomenal sales of the record established Autry as a Yuletide warbler second only to Bing in public expectations. So he needed seasonal material, and Marks was the obvious go-to guy. The proprietor of St Nicholas Music obligingly provided the cowboy with "An Old-Fashioned Christmas", "Everyone's a Child at Christmas", "Jingle Jingle Jingle" and "When Santa Claus Gets Your Letter":
Just in case you're worried that Mr Marks, a lyricist as well as a composer, was running out of things to say about Christmas, he cannily co-opted two of the most famous poems on the subject and musicalized them. His setting of "Twas the Night Before Christmas" is very pedestrian and its waltz time subverts the emphases of the text, but it was a modest hit for Autry and Rosemary Clooney. On the other hand, his setting of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "Christmas Bells" is very fine indeed. Longfellow wrote the seven stanzas of his poem for Christmas 1864 - a difficult time for America, and for the poet personally. In 1862, his wife was fatally burned when a few drops of sealing wax set her dress afire. Her husband attempted to smother the flames with his body, but merely added his injuries to hers: His famously full beard, so well known to nineteenth-century Americans, was grown only because he could no longer shave. A year later, his son Charles was severely injured in battle. "How inexpressibly sad are all holidays," wrote Longfellow in a bleak diary entry on his first Christmas Day without Fanny. The following year he sat down and channeled his grief into an affirmation of faith:
I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old familiar carols play
And wild and sweet the words repeat
Of peace on earth, good will to men...
Unlike "The Night Before Christmas", Johnny Marks' tune understands the potency of the words. It may be the most formal melody he ever wrote, and in the right hands it's beautiful. I'm not the biggest fan of Harry Belafonte, but I've always loved the simple declarative power of his recording:
As to why Marks' cuter Yuletide jingles were having a harder time of it, I think in part that's because "Rudolph" provided a roadmap for anybody else looking for a piece of the action. For example, Gene Autry's next big Yuletide hit was "Frosty the Snowman". Yet, even though it's by Jack Rollins and Steve Nelson rather than Johnny Marks, the chord structure and basic AABA architecture are so close to "Rudolph" that you could easily interchange the middle-eight of one with the other without it making a jot of difference musically. It took Marks himself a while to figure that out, but, when he did, he wound up with what, were it not for the singular success of that boffo reindeer, would rank as his two most popular contributions to the Christmas season.
"My father wrote 'Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree' during a summer holiday in Vermont," Johnny's son David Marks told me a few years ago. "In fact, he composed most of his Christmas songs during the summer." That makes sense. If you leave it till Thanksgiving it's too late. But this summer Marks got particularly lucky. He was sunbathing on a Green Mountain lake drinking in the verdant majesty all around when suddenly the air was rent by a group of teens who put on a transistor radio and began dancing around. And it occurred to Marks that maybe it was time to yoke his Christmas expertise to the new beat of rock'n'roll. He looked at the gyrating youngsters and pondered. Not a rock'n'roll beach party but a rock'n'roll Christmas party:
Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree
At the Christmas party hop
Mistletoe hung where you can see
Ev'ry couple tries to stop...
"Christmas party hop": Isn't that a little redundant? No matter. Marks didn't worry about it, so why should we? Aside from that word, the rest of the song is just the usual St Nicholas Music shtick - mistletoe, pumpkin pie, caroling - applied to the novel theme of rockin'. The final line sums up the trick of the song: It's written "in the new old-fashioned way". That's to say, it's ostensibly a rock'n'roll Christmas number, but it's really basic Johnny Marks with a topical gloss.
That's not quite how he saw it: "The lyric is a masterpiece of writing," he told one interviewer modestly.
Actually, the music is a masterpiece of rewriting. This time round, Marks stuck like "Frosty" to "Rudolph". The chord structure's more or less identical: On the one hand, "Rudolph (G) The Red-Nosed Reindeer had a very shiny nose (D);" on the other, "Rockin' (G) Around the Christmas Tree at the Christmas party hop (D)." And you can pull the old middle-eight switcheroo with effortless ease. Go on, try it:
Rockin' Around The Christmas Tree
Let the Christmas spirit ring
Later we'll have some pumpkin pie
And we'll do some caroling
Then one foggy Christmas Eve
Santa came to say
'Rudolph, with your nose so bright
Won't you guide my sleigh tonight?'
Rockin' Around The Christmas Tree
Have a happy holiday...
Or:
All of the other reindeer
Used to laugh and call him names
They never let poor Rudolph
Join in any reindeer games
You will get a sentimental feeling
When you hear
Voices singing let's be jolly
Deck the halls with boughs of holly
Then how the reindeer loved him
And they shouted out with glee....
Notice, too, how both releases use the distinctive device of leaving the first four bars unrhymed and rhyming only in the last half ("bright"/"tonight" and "jolly"/"holly"). I'm not saying these are just the eight-bar equivalents of modular furniture - the relationship is more organic than that - but you do get the sense with "Rockin' Around" that Marks has understood why "Rudolph" works and "Everyone's a Child at Christmas" is just ...okay.
But who should sing it? "The trouble is Autry can't do me any more good," he sighed to Time magazine, somewhat ungratefully. "He's slipped a lot." So he shopped "Rockin'" around, and in the early fall of 1958 an acetate and lead sheet wound up on the desk of Owen Bradley in Nashville. "We weren't really into rock'n'roll a whole lot," said Bradley, "because we had lots of country acts." But it seemed just right for a new gal he had: Brenda Lee. They went into the studio with no printted music, no arrangement, but a handful of great players - Boots Randolph on sax, Floyd Cramer on piano - and the result was so good hardly any cover version since deviates from it to any degree:
And yet it flopped that Christmas of 1958, selling fewer than 5,000 copies. It was re-released at Christmas 1959, and flopped again. Only in 1960, by which time Brenda Lee was a major star, did it finally take off. And since then it's never stopped: The original record has kept selling every year, including a return to the Top Twenty in 1984.
A couple of years after "Rockin' Around", Marks was given a tricky assignment. "He was asked for a song that said 'Have a Merry Christmas', but without using the word 'merry'," his son David told me. Easier said that done. It's one thing to write "We wish you a Merry Christmas", or even "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas": the phrase exists; it's part of the language; what could be more natural than expressing it in song? But pulling a vernacular greeting out of thin air is a different proposition entirely. Johnny Marks thought about it, and then set off:
Have A Holly Jolly Christmas
It's the best time of the year
I don't know if there'll be snow
But have a cup of cheer...
And "Holly Jolly" is such a close cousin to "Rudolph" and "Rockin'" you could easily combine all three into one mutant behemoth of a Johnny Marks Christmas song:
Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree
Let the Christmas spirit ring
Later we'll have some pumpkin pie
And we'll do some caroling
Then one foggy Christmas Eve
Santa came to say
'Rudolph with your nose so bright
Won't you guide my sleigh tonight?'
Have a Holly Jolly Christmas
And in case you didn't hear
Oh by golly
Have a Holly
Jolly Christmas this year.
The Quinto Sisters recorded it first, but Burl Ives made it a hit - although, if Burl Ives is the alternative, I'll stick with the Quinto gals:
A few years back, undaunted by the sisters Quinto, Harry Connick Jr made an oddly cool record of "Holly Jolly":
Marks was bullish about the particular specialization he'd chosen. "What the hell, I can't control the American way of life," he said. "I'm not going to fight it; I'm going to join it." And, as for his seasonally skewed royalty statements, he shrugged: "If I sell that many at Christmastime, what the hell do I care what they do in May?" For any songwriter, a Yuletide standard is a seasonal insurance policy. And Marks carried more seasonal insurance than any other composer. He kept going almost to his death, by which point he'd covered more or less every angle. "You're not going to get people going up to each other and saying, 'Have a Holly Jolly Christmas'," his son David said to me. "In the end, he felt that there was only so much you could say about Christmas, and it had already been said."
Johnny Marks died in 1985. And while his holly jolly jingles are not exactly what Longfellow heard from "the belfries of all Christendom", these lines (mostly unsung, alas) from Marks' setting of "I Heard The Bells" seem to embrace his contribution, too:
...Ringing, singing on its way
The world revolved from night to day
A voice, a chime, a chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good will to men.
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