Number seven . . .

7 Boogie-Woogie Santa Claus Mabel Scott

Born in Virginia, Mabel Scott started out singing in the choir of the Metropolitan Baptist Church, 151 W128th St, in Harlem. She sang R&B from the mid-1940s till the mid-1950s. ‘Tiny Bradshaw, Bull Moose Jackson, I worked with all of them,’ she said. She worked in the Cotton Club (with Cab Calloway), Detroit and . . . London, where her first recordings were made for the same label as would later sign the Beatles (and Bernard Cribbins), Parlophone.

Boogie-Woogie Santa Claus was written by Leon René, a ‘Creole’, originally from Covington, Louisiana, right across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans — a four mile trip on the world’s longest bridge over (continuous) water. He took up brick-laying to support his music-making. By then based in Los Angeles, he was the first person to record Nat King Cole. (He said. Actually, Cole had cut stuff years earlier.)

One of the first (and foremost) black music business giants, René also wrote When It’s Sleepy Time Down South, I Sold My Heart To The Junkman, Rockin’ Robin and When The Swallows Came Back To Capistrano — which I can’t be alone in having thought was about somewhere in Italy rather than, as I just discovered by checking, a cliff in southern California.

Mabel Scott was the first to have a hit with this song, in 1948 — on René’s own Excelsior label. That was only a ‘race’ hit. The one that really made the money was Patti Page’s version. ‘It just happened to be couple with one of the biggest hit records of all times,’ said René. It was the flipside of Page’s Tennessee Waltz and when it comes to royalties, of course, the b-side pays just as much as the a-side.

Mabel Scott also cut Baseball Boogie, for King. ‘I’m a big-legged pitcher. Get your bat ready, baby. If you can hit that ball, you can make a home run. I’ve got a drop that’ll make you swing down low. So get your bat ready, baby, let’s see what you can do. Will you step down low? Will you step to the plate?’ Donne or Marvell would have been proud of such an extended poetic conceit. She also cut a track called Yes! Sample lyrics: ‘I can’t say no to you. Baby, baby, yes. Yes, yes, yes.’

How her songs and singing related to her offstage life is hard to say. Judging by the few pictures, she was certainly beautiful. Yet . . . around the time she first cut this track, she was married to the man I shall now dub Mr Black Christmas — Charles Brown (see below). But she divorced him within three years. Her second marriage wasn’t much more successful. That husband hit her. Disillusioned, she gave up secular music and retreated to the church for the remaining forty-five years of her life.

Next up A Platters' platter

A sixth helping?

6 Merry Christmas Polka The Andrews Sisters

The Andrews Sisters are another constant of seasonal music compilations. I’ve seen them described as The Queens of Christmas Music, with Bing Crosby as its King. He did half a dozen duets with them.

Real sisters, they were also real Americans — daughters of a Greek father and a mother from a Norwegian family. Their first hit was archetypally American, too — Bei Mir Bist Du Schon, an old-sounding (but really only a few years old) Yiddish tune updated and Anglicised by a Jewish Tin Pan Alleyist Sammy Cahn who acquired the publishing for thirty dollars. Ah, the music business . . .

The music of Merry Christmas Polka is by Sonny Burke, a big band leader who later became music director at Sinatra’s label Reprise. He wrote the music to Peggy Lee’s words for the Disney cartoon, Lady And The Tramp. (Nothing to do, of course, with the Sinatra standard, The Lady Is A Tramp. That was a Rodgers-Hart song written for 1937’s Babes In Arms — which also introduced My Funny Valentine. Both were sung by a 16-year-old, Mitzi Green. The second was about herself — well, her character anyway. The first was was about — and sung to — a man named Val. Some Broadway night out that must have been.)

The lyrics are by Paul Francis Webster (1907-1984), a New Yorker who dropped out of college, ran away to sea and ended up in Hollywood writing songs for Shirley Temple. He wrote the words to Duke Ellington’s I Got It Bad (And That Ain’t Good) and worked on the all-black show, Jump For Joy.

He won three Oscars, for Secret Love (Doris Day, in Calamity Jane, 1953), Love Is A Many-Splendored Thing (1955), The Shadow Of Your Smile (The Sandpiper, 1965). He wrote the theme for the Spider-Man cartoon series: ‘Spider-Man can, Spider-Man can, Spider-Man can do what a spider can.’

That idiocy aside (deliberate, I assume), he had a real hand for rhymes. Merry Christmas Polka has barrels with carols and a top quality triple rhyme: tingle/jingle/Kringle. Good as that is, though, his one for Memphis In June, is even better. To my mind, it’s popular song’s greatest triple internal shwa rhyme: oleander/veranda/Miranda.

Because of its southern setting and atmosphere, I’d always thought Memphis was a Johnny Mercer lyric, even probably wrote as much. Not that anyone corrected me. It seems most people are as unknowledgable about Paul Francis Webster as I was till I looked him up.

There is a mystery about him, too. What colour was he? If he worked on all-black musical, you assume he was black. But there is no reference to that so maybe he was white. Even looking at pictures, I can’t work out whether he was black or white. In younger pictures, he looks black. In ones from old age, white. See  for yourself.

So, the polka? Despite its name, it’s not a Polish dance but Czech. Well, Bohemian — as that bit of the Austrian Empire was known till it was killed off in 1918. The Andrews Sisters did well with polkas. They had the first hit with Beer Barrel Polka — which, until I looked it up, I believed was an old English music hall knees-upper. ‘Roll out the barrel, roll out the barrel . . ’ etc etc, with upright, jangly piano (or rather, pianner) accompaniment. In fact, it’s a Czech tune which was probably pushed into the wider world by the impact of the German invasion of the Sudetenland.

PS1 Polka dots? Why? Because when big round spots on clothes became fashionable, around 1850, the polka itself was the latest thing on western European dance-floors. If came into fashion  now, I’d guess they might be called dubstep spots.

PS2 My shoemaker friend Marcus reminded me about polka Grammys. For twenty-three years, they had a polka section, from 1986 till 2009, when it was dropped and polkaristas were encouraged to enter the folk or world music categories. Too late for either the Andrews Sisters or Paul Francis Webster. But not for Brave Combo (see above) who won twice, in 2000, with Polkasonic! and in 2005 with Let's Kiss: 25th Anniversary Album. Out of the remaining twenty-one years, Jimmy Sturr won eighteen times. Which is maybe why the category was, in Grammy publicity’s word, ‘retired’.

Next up Boogie-woogie and spousal abuse

And . . . the fifth choice . . .

5 Must Be Santa Brave Combo

This is from something no modern Christmas is musically complete without — an extract from Bob Dylan’s Theme Time Radio Hour Christmas & New Year’s two-hour special first broadcast, from the Abernathy Building, on December 20, 2006. It played between Huey Piano Smith and The Clowns’ New Orleans re-work of Silent Night and the Enchanters’ Mambo Santa Mambo.

I thought it was traditional kids’ song but it’s not. Not that it doesn’t have a pre-history. As you might suspect from its sound, it’s based on an old German drinking song. The new version was written, in 1960, for Mitch Miller, legendary A&R man and TV singalong host. Tommy Steele had the UK hit with it, a minor one. That must be where I first heard it.

Dylan liked it so much he did his own version — in which the reindeers are given the names of US presidents. 

If you haven’t see the video for it, you have a real treat coming your way. It’s quite mad. Dylan himself has long straight-haired wig, wears a new hat for each verse and dances a kind of hora. There’s a serious punch-up — a kind of follow-up to the seeming murder in the video for Beyond Here Lies Nothin. That’s the one that, er, borrows the tune of Black Magic Woman.

Brave Combo have featured in The Simpsons and were David Byrne’s wedding band. They have done the Rolling Stones as cha-cha-cha and Tennessee Ernie Ford as cumbia. But, mostly, they do polka. They did a whole Christmas album some twenty years ago. I haven’t got round to listening to it yet. A man can enjoy only so much polka. Yet . . .

Next (probably tomorrow) A man who might be black or might be white but whichever it was he did the polka.

And the fourth late Christmas gift to you . . .

First, an apology for the belatedness of this. I had a (rare) computer malfunction. The text of all these sleevenotes somehow just spontaneously reverted to a far earlier version. There weren't even the subsequent saved versions in my Time Machine back-up. I lost a lot of writing. Forever. I cried. Well, almost. Then I sat down and wrote it again. Who know, it might be better, it might be worse. No way of telling.

4 On The Rooftop Gentleman Auction House

The band is from St Louis - the setting for the seasonal song which, I'm told, is fast overtaking White Christmas in popularity, Hugh Martin and Hal Blane's Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas which was premiered, by Judy Garland, in her future husband Vincente Minnelli's 1944 musical Meet Me In St Louis.

There seem to be quite a lot of them in Gentleman Auction House - two drummers, I think. There were once seven of them and then there were six. There is a guitarist and singer, Eric Enger, who looks like he’s probably the leader. There’s a woman with blonde hair, Kiley Lewis, who, onstage, does that funny skippy dance thing that women who can’t dance do. I think she might be the singer’s girlfriend — or perhaps might have been. That’s not just idle speculation. I think it might have relevance to this track.

They say they made the name up by putting three words together so it sounded like some kind of fictional organisation. They were voted the best indie band in St Louis 2009. Among the nice things said about them was this, well, gem: ‘rhythmically robust and unconventionally ecstatic pop music reminiscent of a more composed Architecture in Helsinki’. Eeery Sarinnen perhaps.

This track comes a from their 2008 seasonal EP Christmas In Love, which also includes their version of Here Comes Santa Claus. Their record company press release described it as ‘emotive melodies and kitchen sink instrumentation with a gloriously dynamic take on a classic holiday tradition’

As far as I can tell, the band haven’t done much since. There hasn’t been a posting on their blog for nearly two years. Another record has been promised several times but it’s never arrived.

The song is stranger than it seems. On first hearing — tenth, even — it’s a paen to Christmas monogamy:

   ‘All the reindeer rocking on the rooftop.

    I'm sitting  by the tree.
    I’m hanging with my boyfriend/girlfriend.’

Then you notice something else, half-buried in the mix. It seems that Santa — yes, that Santa, the one married to Mrs Claus — is still doing his deliveries in a town down the road. And he’s taken the time to call the singers’ household. He wants to talk to the girlfriend. So Santa is after a little side action. So the boyfriend — while hanging by the tree, as the reindeers are rocking on the rooftop — is happy to pass the message on.

No matter how many times I listen to it, though, I can’t figure out what happens next. What is clear to me is that not only is this not the first time Santa has called but that he wouldn’t be calling again if he didn’t expect to have his expectations fulfilled.

So what’s going on here? Is it an open relationship or a seasonal sharing? A boy, a girl, a fat old bloke with a beard and a red hat.

Next time I write to Santa, remind me to ask him.

Tomorrow Santa polka is coming to town

And the third Christmas catch-up

3 Rudolph, The Red-Nosed Reindeer Mambo Billy May

Rudolph The Red-Nose Reindeer is a rare — possibly unique — example of a toy savings bank (with light-up nose) being turned into a hit song. 

The Rudolph franchise started life as a story in the mail-order brochure for a Chicago department store, written by Robert L May. He later said that its ugly duckling tale was basically autobiographical - he was 'a scrawny kid, not accepted by my peers'.

The booklet was so successful with America's children that by the late 1940s, there was a whole Rudolph merchandising industry - stuffed toys, watches, toy film projectors, underwear and that savings bank with a nose that lit up each time a coin was dropped into it. (Oh, how I want one. Oh, how the Greeks could have done with one.)

Not that this helped May. As an employee, he didn’t own the Rudolph copyright. He was also in bad financial shape, wrecked by the medical bills for his dying wife. Then, as a kind gesture, his employer’s gave him the copyright, Rudolph became a song and May’s life and bank balance were transformed.
Rudolph was turned into a song by May's New York Jewish brother-in-law Johnny Marks. Described as ‘arrogant’, Marks all but threatened to break up the family if May didn’t let him — rather than the other songwriters who were chasing him — write the song. (He broke up the family soon enough anyway, divorcing May’s sister not long after.)

Something of a Christmas specialist, Marks also wrote I Heard The Bells On Christmas Day for Bing Crosby, A Holly Jolly Christmas for Burl Ives and Brenda Lee's Rockin' Around The Christmas Tree — while on the beach. Rudolph was published by St Nicholas Music Publishing Co — not of the north pole but 146 W54th St, NY NY.

In writing the lyrics — in April — Marks completely recast the story in May’s brochure. That original Rudolph didn’t always work for Santa, didn’t even live at the north pole and, though he did have a shiny nose and his horny deer pals did tease him about it, he wasn’t ashamed of it or anything. He lived in a regular reidndeer village. Santa found him by chance. When delivering Rudolph’s Christmas presents, he noticed a glow coming from the reindeer’s room — his red nose. Having had a succession of traffic accidents — in the fog, generally — Santa realised that Rudolph, or at least his nose, would be a solution to his collision problem. And the ever-rising insurance premiums for his sleigh, too. So he hired Rudolph as his lead reindeer, letting his red nose increase the sleigh’s night-time visibility.

Marks first offered Rudolph to that other Christmas specialist Bing Crosby. But he turned it down, as did Dinah Shore. So he took it to Gene Autry (see above). Autry didn’t like it either. But his wife Ina May did. So he recorded it, then debuted it live at Madison Square Gardens, in late 1949. It sold two million. For a long time, it was the second best all-time Christmas seller — to Bing’s White Christmas.

It has since been recorded by 500 performers. I haven’t got all of them. It just feels that way. As I discovered when I looked through the Rudolphs in my Christmas collection — a couple of boxes of Xmas CDs — Really Useful Boxes, of course — plus 750 Xmas tracks on my iTunes. I have at least thirty versions of Rudolph, by Dean Martin to Dolly Parton, Fats Domino to the Chipmunks. I’ve even got even a whole Rudolph CD, a German one, with sleeve notes and a great picture of Gene Autry with Rudolph himself. Well, maybe it’s not actually the reindeer but a man dressed up as one — the front legs do look about ten times as thick as the back ones and the facial expression does look decidedly static.

Then there are the other Rudolph songs. Chuck Berry’s fabulous Run Rudolph Run, of course. But also Johnny Horton’s They Shined Up Rudolph’s Nose and Homer & Jethro’s Randolph, The Flat-Nosed Reindeer.

Billy May was Frank Sinatra’s great arranger — see, hear, worship the Come Fly With Me album. He also had a reputation for creating parodies: he worked closely with the master musical parodist Stan Freberg. I suspect May and his band are not taking this with exactly sepulchral seriousness. I do like the idea of tropically grooving reindeer — and a version with a shout-out to Kriss Kringle.

PS1 There are eight reindeers pulling Santa’s sleigh: Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donder (sic), Blitzen. So where did Rudolph fit in the team? If Santa stuck with a four by two line-up, one of the other reindeers would have had to made way for him. If Santa made it a nine-deer team, Rudolph would have been stuck out front by himself.

PS2 Being really pedantic, given that a red light is a generally the signal for the rear end of a moving vehicle, shouldn’t Rudolph been on the back, pointing the other way? If he was on the front, other sleighs etc would probably have decided his shiny red nose indicated the back of Santa’s sleigh. Which could well have ended up with their running into it and Rudolph taking the first hit. Which wouldn’t have done much for Santa’s accident rate or insurance premiums. Rudolph’s health and welfare, either. Remind me, please, next time I write to Santa that I should raise these issues with him.

PS3 See below for more anomalous reindeers.

Next up, tomorrow Santa hits on girl, boyfriend hits back

Xmas number two . . .

2 Frosty The Snowman Jan Garber Orchestra

A kind of sequel to the original version of the following track. In 1949, Gene Autry — the movie cowboy known as ‘the tuneful cowpuncher’ — had a hit with Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer (see below). Frosty The Snowman was that song’s 1950 follow-up. It was written, as a children’s song, by Steve Nelson (lyrics) and Jack Rollins (music), professional songwriters who bounced from Tin Pan Alley to the country music world, successfully if not spectacularly.

Nelson was a New Yorker. As a younger man, he wrote with Fred Coots, author of Santa Claus Is Coming To Town. Later in life, he was an early inductee in the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame.The year before Frosty, he had a seasonal hit with country star Eddy Arnold, Will Santy Come To Shanty Town? He and Rollins also wrote the official song of the US Forestry Department, Smokey The Bear.

Frosty was their big hit. Rollins’ gravestone, in his hometown, Keyser, West Virginia, even has ‘Frosty The Snowman’ chiselled into it — no more than that, no explanation, no context, just the name of the song that paid for the stone and is still providing for his descendants.

The best known version, in the US anyway, is by Jimmy Durante. There are many, many others, though. Somehow, all of them manage to sustain the willed innocence of the writers’ original intentions — even the ones created by the decidedly unworldly. Phil Spector’s relentless production for the Ronettes, for example, or Leon Redbone and Dr John’s typically sly reading of it.

This version, in which the vocals don’t come in till half way through, is by Jan Garber, a mid-century bandleader from Philadelphia, known for making the sweetest of sweet big band music. ‘Lookie, lookie, here comes cookie’ was a typical line from one of his songs. You can’t hear his Frosty without thinking of white ties and Martinis — or Bob Hoskins in Dennis Potter’s Pennies From Heaven. He was billed as ‘Idol of the Airlanes’ — I guess that referred to radio rather than powered flight. It is — probably — a BBC radio broadcast from December 1954.

Next up, tomorrow Rudolph: a dying wife, an unpleasant brother-in-law and Sinatra's favourite arranger

Xmas 2011 sleevenotes

The very last act of last Christmas . . .

As I do most years, I put together a Christmas music compilation. I put this year's on Dropbox and made it available to everyone on my blogmail list. At the same time I promised some sleevenotes. Somehow, life intervened and I didn't post what I'd got and I decided a little more detail would be good — especially as I made you wait so long. Then I realised it wouldn't fit into one blogpost — or at least it would make an incredibly long one. So I decided to post one track note a day. Then I realised that some of them needed a little work. So I started fixing them. Anyway, you get the idea.

Finally, though, it's good to view. I will be posting one track note a day, over the next twenty days. You can still download the tracks from my Dropbox if I sent you an email letting you know about the compilation. If you haven't got that or have lost it or have just come to this blog for the first time, email me or post a comment and I'll send you a link.

Oh, one more thing. Where it says 'see below' or somesuch, it is referring to a future post.

Here goes the first of twenty . . .

1 Silver Bells Doris Day

Not as old as you’d think. It debuted in 1950, sung by Bob Hope and Marilyn Maxwell in The Lemon Drop Kid, a crime comedy. Like Guys and Dolls, it’s from a Damon Runyon story.

Nor was it much of a hit. The first time it charted in the UK was with the Terry Wogan and Aled Jones version, in 2009. That was a charity record. Still, you ask, what did a charity do to deserve that?

It was written by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans, both Jewish — like so many of the most famous Christmas song makers. Irving Berlin and Mel Torme, naturally, but also Johnny Marks (see below) and Bob Dylan (see below). And, of course, Michael Carr, author of The Little Boy That Christmas Forgot, with its final lyrical flourish: ‘I’m so sorry for that laddy, he hasn’t got his daddy’. Carr, ne Maurice Cohen of Leeds, grew up in Dublin, was the son of boxer Cockney Cohen and also wrote South Of The Border (Down Mexico Way).

Livingston and Evans won three Oscars. For Buttons and Bows, in Bob Hope’s 1948 comedy Paleface — that’s the movie with the ‘leans to the left, shoots to the right’ gag. For Mona Lisa, sung by Nat King Cole in the completely forgotten 1950 Alan Ladd spy thriller, Captain Carey USA. And for Que Sera, Sera, which was debuted by Doris Day in Hitchcock’s 1956 remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much).

Doris Day liked this song so much she recorded it twice, in 1950, and again as the lead track on 1964’s The Doris Day Christmas Album. This is the earlier version.

Next up Frosty The Snowman