The Greatest Christmas Songs of All-time - "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) - Darlene Love

0:03 Callaroga Shark Media. I'm Garrett Fischer, And in nineteen sixty three, Phil Spector had a problem. He was the most innovative producer in popular music, creator of the Wall of Sound, the guy who'd made the Ronettes and The Crystals into chart toppers. He was twenty three years old and already a legend, and he wanted to make a Christmas album. This wasn't going to be some throwaway holiday cash grab. Spector's philosophy had always been two hits and ten pieces of junk. For albums, he focused on singles, but for this Christmas album, he decided every track would be treated like a potential hit. He'd apply his full Wall of Sound production to holiday standards, using his stable of artists The Ronettes, The Crystals, Darlene Love, Bob b Socks, and the Blue Jeans. The session started in the summer of nineteen sixty three at gold Star Studios in Los Angeles.

1:02 Specter essentially locked everyone in the Wrecking Crew, the Cream of La. Session musicians spent two months living and breathing this Christmas album day after day, week after week, through the hot California summer and into fall, working on songs that would be heard during the coldest time of year. The lineup was Absurd Hal Blaine on drums, Leon Russell and Don Randy on piano, Barney Kessel, Tommy Tadesco and Nino Tempo on guitars, Steve Douglas and Jay Migliore on saxophones, Ray Pulman on bass, Jack Nichell doing the arrangements, Larry Levine engineering and on percussion. Of all things, a young Sonny Bono, basically Specter's gopher, who happened to be around.

1:48 The backup singers were The Blossoms, featuring a seventeen year old named Cherylyn Sarkissian. You know her better as Chaer. She was one of Spector's favorite backup vocalists and she sang on nearly every track on the album. Spector needed one original song for the album. Everything else was standards, White Christmas, Santa claus Is Coming to Town, sleigh Ride, But for the original he went to the songwriting team of Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, who'd been writing hits for him. They came up with a song about longing, about being away from home at Christmas, about watching the snowfall and feeling completely disconnected from the joy around you. The song was intended for Ronnie Bennett, soon to be Ronnie Spector, Phil's wife. Ronnie was the lead singer of the Ronettes, with that distinctive voice that made Be My Baby one of the greatest records of the era. This song was supposed to be hers, but Spector decided Ronnie couldn't get the emotion right. According to Darlene Love, Ronnie just couldn't put the intensity into it that the song demanded.

2:50 So Spector did what he always did. He brought in Darlene Love. Love was twenty two born Darlene Write in Los Angeles. She'd been singing since childhood and her church choir gospel trained, which meant she had power, control and an understanding of how to build emotional crescendos. By nineteen sixty three, she was already a secret weapon Inspector's arsenal. She'd sung lead on He's a Rebel and He's Sure the Boy I Love, both credited to the Crystals, even though the crystals weren't on them. Spector had even renamed her. She was Darlene Wright when they met, but he decided Darlene Love sounded better. Love was part of the Blossoms, one of the most sought after backing vocal groups in la She sang on everything Sam Cook records, Dion Warwick tracks, Beach Boys sessions. She was everywhere, but rarely got credit.

3:45 Being the voice of other people's groups was just how the business worked if you were a black woman in nineteen sixty three. So when Spector handed her this Christmas song, Love knew what to do. She walked into gold Star Studios, not even in a proper vocal booth, just standing in the room with a microphone hanging down, and delivered what would become arguably the greatest vocal performance on any Christmas song ever recorded. Let's talk about what makes this recording so extraordinary, because it's not just Love's voice, though that's the centerpiece, it's everything Specter built around her. The wall of sound was Specter's technique of layering multiple instruments playing the same parts, creating this massive, dense sonic texture. For Christmas, Baby Please Come Home, he went all in, multiple guitars playing the same riffs, multiple pianos hitting the same chords, percussion everywhere, sleigh bells, tambourines, handclaps, those church bells ringing throughout a full horn section, and underneath it all Hal Blaine's drums. Blaine is the key to understanding the track's power.

4:54 He plays with incredible restraint for most of the song, just keeping time, adding color, let Love's vocal be the focus. But in that final chorus he unleashes everything he's been holding back. It's like a dam breaking. The drums become this churning, pounding force that drives the song to its conclusion. Jack Nitsche's arrangement is masterful. The song builds constantly, it never plateaus. Every section is more intense than the last. The horns punch in at perfect moments, those saxophones rasping and wailing, the backing vocals share, and the blossoms adding depth without ever competing with Love's lead. And then there's Love herself. She doesn't sing this song, she inhabits it.

5:41 Every syllable is obliterated, pushed to its absolute limit. The desperation is palpable. When she sings about watching the snowfall, it's not a pleasant observation, it's an event of cosmic significance. When she sings that it's not like Christmas at all, you believe her completely. The genius is in the contrast. Musically, this is bombastic, celebratory, huge, Everything about it screams Christmas joy. But Love's vocal tells you something different. She's alone, miserable, disconnected from everything happening around her. That tension between the production's exuberance and the vocals anguish is what makes the song work. Rolling Stone would eventually rank at number one on their list of the Greatest rock and Roll Christmas Songs.

6:30 They said, nobody can match Love's emotion and sheer vocal power. They're right. People have tried you too, Mariah Carey, Death Cab for Cutie, Bruce Springsteen. Literally hundreds of artists have covered this song. Some versions are good, none touch Love's original. The album A Christmas Gift for You from Philly's Records was released on November twenty second, nineteen sixty three, the same day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. The timing couldn't have and worse. The entire country was in mourning. Nobody was in the mood for Christmas music, no matter how good it was. The album and the single were quietly withdrawn. As Specter later said, the entire country was completely somber. No one was celebrating anything. There really was not a Christmas that year. So this masterpiece, this album that Brian Wilson called his favorite record, that George Harrison reportedly loved above all others, just sat there through the sixties and seventies, largely forgotten the Beatles. Apple Records re released it in nineteen seventy two as Phil Spector's Christmas Album, and slowly gradually it started finding an audience.

7:46 Love's version of the song lay dormant for twenty three years. Then something happened that changed everything. In nineteen eighty six, Paul Schaeffer, David Letterman's bandleader and musical director, was working on a Broadway review called Lee of the Pack, which featured songs written by Ellie Greenwich. One of those songs was Christmas Baby, Please Come Home, and Darlene Love was singing it. Shaeffer heard Love perform it and immediately thought, this needs to be on Letterman's show. He invited Love to perform it on Late Night with David Letterman that December. She came on sang it with Shaeffer and the World's Most Dangerous Band, and it became an instant tradition for the next twenty nine years. From nineteen eighty six to twenty fourteen, Darling Love appeared on Letterman's show Late Night on NBC, then Late Show on CBS the week before Christmas and performed Christmas Baby, Please Come Home. It became appointment television. The only year she didn't appear was two thousand and seven, when the writer's strike forced them to air a repeat of her two thousand and six performance.

8:53 Think about what that means for an entire generation. Darlene Love singing this song on Letterman was Christmas. It wasn't officially the Holidays until she showed up, put on something fabulous and absolutely destroyed that vocal. Every single year Letterman understood what he had. He gave her the full stage, let the performance Breathe never cut away to something else. The camera stayed on Love as she built that crescendo, as she hit those impossible notes, as she brought the house down. The tradition moved to the View from twenty fifteen to twenty twenty three. After Letterman's show ended. In twenty twenty four, she performed it on the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. She's eighty three years old and her voice is still powerful enough to command that song, but the Letterman performances are the ones that matter. They introduced Christmas Baby, Please Come Home to millions of people who'd never heard Phil Spector's Christmas album. They gave Love the recognition she'd been denied for decades. The Crystal's got credit for her work in the sixties, but this song was undeniably, unmistakably hers More in a Moment. In nineteen ninety three, Love suit Specter for unpaid royalties and was awarded two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. It wasn't nearly enough for

10:24 what she was owed, but it was something. She published her autobiography in nineteen ninety eight, My Name is Love, telling her story of struggle and survival in an industry that constantly tried to erase her. In twenty eleven, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, not as a member of the Blossoms, not as a backing singer, but as Darlene Love, the artist whose voice defined an era even when she wasn't getting credit for it. And every year she does a Christmas show in New York City always cap by this song because Love understands something important. Christmas Baby, Please Come Home only works if you don't oversaturate it. She keeps it special, she only sings it around Christmas. She protects its power. There's something about the song's melancholy that makes it more resonant than purely joyful Christmas music. Not everyone feels happy at Christmas, not everyone's home, not everyone's with the people they love.

11:28 This song speaks to that loneliness, that disconnection, while still being undeniably a Christmas song. It validates the sadness without wallowing in it. The Utwo cover from nineteen eighty seven gets closest to the original spirit. They recorded it during a sound check in Glasgow on the Joshua Tree tour, and they had the wisdom to bring Darlene Love in to sing backing vocals. It's powerful because they understood the song isn't about vocal gymnastics. It's about emotion. Though even you two at their biggest and best, couldn't quite match what Love captured in nineteen sixty three. When Chaer recorded a duet version with Love in twenty twenty three for her Christmas album, It was a full circle moment. There's something perfect about seventy seven year old Share and eighty two year old Darlene Love singing together, the same two women who were in that studio sixty years earlier, when Share was seventeen and providing backing vocals while Love delivered one of the greatest performances in popular music. They performed it together at the Rockefeller Center tree lighting, two grand old ladies still commanding that song. Phil Spector died in prison in twenty twenty one, serving time for murder. His legacy is impossibly complicated. A genius producer who created some of the most important music of the sixties and an abusive, controlling tyrant who terrorized the artists who worked for him.

12:55 Love has spoken about how difficult he was to work with, how he exploited Ourt, how he took credit for other people's work. But Christmas Baby, Please Come Home, transcends Specter. It belongs to Darlene Love. It's her voice, her emotion, her power that makes it immortal. Everything Specter built, the wall of sound, the wrecking crew, the arrangements, the production, all of it exists to serve that voice. It's worth noting that Love has said, this is a joyful song to her. When she sings it, she's inviting people to come home, to reunite with loved ones. The sadness in the lyrics becomes a call to action. Don't be the person who's away, Don't be the one watching the snowfall alone.

13:42 Come home. That reframing is powerful. The song that sounds like longing becomes an invitation. The song that sounds like lost becomes a reminder to connect. Sixty one years after its release, Christmas Baby, Please Come Home has achieved what every Christmas song hopes for. It's become essential. Radio stations play it alongside White Christmas and All I Want for Christmas is You. It's in countless movies and TV shows. It's covered by everyone from country singers to punk bands. But nothing touches the original. Nothing matches Darlene Love at twenty two years old, standing in gold Star Studios with a microphone hanging down, surrounded by the greatest session musicians in Los Angeles, delivering a vocal performance so powerful it still gives you chills. Six decades later, Phil Spector wanted to make a Christmas album where every track was treated like a hit. He succeeded, but he also created something he didn't expect. A song that would give one of his uncredited, underrecognized artists a signature moment, a song that would become her calling card, the thing that would bring her back to national television every year for three decades.

14:54 The song released on the worst possible day, found its perfect life. It just took twenty three years to get there. Next week, on Hit Maker Chronicles, we travel to nineteen fifty six and the King of rock and Roll's complicated relationship with Christmas, Elvis Presley's Blue Christmas. How he turned a country flop into a rock and roll standard, and why the song that made him uncomfortable became one of his most enduring hits. I'm Garrett Fisher, Please Come Home.