Nov. 8, 2025

The Greatest Christmas Songs of All-time - "The Christmas Song" - Nat King Cole

Show Notes
Transcript

Welcome back to Hitmaker Chronicles! I'm your host, Garrett Fisher. Today, we begin our eight-week Christmas series with the song that defined what a Christmas standard could be - written in 45 minutes on the hottest day of summer 1945 to psychologically cool off. We'll trace how two young Jewish songwriters created the most-performed Christmas song ever, how Nat King Cole recorded it four times searching for perfection, and why Capitol Records thought strings would ruin everything. It's a story about thinking cool thoughts, breaking color barriers, and how the first Black artist to record a Christmas standard created the template for all that followed. Let's roast some chestnuts.

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Callaroga Shark Media. I'm Garrett Fisher. And in July nineteen

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forty five, Los Angeles was suffering through one of its

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worst heat waves. Bob Wells, a twenty two year old

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songwriter born Robert Levinson in Newark, was sitting in his

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house into Luca Lake, miserable. He tried everything, cold drinks,

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cold showers. Nothing worked. As a child with polio, he'd

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spent much of his youth in bed listening to radio,

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dreaming of Hollywood. Now he was here writing for Peggy

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Lee and Rosemary Clooney, and he was melting. Then he

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had a thought that would generate more money than any

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air conditioning bill could cost. Maybe if I could just

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write down a few lines of wintry verse, I could

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physiologically get an edge over this heat. He grabbed a

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spiral pad and penciled four lines about chestnuts, roasting, jack frost,

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nipping yule, tide care, and folks dressed like Eskimos. Not

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a song, just an attempt at mental air conditioning. That's

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when nineteen year old Meltormee walked in Tourmee, who'd been

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performing since age four as part of the Coon Sanders

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orchestra had become friends with Wells at a Hollywood party.

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Both were young, Jewish, ambitious, and had developed a habit

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of letting themselves into each other's houses to work on songs. Hey,

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what's this, Tormeau asked, picking up the pad. Wells, appearing

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in tennis shorts and a white T shirt, looking absolutely miserable,

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explained his cooling strategy. Tormee looked at the lines again.

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You know, I think this just might make a song.

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He sat down at the piano and started playing an

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arpeggiated melody that had been going through his head for

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a week. Wells joined him. Forty five minutes later, they

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had the Christmas Song, complete with a bridge, a perfect structure,

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and a line about tiny tots with the eyes all

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aglow that would make parents cry for the next eighty years.

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Energized despite the heat, they jumped into Wells's immaculate cherry

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red nineteen forty one Buick convertible and drove to their publisher,

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Johnny Burke, who listened once and declared it worthless, only

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good for one day of the year. Undeterred, they drove

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to Hancock Park, to the home of a twenty seven

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year old pianist and singer who was starting to make waves.

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Nat King Cole Cole was at a crossroads. The King

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Cole Trio Cole on piano and vocals, Oscar More on guitar,

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Johnny Miller on bass, was the only black act on

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Capitol Records and incredibly successful in the jazz world. But

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Cole and his manager, Carlos Gestel saw bigger horizons. When

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Torme played the song, Cole didn't just hear a Christmas tune,

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He heard his future. I told him it was beautiful,

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Cole later recalled, but I didn't feel it would be

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right to do it with just a trio. This was

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heresy at Capitol Records. The label was adamantly against adding strings.

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The King Cole trio was perfect as it was, Why

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mess with success? But Cole was stubborn fine, Capitol said,

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record it with the trio first. On June fourteenth, nineteen

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forty six, while appearing at Kelly's stable in New York,

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the trio went into WMCA radio studios. What emerged was

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pristine jazz inflected perfection. Cole's warm vocals, his delicate piano,

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Oscar Moore even throwing in a little quote from jingle

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Bells at the end. But when Cole heard the playback,

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he knew it wasn't enough. This song deserved more. Two

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months later, on August nineteenth, displaying rare defiance against his label,

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Cole went back into the same studio with what Capitol

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grudgingly called a string section, four string players, a harpist,

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and drummer Jack the Bear Parker. This wasn't just adding strings.

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This was Cole's first orchestral recording, a watershed moment. Released

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in November nineteen forty six, it hit number three on

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the pop charts and crucially number two on the R

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and B charts. Think about what this meant. A black

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artist singing a Christmas song with strings was crossing every

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boundary the music industry had built. As one historian noted,

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it was the first holiday standard ever introduced by a

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black American. But Cole wasn't done. In nineteen fifty three,

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with the new technology of magnetic tape, he re recorded

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it with Nelson Riddle conducting a full orchestra. Then, in

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nineteen sixty one, now in stereophonic sound, he recorded it

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one final time with Ralph Carmichael conducting an even larger orchestra,

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his voice deeper, more focused, creating what most consider the

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definitive version. Four recordings across fifteen years, each one searching

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for something not perfection exactly, but permanence. Cole was building

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something that would outlast him. The song's success went beyond charts.

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By nineteen sixty, over one hundred fifty artists had recorded it.

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It became what BMI calls the most performed Christmas song

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of all time. In January twenty twenty three, it finally

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hit the Billboard Hot one hundred's top ten, giving Cole

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the longest span between chart appearances fifty nine years, and

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the song the record for longest journey to the top

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ten seventy six years. But the real significance was cultural.

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When Cole recorded this in nineteen forty six, he was

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navigating in America where he couldn't eat in many of

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the venues where he performed. The King Cole Trio was

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making breakthrough music, but they were still fighting for basic dignity.

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The Christmas Song wasn't protest music. It was something more subversive.

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It was a black artist claiming Christmas itself, painting a

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picture of American domestic perfection. So compelling that it became

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the standard everyone else had to meet. Tormee later called

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it his annuity. The song generated steady income for both

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writers their entire lives. Wells went on to write for television,

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winning six Emmys. Tourmee became the Velvet Fog, one of

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the great jazz singers. But nothing either did afterward match

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those forty five minutes in that sweltering room. There's something

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perfect about a Christmas song written to escape the heat.

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It's pure imagination, pure longing for something you don't have.

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Wells trying to think cool thoughts, created warmth. Two Jewish

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kids wrote the most beloved Christmas song. A black artist

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and a segregated America painted the picture of Christmas that

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White America adopted as its own. Cole died in nineteen

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sixty five, just forty five years old, from lung cancer.

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His daughter Natalie would later say Christmas music was his

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greatest gift to the world, This ability to make everyone

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feel included in the holiday, regardless of who they were

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or where they came from. More in a moment. The

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song itself is deceptively simple. It's just a list of

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Christmas images. Really Chestnuts, Jack frost, Carol's Reindeer, Turkey missiletoe,

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but Torme's melody makes it feel inevitable, like these notes

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have always existed in this order, and Cole's voice, warm, precise,

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never over selling, makes you believe every word. Today, when

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the nineteen sixty one stereo version plays in every store

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from October through December, we don't think about the heat

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wave or the segregation, or the four attempts to get

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it right. We just hear Christmas. But that's the magic trick.

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Two guys trying to cool off accidentally created warmth that's

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lasted eighty years. Every December, radio stations still search for

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new Christmas hits, hoping to find the next standard, but

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they're chasing something that can't be replicated. That perfect storm

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of talent, timing, and temperature that happened when Bob Wells

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was too hot to think about anything but snow. As

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Well said years later, he was just trying to immerse

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himself in winter to cool off. Instead, he created the

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warmest song in the American songbook, not bad for forty

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five minutes on the hottest day of the year. Next week,

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on Hipmaker Chronicles, we travel back to eighteen eighteen Austria,

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where a broken church organ on Christmas Eve led to

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the creation of Silent Night, a song so powerful it

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stopped World War One, if only for a moment. How

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did a last minute poem become the most recorded song

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in human history. I'm Garrett Fischer. Keep those chestnuts roasting.