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

0:03 Callaroga Shark Media. I'm Garrett Fisher. And in July nineteen forty five, Los Angeles was suffering through one of its worst heat waves. Bob Wells, a twenty two year old songwriter born Robert Levinson in Newark, was sitting in his house into Luca Lake, miserable. He tried everything, cold drinks, cold showers. Nothing worked. As a child with polio, he'd spent much of his youth in bed listening to radio, dreaming of Hollywood. Now he was here writing for Peggy Lee and Rosemary Clooney, and he was melting. Then he had a thought that would generate more money than any air conditioning bill could cost. Maybe if I could just write down a few lines of wintry verse, I could physiologically get an edge over this heat. He grabbed a spiral pad and penciled four lines about chestnuts, roasting, jack frost, nipping yule, tide care, and folks dressed like Eskimos. Not a song, just an attempt at mental air conditioning. That's when nineteen year old Meltormee walked in Tourmee, who'd been performing since age four as part of the Coon Sanders orchestra had become friends with Wells at a Hollywood party.

1:18 Both were young, Jewish, ambitious, and had developed a habit of letting themselves into each other's houses to work on songs. Hey, what's this, Tormeau asked, picking up the pad. Wells, appearing in tennis shorts and a white T shirt, looking absolutely miserable, explained his cooling strategy. Tormee looked at the lines again. You know, I think this just might make a song. He sat down at the piano and started playing an arpeggiated melody that had been going through his head for a week. Wells joined him. Forty five minutes later, they had the Christmas Song, complete with a bridge, a perfect structure, and a line about tiny tots with the eyes all aglow that would make parents cry for the next eighty years.

2:04 Energized despite the heat, they jumped into Wells's immaculate cherry red nineteen forty one Buick convertible and drove to their publisher, Johnny Burke, who listened once and declared it worthless, only good for one day of the year. Undeterred, they drove to Hancock Park, to the home of a twenty seven year old pianist and singer who was starting to make waves. Nat King Cole Cole was at a crossroads. The King Cole Trio Cole on piano and vocals, Oscar More on guitar, Johnny Miller on bass, was the only black act on Capitol Records and incredibly successful in the jazz world. But Cole and his manager, Carlos Gestel saw bigger horizons. When Torme played the song, Cole didn't just hear a Christmas tune, He heard his future. I told him it was beautiful, Cole later recalled, but I didn't feel it would be right to do it with just a trio. This was heresy at Capitol Records. The label was adamantly against adding strings.

3:02 The King Cole trio was perfect as it was, Why mess with success? But Cole was stubborn fine, Capitol said, record it with the trio first. On June fourteenth, nineteen forty six, while appearing at Kelly's stable in New York, the trio went into WMCA radio studios. What emerged was pristine jazz inflected perfection. Cole's warm vocals, his delicate piano, Oscar Moore even throwing in a little quote from jingle Bells at the end. But when Cole heard the playback, he knew it wasn't enough. This song deserved more. Two months later, on August nineteenth, displaying rare defiance against his label, Cole went back into the same studio with what Capitol grudgingly called a string section, four string players, a harpist, and drummer Jack the Bear Parker. This wasn't just adding strings.

3:54 This was Cole's first orchestral recording, a watershed moment. Released in November nineteen forty six, it hit number three on the pop charts and crucially number two on the R and B charts. Think about what this meant. A black artist singing a Christmas song with strings was crossing every boundary the music industry had built. As one historian noted, it was the first holiday standard ever introduced by a black American. But Cole wasn't done. In nineteen fifty three, with the new technology of magnetic tape, he re recorded it with Nelson Riddle conducting a full orchestra. Then, in nineteen sixty one, now in stereophonic sound, he recorded it one final time with Ralph Carmichael conducting an even larger orchestra, his voice deeper, more focused, creating what most consider the definitive version. Four recordings across fifteen years, each one searching for something not perfection exactly, but permanence. Cole was building something that would outlast him. The song's success went beyond charts.

4:59 By nineteen sixty, over one hundred fifty artists had recorded it. It became what BMI calls the most performed Christmas song of all time. In January twenty twenty three, it finally hit the Billboard Hot one hundred's top ten, giving Cole the longest span between chart appearances fifty nine years, and the song the record for longest journey to the top ten seventy six years. But the real significance was cultural. When Cole recorded this in nineteen forty six, he was navigating in America where he couldn't eat in many of the venues where he performed. The King Cole Trio was making breakthrough music, but they were still fighting for basic dignity.

5:41 The Christmas Song wasn't protest music. It was something more subversive. It was a black artist claiming Christmas itself, painting a picture of American domestic perfection. So compelling that it became the standard everyone else had to meet. Tormee later called it his annuity. The song generated steady income for both writers their entire lives. Wells went on to write for television, winning six Emmys. Tourmee became the Velvet Fog, one of the great jazz singers. But nothing either did afterward match those forty five minutes in that sweltering room. There's something perfect about a Christmas song written to escape the heat. It's pure imagination, pure longing for something you don't have.

6:25 Wells trying to think cool thoughts, created warmth. Two Jewish kids wrote the most beloved Christmas song. A black artist and a segregated America painted the picture of Christmas that White America adopted as its own. Cole died in nineteen sixty five, just forty five years old, from lung cancer. His daughter Natalie would later say Christmas music was his greatest gift to the world, This ability to make everyone feel included in the holiday, regardless of who they were or where they came from. More in a moment. The song itself is deceptively simple. It's just a list of Christmas images. Really Chestnuts, Jack frost, Carol's Reindeer, Turkey missiletoe, but Torme's melody makes it feel inevitable, like these notes have always existed in this order, and Cole's voice, warm, precise, never over selling, makes you believe every word. Today, when the nineteen sixty one stereo version plays in every store from October through December, we don't think about the heat wave or the segregation, or the four attempts to get it right. We just hear Christmas. But that's the magic trick.

7:44 Two guys trying to cool off accidentally created warmth that's lasted eighty years. Every December, radio stations still search for new Christmas hits, hoping to find the next standard, but they're chasing something that can't be replicated. That perfect storm of talent, timing, and temperature that happened when Bob Wells was too hot to think about anything but snow. As Well said years later, he was just trying to immerse himself in winter to cool off. Instead, he created the warmest song in the American songbook, not bad for forty five minutes on the hottest day of the year. Next week, on Hipmaker Chronicles, we travel back to eighteen eighteen Austria, where a broken church organ on Christmas Eve led to the creation of Silent Night, a song so powerful it stopped World War One, if only for a moment. How did a last minute poem become the most recorded song in human history. I'm Garrett Fischer. Keep those chestnuts roasting.