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Steve Metcalf has been writing about the musical life of this region, and the wider world, for more than 30 years. For 21 of those years, he was the full-time staff music critic of The Hartford Courant. During that period, via the L.A. Times/Washington Post news service, his reviews, profiles and feature stories appeared in 400 newspapers worldwide.He is also the former assistant dean and director of instrumental music at The Hartt School, where he founded and curated the Richard P. Garmany Chamber Music Series. He is currently Director of the Presidents' College at the University of Hartford. Steve is also keyboardist emeritus of the needlessly loud rock band Duke and the Esoterics.Reach him at spmetcalf55@gmail.com.

The Ten All-Time Best Christmas Songs (of All Time)

Marta Crowe
/
Creative Commons

Last week, while discussing some of classical music’s great Christmas works, I casually mentioned that I might want to extend the conversation to the pop music side.

Many (seven, I think) readers asked me to do just that.

So, because there’s a very brief holiday lull in the live concert scene, and because Thanksgiving is the time-honored start time for hauling out the Christmas songbag, I offer my take on the Ten Greatest Christmas Pop Standards.

Like all such lists that show up nowadays in magazines and websites, this one was arrived at through many grueling minutes of research, and various sophisticated algorithms. To explain these to the lay reader would be unproductive, as I have very little idea what an algorithm is.

In any case, in the interest of touching off some healthy Thanksgiving dinner-table debates, here, in random order, are the top ten:

"I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" 

The writer Annie Dillard once told me, very seriously, that she considered this tune to be the “prettiest song ever written.” And, by golly, when you set aside the slightly cloying lyrics (which initially were misunderstood by Catholic Church leaders, who believed that it described an adulterous encounter -- this is true -- and ordered the record banned some cities), it really is a very lovely tune. 

For the record, it was written by a British songwriter named Tommie Connor, whose only other accomplishment of note was to provide the English lyrics to the great WWII love ballad, “Lili Marlene.”

"Blue Christmas"

Elvis made it a hit in 1957 and forever after, but the song had been written nearly a decade earlier (by Bill Hayes/Jay Johnson, the latter of whom for a time lived in Connecticut), and back in 1949 had actually been a decent sized hit for the country legend Ernest Tubb. 

The distinctive woman’s backup voice on Elvis’s version, soaring high above the Jordanaires’ standard male harmonizing, belongs to legendary session singer Millie Kirkham, who, for the record, is still alive and performing nearly 60 years later.

"Sleigh Ride"

I’ve made this observation before, but it’s worth reinforcing here: I believe that this hardy perennial, composed by Connecticut’s own Leroy Anderson in 1948 for the Boston Pops (lyrics were added later by Mitchell Parish), has been recorded and performed by a wider stylistic array of musical artists than any composition in the history of Western music. 

A partial list: the New York Philharmonic, Johnny Mathis, the Ronettes, Canadian Brass, Ella Fitzgerald, the Ventures, Kenny G, Dolly Parton, Fun., Placido Domingo, Bootsy Collins, Captain Kangaroo and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

"The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don’t Be Late)" 

Although none of the standard sources see fit to make mention of it, this 1958 record -- in its original incarnation by David Seville and the Chipmunks -- was the first 45 record I ever owned, thanks to a generous relative who gave it to me and my brother as a joint Christmas present. 

David Seville was the nom de vinyl of one Ross Bagdasarian, who had previously co-composed the 1952 hit “Come On-a My House,” sung by a reluctant, though subsequently very rich, Rosemary Clooney. His co-composer on that tune was his cousin and fellow Armenian-American, the Pulitzer-Prize winning playwright William Saroyan. Bagdasarian, incidentally, can be seen, from a distance, as the boisterous piano-playing bon vivant in Hitchcock’s “Rear Window.”

"All I Want for Christmas is You" 

Unless I am overlooking some newer entry, Mariah Carey’s 1994 (!) giga-hit is the most recent pop specimen to become a true, authentic, undisputed, genre-crossing, multi-generational, stand-around-a-piano-and-sing-and-know-at-least-most-of-the-lyrics Christmas hit standard. 

And a worthy addition it is.

"Baby, It’s Cold Outside"

The incomparable Frank Loesser composed this clever, breathtakingly sexist duet in 1944; it was inserted into an Esther Williams movie a few years later, and wound up winning an Oscar for Best Song. 

There are literally hundreds of versions, but none finer than the 1961 pairing of Ray Charles and jazz singer Betty Carter. Some people find the lyrics uncomfortably suggestive of sexual predatoriness, but you get the feeling that Betty can sure enough take care of herself.

"Winter Wonderland" 

My son-in-law, the noted song-lyric scholar and critic YoniBerkovits, has pointed out that the snowman-cum-clergyman Parson Brown, referred to in the song’s middle section, seems suspiciously and inappropriately inquisitive of the civil status of the couple singing the song: “He’ll say are you married? We’ll say no, man….” 

Rev. Brown would hardly seem to have any compelling reason for asking this intrusive question, and I think Yoni is correct in raising – forthrightly and unflinchingly -- the suggestion that there might be more than a slight whiff of prurience here.

"Little Saint Nick"

Proving once again that Brian Wilson, even when the lyrics were pretty stupid (“he’s gotta wear his goggles cause the snow really flies”), as they so often were, could create a musical statement that somehow feels fresh and irresistible across the decades. 

The song, even with a substantial rideout at the end, clocks in at 2’03,” just missing membership in that tiny but culturally significant club of sub-two minute hits.

"Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas"

This is the rare Christmas song that simultaneously warms your heart and makes you reach for the nearest prescription anti-depressant. The original lyrics (the song is by Ralph Blane and Hugh Martin, created for the 1944 film “Meet Me in St. Louis”) were even bleaker than the ones we know today: "have yourself a merry little Christmas; it could be your last...."

Frank Sinatra gets credit for lightening the mood a bit further; for his 1957 version, he succeeded in getting Martin to change the borderline nihilism of “until then, we’ll have to muddle through somehow…” to the more existentially neutral, “hang a shining star upon the highest bough.”

"Silver Bells"

Every songwriter, for obvious reasons, yearns to write a Christmas standard. I once interviewed Jay Livingston, the composer half of the duo (Ray Evans was the lyricist) that wrote many enduring Hollywood hits, including “Mona Lisa,” “Que, Sera, Sera” and “Silver Bells.” 

I had the temerity -- not to say bad taste -- to ask Mr. Livingston if he would reveal what the annual composer royalties were from that one song, written in haste 40 years earlier. He declined, but he did allow as how he and Evans spoke of it as their “annuity” and went on to say that his winter home in (I think) Florida was named Silver Bells because it had been purchased with proceeds from that one three-minute tune.

Honorable Mention:

"Run Rudolph Run"

Chuck Berry’s genial holiday bid; in the spirit of the season we will overlook the fact that the chord changes are pretty much identical of those of “Carol.”

"Please Come Home for Christmas"

Charles Brown please, not the overproduced Eagles cover.

"Santa Baby"

Surprisingly risqué for 1953, especially as delivered by the earthy Eartha Kitt.

"I’ll Be Home for Christmas"

Once again Elvis owns, if not the definitive interpretation, certainly one of the top two or three.

"White Christmas"

I suppose this has to be included, although the sorry truth is I am not much of a Bing Crosby fan. So I will simply encourage you to check out alternate readings by, among many others, the Drifters and Darlene Love.

Steve Metcalf was The Hartford Courant’s fulltime classical music critic and reporter for over 20 years, beginning in 1982. He is currently the curator of the Richard P. Garmany Chamber Music Series at The Hartt School. He can be reached at spmetcalf55@gmail.com.

Steve Metcalf is an administrator, critic, journalist, arts consultant and composer. He writes the weekly Metcalf on Music blog for WNPR.org, and is the curator of the Richard P. Garmany Chamber Music Series at The Hartt School.

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