Author Interview: Ronald D. Lankford on 'Sleigh Rides, Jingle Bells, and Silent Nights'

The idea for Virginia author Ronald D. Lankford's 2013 book, Sleigh Rides, Jingle Bells, and Silent Nights: A Cultural History of American Christmas Songs, was sparked by his childhood memories.

“I grew up listening to Christmas songs in the 1960s – 'Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,' Gene Autry, the Lennon Sisters,” he told me during an interview at this year's Virginia Festival of the Book in Charlottesville. “Christmas music was always there, so it was an important family ritual.”

The book looks mostly at holiday songs written since the 1930s, when the first secular, commercial Christmas tunes appeared, written by Tin Pan Alley composers and lyricists and distributed through the still new medium of phonograph recordings. Citing music industry historians, the author places 1934 as the year that saw the launch of the first modern Christmas standards, “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” and “Winter Wonderland” (the latter of which never mentions Christmas).

Referencing Irving Berlin's “White Christmas,” recorded by Bing Crosby, and Mel Tormé and Robert Wells' “The Christmas Song,” recorded by Nat “King” Cole, Lankford writes that this kind of holiday song, “performed by a well-known singer, pressed on a 78rpm record, and sold on the mass market, would create a new category of popular music.”

Although Americans celebrate several holidays every year, from New Year's Day to Independence Day to Thanksgiving, only Christmas has a wide range of music associated with it.

One reason for that, Lankford surmises, “is that Christmas seems to last longer than most holidays. Every year we have four or five weeks after Thanksgiving” when Christmas is celebrated, not just one day on December 25.

Another reason, he added, is “that it probably just holds a bigger place in our hearts than other holidays. A lot of people that are religious love it for religious reasons and a lot of [people who] aren't involved in religious aspects of Christmas also love it.”

For his research, Lankford acknowledged that his sources included Stephen Nissenbaum's The Battle for Christmas and Jody Rosen's book-length study on the origins and influence of “White Christmas,” but he also relied on Penne Restad's 1995 book, Christmas in America: A History. These and other sources emphasized nostalgia as a theme of Christmas music and other holiday traditions.

“Mostly what I was looking at was source material in the United States. If you want to understand the songs coming out in the '40s and '50s, you need to see how Christmas was sort of invented in the 19th century by the American middle class. Over and over again we come back to family, home. Dickens was very popular in the United States in the 1840s,” he pointed out, “so I wanted to go back and be grounded in these sources.”

He writes that “the first theme to emerge in the modern Christmas song was nostalgia.” He notes that recordings like “White Christmas” and “The Christmas Song” (already mentioned), as well as “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” (from Meet Me in St. Louis) and “I'll Be Home for Christmas” – all from the early 1940s – were songs that “connected with listeners by offering wistful images of the American past.

Ronald D. Lankford

Starting in the late 1940s and continuing through the 1970s, however, novelty songs (“Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” for instance) began to push nostalgia to the side, and songs “focusing on the holiday blues and hard times” started to get radio play.

The counterintuitive holiday popularity of mournful songs like “Blue Christmas” and “Pretty Paper,” he told me, really took off in the 1960s, when “everything changes.”

John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, mere weeks before Christmas, he said.

Then, the next year, The Beatles arrived in America and “music changes quite a bit. Then we start having a variety of revolutions in the street and so the mood of the country changes.”

At the same time, he said, “what we think of as family begins to change. We tend to think of family as being a mother at home, father at work, and two children – or people used to think that [but] that started to change in the Sixties and, I think, it was a little disorienting.”

As a consequence, Lankford noted, “most of our classic songs end by 1963. [In] the Sixties and the Seventies, what we have instead are a lot of cartoons basically aimed at children,” such as Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas and A Charlie Brown Christmas.

Many popular singers, even rock stars, record at least one Christmas album during the course of their careers, yet creating a hit holiday song is elusive even for artists normally at the top of the charts.

“It's a really difficult trick to pull,” Lankford explained.

“In one way, most Christmas songs are traditional, so you're going back again to family and home, and so people don't want anything really 'out there.' Weird Al's Christmas songs,” for example, “have not become classics.”

On the other hand, he said, “if you want to be a classic, you need something that people will play year after year, so it has to have something distinctive enough that it's going to stand out from every other song.”

Those, he said, “are the two qualities they would have to have” – simultaneously conservative and distinctive – “to get played five weeks a year and not wear themselves out.”

The most unexpected thing Lankford found in his research was that Elvis Presley's first Christmas recordings met resistance and negative criticism.

“I was surprised,” he said, at “how controversial Elvis Presley's Christmas album and [his] Christmas music was in 1957.”

Today, he explained, it seems like Presley is an American icon: “baseball, apple pie, and Elvis.”

Yet in the late 1950s, “when he was touring, he was very controversial and his album was very controversial.”

Lankford recounted a “wonderful story” told to him by a dentist in his hometown of Appomattox.

The dentist's mother was an Elvis fan who "went downtown to buy the Christmas album when it came out. She brought it home, took it out of its sleeve, started to play it, and she didn't get finished with one cut when she said, 'This is the worst thing I have ever heard in my life.' She put it back in its sleeve, took it back to the drug store, and asked for her money back.”

It's easy to see why that controversy of 57 years ago seems puzzling today. This time of year, the tracks on Elvis Presley's Christmas album are played over and over on the radio. Reissued several times, that LP has sold more than 23 million copies and is now considered the best-selling Christmas album in recording industry history.

In addition to his most recent book, Ronald D. Lankford is the author of Women Singer-Songwriters in Rock: A Populist Rebellion in the 1990s (2009) and Folk Music USA: The Changing Voice of Protest (2005). He also edited Should the Voting Age Be Lowered? (2007).

Sleigh Rides, Jingle Bells, and Silent Nights: A Cultural History of American Christmas Songs, by Ronald D. Lankford.  University Press of Florida, October 2013. Hardcover, 264 pp., $21.95.  Kindle edition, $10.49.

'A Century of Christmas Memories' - A Book Review

A Century of Christmas Memories, 1900-1999, by the Editors of Peter Pauper Press. White Plains, N.Y.:  Peter Pauper Press, 2009. Hardcover $12.95, 120 pages.

One hundred years ago today, President Woodrow Wilson lit the first national Christmas tree on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol.  Ten years later, Calvin Coolidge presided over a tree-lighting ceremony on the Ellipse south of the White House, beginning a tradition that endures today.

These are two of the historical tidbits included in A Century of Christmas Memories, 1900-1999, a stocking stuffer book attributed to "nameless" editors working for the Peter Pauper Press.

While it contains more than 100 pages spanning ten decades, the book itself can be read cover to cover in less than an hour.  Each item consists of just one or two sentences, and the pages are dominated by photographs and other illustrations.

Designed more to entertain and to evoke nostalgia than to be a serious reference tool, A Century of Christmas Memories has the capacity to send readers scrambling to the encyclopedia or to the Internet to learn more about the events, trends, and commercial products it mentions.

To get a flavor of the book, check out some of the items reported every ten years ending in "3".

One might be surprised to learn, for instance, in one of the entries for 1903 that that was the year that Advent calendars were first introduced:

they are attributed to printer Gerhard Lang.  Legend has it that Lang's mother gave her son a piece of cake or biscuit on each day in December, giving him something to look forward to as he counted down to Christmas.  This inspired his creation of the calendars that offer children treats or favors for each day leading up to December 25.

Besides the debut of the first national Christmas tree, 1913 also saw the birth of the Kewpie doll and the Erector Set, as well as the Goo Goo Cluster candy, the crossword puzzle, and

On December 1, the first "drive-in" gas station opens in Pittsburgh, current home of the Gulf Oil Company.  The price for a gallon of gas?  Eight cents!

Ten years later, when Coolidge lit the Christmas tree outside the White House ("illuminated by 2,500 lights"), Paul Whiteman's orchestra had a hit with the holiday-themed "Parade of the Wooden Soldiers" and the Hasbro company, eventually known for producing popular toys left under the Christmas tree, was founded.

In the midst of the Depression, 1933 saw the erection of the first Rockefeller Center Christmas tree and the first Radio City Music Hall Christmas Spectacular (featuring the Rockettes).

During the Second World War, the U.S. government suggested giving war bonds as Christmas presents.  In 1943, Bing Crosby had a hit record with "I'll Be Home for Christmas" and -- despite otherwise suspending the expansion of the TV industry -- there was an experimental broadcast of Dickens' A Christmas Carol.  (How many -- or how few -- viewers saw it is not noted.)  Overseas that year, American GIs decorated Christmas trees in Italy with the leftover foil from their C-rations and sailors on the U.S.S. North Carolina sent a large check to Macy's with instructions to provide gifts to their families across the country.

In the peace and prosperity of 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower produced the first White House Christmas cards, featuring his own artwork.   Classic holiday recordings introduced that year included Eartha Kitt's sultry "Santa Baby" and Louis Armstrong's novelty number, "Zat You, Santa Claus?"  That was also the year that Matchbox cars were first found under the tree on Christmas morning.

In the wake of President John F. Kennedy's assassination, Christmas 1963 was somewhat subdued, as suggested by Roy Orbison's recording of Willie Nelson's song, "Pretty Paper," but that year in England, the Beatles sent their fans the first of several special recordings of holiday greetings and Andy Williams first recorded the now-seemingly ubiquitous "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year."  Toy manufacturer Hasbro introduced the Easy-Bake Oven in 1963, selling half a million units that first year.

The OPEC oil embargo dimmed some lights for Christmas 1973, but that year saw the debut of Dungeons & Dragons and the first Hallmark collectible ornaments.  Songwriters Johnny Marks ("Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer") and Irving Berlin ("White Christmas") received the 1973 Spirit of Christmas Award from the International Society of Santa Claus.

Today we think a 24-hour cable-TV marathon of A Christmas Story is a tradition whose origins are lost in the mists of history.  It turns out that movie premiered in 1983, as did the Eddie Murphy-Dan Aykroyd vehicle Trading Places and ABC-TV's annual Mickey Mouse Christmas parade broadcast from Disney World.

The fourth year of the last decade of the twentieth century, 1993, featured the release of Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas, a hybrid holiday film.  Big toys that year were action figures based on the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers TV series and the biggest bubble commodity since tulips and before Bitcoin, the Beanie Babies:

this is the year the first Beanie Babies are unleashed on an unsuspecting public, creating a craze that would last for years.  The Original Nine?  Spot the Dog, Squealer the Pig, Patti the Platypus, Cubbie the Bear, Chocolate the Moose, Pinchers the Lobster, Splash the Orca, Legs the Frog, and Flash the Dolphin.

The twenty-first century is beyond the scope of A Century of Christmas Memories, but let's take a look back at what happened on December 25, 2003, just ten years ago, to continue the nostalgia,  The top three films that day (per box office receipts) were The Lord of the Rings:  Return of the King, Cheaper by the Dozen, and Paycheck.  Billboard's top single for that week was "Change Clothes" by Jay-Z.  The AP headlined a story: "‘Secret Santa’ spreads $40K worth of cheer" about a man in a Santa suit passing out $100 bills to strangers.

What will a future edition of A Century of Christmas Memories have to say about the holiday season of 2013? Perhaps we'll be remembering Pajama Boy, but only the editors of the Peter Pauper Press know for sure.

What Was Christmas Like in 1941? A Book Review

Pearl Harbor Christmas: A World at War, December 1941, by Stanley Weintraub. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, November 1, 2011. 224 pp., $24.00.

“Pearl Harbor Christmas” may sound like the title of a 1960s-era TV holiday spectacular set in Hawaii, in which Bing Crosby had sung a duet of “Mele Kalikimaka” with Rosemary Clooney.

It’s not.

It is actually a tightly-packed but readable account of the “12 days of Christmas” beginning two weeks after the December 7, 1941, Japanese attack on the U.S. Pacific fleet in Pearl Harbor (Sunday, December 21 to Thursday, January 1). It begins with the arrival of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in Washington for talks with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and ends with the ceremonial signing of the “Joint Declaration of War Aims” by representatives of the nations allied against the Axis Powers.

In between, author Stanley Weintraub takes his readers on a day-by-day (sometimes hour-by-hour) account of the political, diplomatic, and military events of that crucial week and a half. He circles the globe, drawing on public documents, letters, and diaries from not just the United States and Britain but also from the Philippines, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaya, Singapore, Australia, France, North Africa, the Soviet Union, Germany, and Japan.

I picked up Pearl Harbor Christmas by chance at a local bookstore and bought it on a whim, thinking that it primarily would focus on the home front in the weeks following the Pearl Harbor attack and how Americans adjusted their holiday celebrations to the new realities of having been thrust into war.

The book has some of that, and Weintraub is able to draw an adequate picture of what the Christmas season of 1941 was like.

Wartime black-out rules had not yet dimmed Christmas lights, and Christmas trees themselves, Wientraub says, “were plentiful, seldom priced at more than a dollar or two.” Rockefeller Center presented its annual Christmas show, featuring the Rockettes, and people were still reading comic strips and going to the movies.

“The hit book for Christmas giving,” he writes in a prelude, “at a hefty $2.50, was Edna Ferber’s Reconstruction-era romance Saratoga Trunk. For the same price, war turned up distantly yet bombastically in a two-disc set of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, performed by Artur Rodzinski and the Cleveland Orchestra.”

Weintraub goes on to list the prices of crates of citrus fruits (“$2.79 at Bloomingdales”) and new cars (“soon to be unobtainable”) for $900. Silk stockings were $1.25 a pair, and nylon stockings – which would also quickly disappear as the fabric was needed for parachutes – were $1.65.

In a clever, parenthetical turn of phrase, he writes about upscale clothing shops:

“Hattie Carnegie’s designer dresses began at $15. The upscale Rogers Peet menswear store offered suits and topcoats from a steep $38. (At recruiting stations nationwide, the army was offering smart khaki garb at no cost whatever to enlistees.)”

The book, however, is mostly about politics, not domestic life.  And the politics and diplomacy that are the focus of Weintraub's research are fascinating in themselves.

Churchill’s extended visit to Washington included bibulous dinners at the White House, a joint press conference with FDR, two visits to local churches (on Christmas and New Year’s Day), a speech to a joint session of Congress, a side-trip to Ottawa to address the Canadian parliament, and the British Prime Minister’s only shared public appearance with the American President, at the annual lighting of the White House Christmas tree.

The account of the Christmas Eve speeches is one of several sections of the book that could have used a better editor’s eye, because Weintraub’s writing is redundant on two facing pages.

On page 80, Weintraub writes that Churchill began his speech with the phrase “This is a strange Christmas Eve,” and then quotes extensively from his remarks, including a passage about “war, raging and soaring over all the lands and seas, creeping nearer to our hearts and our homes.”

Three paragraphs later, on page 81, Weintraub repeats the passage:

“It was, [Churchill] conceded, ‘a strange Christmas eve,’ with war ‘raging and roaring over all the lands and seas, creeping nearer to our hearts and homes.’”

This is not an isolated incident of sloppy editing.

In a description of how actor Robert Montgomery – by December 1941 an officer in Naval Intelligence assigned to the White House – set up a map room for the President’s use, Weintraub writes on pages 75-76:

“Space was limited; toilets and sinks were removed from a ladies’ cloakroom in the basement, as Montgomery superintended the conversion of a ladies cloakroom in the basement into a secure information center...”

Similar repetitiveness is found on page 92 (“Rarely seen at religious services at home, Churchill accompanied the President to Foundry Methodist Church…”) and 94 (“Churchill – not a churchgoer at home…”).

Still, these errors, while distracting, do not significantly mar the flow of the story that Weintraub tells, and Pearl Harbor Christmas is a real page-turner as the narration flies from place to place, sometimes describing high politics and sometimes describing the hardscrabble efforts at survival of seamen and grunts.

The book reveals how, simultaneously, the United States was caught unawares by the Japanese attacks in the Pacific, leading to the quick fall of the Philippines under what Weintraub seems to characterize as arrogant and incompetent military leadership of General Douglas MacArthur – but that it was also able to turn on a dime and, within weeks, ramp up its military and industrial operations to meet the needs of facing down hostile enemies in both Europe and the Pacific.

The 12 days of Christmas in 1941 included delicate negotiations about how the war would be pursued. As a direct result of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the American people were angry and eager to take the war into the Pacific and strike back at the Japanese immediately. Churchill and Roosevelt, however, recognized that the greater threat came from Hitler’s Germany and that the initial focus of the war should be in Europe. Japan would have to wait.

In the course of events, the war was fought on both fronts, but the defeat of Hitler came first, with Japan to fall several months later.

What’s remarkable to see, in that regard, is the predictions made by military and political leaders of that time about how long it would take to bring the war to an end. Not precisely correct, Churchill thought that a frontal invasion of the European continent would occur sometime in 1943, with the war to end by 1944. He was off by a year but, on the general shape the war would take, he was eerily prescient.

The intersection of wartime and Christmastime is a particular focus of Stanley Weintraub's prolific work. He is also the author of Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce (2002); 11 Days in December: Christmas at the Bulge, 1944 (2007); and General Sherman's Christmas: Savannah, 1864 (2009); as well as General Washington's Christmas Farewell: A Mount Vernon Homecoming, 1783 (2007).  Could Christmas in Kandahar be next?  (There is already a song by that name but, so far, no book.)

If one is primarily interested in social history (as I was, when I purchased this book), Pearl Harbor Christmas could turn out to disappoint, because it is primarily about political and military history. In my case, the initial disappointment ended quickly, because the story that Weintraub tells is compelling, with many revealing details about the first weeks of the Second World War that otherwise would be buried in archives and dusty memoirs.

Four Books to Stuff Into Christmas Stockings

I wish to recommend the four best books that I have read in the past year.  Three are non-fiction, one is fiction.  I regret not having written full-length reviews of these books yet, but I may get around to it eventually.

By far my favorite book of 2010 has been Daniel Okrent's Last Call:  The Rise and Fall of Prohibition.  The title is self-explanatory but completely understates the rich lode of historical matter that Okrent has gathered between the book's covers.  I thought I knew the story of Prohibition, and I was wrong.  So many rich details had slipped my notice over the years, including the seminal work of Wayne B. Wheeler, the pre-eminent lobbyist for Prohibition, who basically invented grass-roots political organizing and direct-mail fundraising years before Marvin Liebman, Richard Viguerie, or MoveOn.org.

Neither did I know how the forces of Prohibition had undermined the Constitution by preventing for a full decade the mandated reapportionment following the 1920 census, because those favoring Prohibition knew that a Congress that more accurately represented cities, suburbs, and recent immigrants would be less inclined to support stiff enforcement of the Volstead Act and would be more inclined to move toward full repeal of the 18th Amendment.  As a result of the manipulation of Wheeler and others, the Congress elected in 1930 represented the same districts as their predecessors did in 1912, a clear violation of the Constitution.

What's more, Okrent did some digging and discovered no evidence for the widely-held belief that the patriarch of the Kennedy clan, Joseph P. Kennedy, was a bootlegger.  Though Kennedy had imported liquor legally at just about the time that repeal seemed inevitable, there simply is no documentary proof that he had imported illegal liquor during Prohibition.  The rumor that the senior Kennedy had been a bootlegger, and had built his family's fortune on that, seems to have begun sometime in the 1950s and, as Okrent points out, if any evidence had existed prior to that date, Kennedy -- who had many enemies in business and politics -- would certainly have been called out on it.

Another book of history that I really enjoyed was Jennifer Burns' Goddess of the Market:  Ayn Rand and the American Right.  Burns, who teaches at the University of Virginia, wrote a page-turner about the Objectivist philosopher and novelist's life.

That may be hard to believe, since the outlines of Rand's career are so well-known, given previous biographies and memoirs.  Somehow, however, Burns is able to keep the reader's attention.  As I read along through the book, I kept saying to myself, "I know what happens next, but I want to find out how it happens."

Burns was the first outside scholar to be given access to Rand's personal papers and library, and the result of her research is a highly readable yet informative chronicle, not only of Rand's life but of her influence on the American conservative and libertarian movements. 

Over the course of the past eleven or twelve months, I have had at least three opportunities to see Burns speak:  once at the Miller Center, once at the Virginia Festival of the Book, and once at a forum she assembled on the idea of "liberaltarianism," or the cooperation between libertarians and liberals in the public square.  On two occasions, I was able to interview her about Ayn Rand and about her book.

In the world of entertainment, it was my pleasure to see TV's Craig Ferguson perform his stand-up act at the Paramount Theatre in Charlottesville on October 17.

In anticipation of that show, I read Ferguson's own autobiography, American on Purpose:  The Improbably Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot.

As the title implies, the story culminates in Ferguson's decision to become an American citizen.  I was actually a bit disappointed that, for all the detail about his life and "adventures" earlier in the book, the section on the naturalization process was thin.  It certainly was not as complete as the reports Ferguson gave about it on The Late, Late Show on CBS while he was going through it.  (That included numerous offers of "honorary citizenship" from state governors, including a then-unknown-outside-Alaska Sarah Palin, whom Ferguson described at the time as something of a "sexy librarian.")

Still, Ferguson's chronicle of his life growing up in a lower-middle-class household near Glasgow in the 1960s and '70s, his love affair with the United States that began upon his first visit here at the age of 13, his early life as a drunk and drug addict, his first attempts at performing (which began with him as the drummer for a punk rock band, leading to a stand-up act as the character "Bing Hitler") that included encounters with other beginners like U2 and Alan Cumming, through his long-term engagement as a regular on The Drew Carey Show and finally, his becoming the best of the late-night talk show hosts (in my opinion, at least).

After Ferguson's performance at the Paramount in Charlottesville, I noticed his tour bus was still parked out back and, curious, I found a cadre of fans standing outside, waiting for the star to emerge.  Sure enough, only a few minutes later, he came out of the stage door and signed a few autographs and posed for a few photographs.  Luckily for me and Steven Latimer, who was with me that night, Craig let us pose with him in the very last shot taken that night.  Naturally, I posted it on Facebook as soon as we got home.  It appears here for the first time outside a social networking context.

As the picture was being snapped, I said to Craig, "You're the smartest host on late-night TV," to which he replied:  "That's like being a tall midget."  Maybe so, but I stand by my statement.

For what it's worth, I also purchased Ferguson's novel, Between the Bridge and the River, on that night at the Paramount.  I have not yet had a chance to read it.

I don't read much fiction, in general, but when I received a review copy of James Magruder's Sugarless late last year, I simply could not put it down.

It has been almost a year since I read the book, but I still think about it because it resonates with my personal experience so much:  not in every aspect, but hitting a sufficient number of points on the matrix to make me believe it.

Sugarless is the story of Rick, a 15-year-old high school student in suburban Chicago during the mid-1970s who, almost purely by chance, ends up on the speech team and finds out he has a talent for dramatic interpretation (or dramatic interp, for those in the know).

Magruder's verisimilitude about high school forensics struck me more than anything else in the book, even the parts about the protaganist's struggle with coming out as gay in an era far less accepting of that than it is now.  His descriptions of the scenes at speech tournaments are amazingly accurate, and his portrayals of coaches and competitors are eerily familiar to me.

The one detail that other readers might find difficult to believe is the choice of the protaganist's speech coach to have him do an excerpt from Mart Crowley's play, The Boys in the Band.  People unfamiliar with high school forensics may think that a play about gay men would be off-limits, especially in 1976, and especially in the American Midwest.

The truth is, a cutting from The Boys in the Band was circulating at that time, and my own coach asked me to do it.  For reasons unrelated to the content of the piece, I ended up doing a different selection.  (If I recall correctly, it was the courtroom scene in A Man for All Seasons, a far more conventional choice.)  So I can testify against the doubters that an excerpt from The Boys in the Band was, indeed, being performed on the high school forensics circuit in the mid-1970s.

Having just seen the excellent documentary about Crowley and his play, Making the Boys, at the Virginia Film Festival, my memories of reading Sugarless earlier this year and my own experience in high school rushed back to me.  I recommend Sugarless to anyone who has competed in speech and debate or to anyone who was once a gay teenager.  It's an excellent book, and a compelling read -- a real achievement for a first-time novelist, even one who, like Magruder, is an accomplished playwright and translator.

(This review essay is excerpted from a longer blog post at Rick Sincere News & Thoughts on November 28, 2010.)

'The Daily Telegraph Book of Carols,' by Ian Bradley

Christmas is unique among holidays in the music we associate with it.

Just think: What other holidays bring to mind so many, and so many different, songs? Outside of church services, Easter has “Here Comes Peter Cottontail” and not much else. Patriotic commemorations like Independence Day or Memorial Day might be celebrated with “The Star Spangled Banner” or “America the Beautiful,” but those and other anthems are not identified with a single holiday. Diehard union organizers might sing “The Internationale” on Labor Day, but even that would be a rarity.

Christmas, on the other hand, has hundreds of songs – some spiritual, some secular, some a strange blend of both – dedicated to it. We hear them on the radio (almost every media market now has at least one FM station that plays Christmas music around the clock starting around Thanksgiving and ending only on December 26), in shops, on street corners, in school pageants, from wandering carolers, and in our own homes.

Christmas songs, it seems, are among the few – besides TV theme songs – that Americans have etched in our memories with the capability of singing by heart, without written notes or lyrics. We know them so well, we think they have been around forever.

Strangely enough, some of those “ancient” songs are newer than we might imagine. Not only that, but many of them became popular despite hardheaded resistance from religious leaders – and I am not talking about opposition to “Rudolph” or “Frosty,” but to deeply spiritual, Bible- or tradition-based hymns that today are more likely to be sung at Midnight Mass than heard on the radio or at the shopping mall. From 1700 until 1782, for instance, only one Christmas hymn – “While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night” – was permitted to be sung during Anglican church services; in 1782, “Hark, The Herald Angels Sing” made the acceptable song list twice as long.

The stories of these, and 98 other, familiar (and some not-so-familiar) Christmas songs are told by church historian Ian Bradley in The Daily Telegraph Book of Carols, published in 2006 as a companion to his The Daily Telegraph Book of Hymns (Continuum, 2005). Many would be surprised to learn from Bradley that hymn-singing by congregations during church services is, historically speaking, a rather recent phenomenon. What’s more, “carols” (which used to be songs accompanied by dancing for almost any season of the year, including Lent, Easter, summer, and Christmastime) were particularly looked down upon by the official church.

Bradley explains:

“Yet although it now seems almost unthinkable to celebrate (or survive) the festive season without them, carols originally had nothing to do with Christmas, nor even with Christianity. They were among the many pagan customs taken over by the medieval church which used them initially as much in the celebration of Easter as of Christmas. The subsequent development of the carol as a distinctive genre standing somewhere between the hymn, the folksong and the sacred ballad and having as its subject matter the story and significance of Jesus’ birth serves as an interesting pointer to several major currents in religious, social and cultural history of the last five hundred years. Born out of late medieval humanism, carols were suppressed by Puritan zealots after the Reformation, partially reinstated at the Restoration, sung by Dissenters and radicals to the distaste of the established churches in the eighteenth century, rediscovered and reinvented by Victorian antiquarians and romantics, and re-written in the late twentieth century to fit the demand for social realism and political correctness. As well as reflecting the mood of their times, some of our best-loved carols also contain coded comments on contemporary events, including, perhaps, the 1745 Jacobite rebellion and the revolutions across Europe in 1848.”

Rereading that paragraph from the first two pages of Bradley’s book after having read the whole thing, it becomes remarkably clear that those 205 words serve as a near-complete summation of the 420 pages of text that follow. Bradley has put in a nutshell the whole history of carol-writing and carol-singing. In subsequent chapters, however, he highlights the origins of dozens of carols, some lost in the mists of ancient history, some by composers and lyricists still living in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He offers tidbits of trivia and corrections of misconceptions that deepen our textural appreciation of much-beloved songs of the season.

In the latter category, misconceptions, for instance, the liner notes of many Christmas CDs attribute the words of “Away in a Manger” to Martin Luther. That’s historically unfounded. The first printed record of “Away in the Manger” was when verses one and two were published in Philadelphia in 1885 in the Little Children’s Book for Schools. Verse three was published seven years later in a book called Vineyard Songs. “Away in the Manger,” moreover, is sung to different tunes in Britain and in North America.

One of the favorite hymns on both sides of the Atlantic, “Adeste Fideles” (with its English-language counterpart, “O Come All Ye Faithful”) was long thought to date from the early Middle Ages. Not so, Bradley tells us:

“Until the middle of the twentieth century it was widely believed that this great Latin hymn calling the faithful to worship the newborn Christ was the work of the thirteenth-century mystic Bonaventura. However the discovery of a mid-eighteenth-century manuscript in 1946 by Maurice Frost, vicar of Deddington in Oxfordshire and a noted hymnologist, and research over the next three years by his friend Dom John Stéphan of Buckfast Abbey led both men to conclude that the author of ‘Adeste, fideles’ was John Francis Wade (1711-86).”

Here’s where the story gets even more intriguing. After it was determined that Wade wrote the song sometime in the 1750s – it first appeared in print in England in 1760 – more research led to the discovery of the song’s political overtones. Bradley continues:

“In 1990 Bennett Zon, a historian of music, gave a paper to the Catholic Family History Society in which he speculated that ‘Adeste, fideles’ might even have been written as a coded Jacobite call to arms on the eve of the 1745 rebellion. He pointed out that half-hidden Jacobite imagery, including Scottish thistles and the initials of the Stuart pretenders, often appeared in Wade’s musical transcriptions and manuscripts. Twenty years after the defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie at Culloden, Wade was still writing ‘Domine salvum fac Regem nostrum Carolum’ rather than ‘Georgium’ for English Catholic congregations to sing.”

Such speculation – and, one must admit, the case remains to be proven – is of a piece with Clare Asquith’s theory of William Shakespeare’s crypto-Catholicism in Shadowplay (PublicAffairs, 2006). Asquith makes a persuasive argument that is based on more than marginalia in a few musical manuscripts, however.

Many of us have heard the touching story about the origins of “Silent Night,” perhaps the most beloved – and certainly the most-translated – of Christmas carols. (Even as I write this, I am hearing Tony Bennett sing it on the radio.) Supposedly mice ate the cables of the church organ and the parish priest and organist huddled together to write, as quickly as possible, a song that could be accompanied by guitar at Midnight Mass.

Well, sort of.

Bradley has done some digging and found out that there’s more legend than fact in that tale, though the song is no less delightful for it.

He notes that “Stille Nacht!” (as he calls it, using the original, German title)

“almost certainly deserves the accolade of the world’s favourite carol. It has been translated into 230 languages. It is often voted No. 1 in surveys of the most popular carols in Britain although it was pipped into second place by ‘In the bleak midwinter’ in the 2005 BBC Songs of Praise poll. A Gallup poll in December 1996 found that 21 per cent of respondents named ‘Silent Night’ as their favourite carol – more than twice as many as voted for the joint runners-up, ‘Away in a manger’ and ‘O come, all ye faithful,’ which each received nine per cent.”

The legend of “Silent Night” is that it was written and performed for the first time on Christmas Eve, 1818, in the Austrian village of Oberndorf, by musician Franz Gruber and the parish priest, Joseph Mohr.

It turns out, however, that Mohr had written the lyrics, and possibly the music, too, at least two years earlier, while he was still serving at a church in Mariapfarr. “It was there,” Bradley writes, “that he wrote his six-verse carol which is striking in its frequent references to fatherhood and complete absence of references to Mary or motherhood.”

That’s right: in the original German, there is no “round yon virgin.” That line is the invention of John Freeman Young, an Episcopal bishop who gave the song a very free translation in the 1850s, and that is the most familiar translation to come down to us. (Pace Evelyn Waugh, “Episcopal bishop” is not a redundancy, it’s just an Americanism.)

Another tidbit about “Stille Nacht” – it was the subject of what we now call copyright infringement litigation. Bradley continues his story:

“’Stille nacht’ might well have sunk without a trace, alongside hundreds of other Austrian folk carols, had a manuscript copy of it not come into the hands of Josef Strasser, a glove-maker and folk-music enthusiast who had a family singing group in the best ‘Sound of Music’ tradition. The Strasser family performed the piece as a newly discovered Tyrolean folk carol. As a result of a concert they gave in Leipzig in 1832 the carol was published as one of set of four Tyrolean songs. There was no mention of either author or composer in this first printed copy and it was only after recourse to the law that Mohr and Gruber were able to prove their authorship.”

The misidentification of a new carol as old and traditional comes up in another of Bradley’s sketches, this one involving “Calypso Carol” (also known by its first line, “See Him Lying On A Bed Of Straw”), written in London in 1964 by Michael Perry, an Anglican clergyman. Bradley reports that Perry “was amused to tune into the radio one day and hear a BBC announcer describe his work as ‘that traditional folk carol from the West Indies.’”

The number of well-known and well-regarded Christmas carols written by clergymen in the 19th and 20th centuries is quite stunning. During the Victorian era, Christmas celebrations were transformed -- depending on whether one was in the low-church or high-church tradition – from an austere day of prayer and mortification and/or a day of drinking and carousing to a family- and especially child-oriented celebration. Anglican priests, in particular, stepped in to write music appropriate to this new tone. A number of familiar Christmas songs were written also by Catholic priests (or Oxford movement Anglicans who later converted to Rome) and Baptist and Unitarian ministers.

In his introduction, Bradley explains:

“Carols played an important role in the Victorian reinvention of Christmas as a largely domestic festival full of sentimentality and good cheer. A huge number of new carols were written in the mid-nineteenth century, many in a pseudo-traditional style. Even the pioneer socialist William Morris provided a pastiche medieval carol with the refrain ‘The snow in the street and the wind at the door’ … It was the Victorians, rather than Bing Crosby, who invented the concept of the White Christmas, bringing snow into the Nativity story with Christina Rossetti’s ‘In the bleak midwinter’ … and Edward Caswall’s ‘See amid the winter snow.’”

That may be the primary reason for our assumption, ahistorical as it might be, that Christmas songs are older than old, even if they were written within our lifetimes: the composers have made an effort to make them feel ancient, and the artifice works. Is it doubtful that, a century from now, listeners will think “Do You Hear What I Hear” and “The Little Drummer Boy” are relics of the late Middle Ages?

In a way, I guess, they are.

(This review appeared originally, in slightly different form, on Rick Sincere News & Thoughts, December 17, 2009.)