Playlist:
Billy the Christmas Pig Dale Baglo Broadcast Inc 3:41
Mister Santa Dorothy Collins 2:00
Les Twist du Père Noël Les Chaussettes Noires 1:53
Ol’ Nick and Rudy Matt Anderson 2:58
Billy the Christmas Pig This is a track from the above CD. I can’t remember how I got it. Did I find it in a thrift store? A garage sale? Did somebody give it to me? If it is that last one, thank you whoever you are! It is a 2007 demo album from Dave Baglo Broadcast Inc, a local Victoria company that makes radio and television ads and jingles as well as special radio programming packages.
The demo album has samples of original programming that would be included in that year’s pre-recorded 10-hour long radio Christmas special called The Gift of Christmas, suitable for adult contemporary, country and oldies format radio stations. Original pieces like this would be interspersed with music suitable for the stations’ format. The music itself would be selected based on current popularity shortly before the package’s release date of Dec 1. Each hour of programming is 50 minutes, with four places pre-designed for inclusion of the station’s advertisements or local announcements.
Note that on this CD label they give credit to professional free-lance announcers and voice actors for the voices on some of the tracks but there are none for this track. I presume that the voices here are members of Dale Baglo’s staff and jingle-singers, perhaps including Dale himself.
Mister Santa is a 1955 Christmas version of one of the biggest hit songs from 1954, Mister Sandman. That original song was so popular when Vaughn Monroe and his orchestra first released it in June that by the end of the year several more covers had been released by other people. Three different versions of Mister Sandman went to the top of the music charts that year! Here is the Chordettes version which has been inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.
The song had been written by Pat Ballard (1899-1960), who is also credited as the songwriter for this Christmas adaptation the following year. He also wrote scripts for radio shows and Hollywood films and fiction for newspapers and magazines. Most of his songwriting was children’s songs and Mister Sandman was by far his biggest hit.
Dorothy Collins was born and raised in Canada but spent most of her professional career (which began at the age of 14) in the US. She established nationwide fame in 1950 appearing as one of the regular featured vocalists on the very popular live NBC television show Your Hit Parade. In those days on-air personalities did the advertisements and she was the spokeswoman and sang the jingles for Lucky Strike cigarettes on that show as well as for their advertisements on other TV and radio shows.
Her career as a recording artist was more mixed, with only a few songs that made it into the top 20 on the song charts, and that did not include this one. Mister Santa doesn’t appear in my reference book Christmas in the charts: 1920-2004 but it couldn’t have been a flop because I can well remember repeatedly hearing it on Top 40 radio and liking it. That must have been in the year it was released when I was seven years old because it wasn’t a big enough hit to have been played much on Top 40 radio in later years.
But perhaps there is still hope for the song. A few weeks ago, much to everyone’s surprise Brenda Lee’s song Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree recorded in 1958 when she was age 13 briefly went to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 Pop music chart (that is now measured by downloads and streaming rather than record sales.) For a short while it beat out Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas Is You which has topped that chart in the holiday season for the past seven years, making Ms Lee the oldest person to have ever topped the Billboard pop music chart.
I certainly wouldn’t have heard this 1961 recording of Les Twist du Père Noël on the radio back then even though it was released on the multinational label Barclay Disques. It was recorded by Les Chaussettes Noires, the first professional French rock ‘n’ roll band, and one of the most successful. But I certainly do remember the Twist, as a song recorded in 1960 by Chubby Checker; as the huge international dance craze that followed the release of that song; and because of the many, many twist songs in English that immediately flooded Top 40 radio. And they all sounded pretty much like this French Christmas one but nobody paid attention to the words anyway.
Actually, I couldn’t forget it. My father had a 16 mm film camera which he mostly used to record important family occasions. When our extended family gathered for our Christmas party that year he had me and my cousin Kathleen do the twist for posterity. He also shot me doing the Gorilla, a very short-lived dance that in retrospect is really just a version of the Monkey but for us clumsy people. The Twist became very unfashionable within a few years but that footage had my family regaled in laughter at many a later Christmas gathering.
Speaking of reworking songs that have been hits before, Canadian blues guitarist and singer-songwriter Matt Andersen’s Ol’ Nick and Rudy is really the same story as a hit Christmas children’s song that you have probably heard before. Actually, I never liked that previous version even though it has been around as long as I can remember.
I knew from early on that Santa Claus has eight reindeer. No more and no less! My intuitive suspicion that this supposed ninth one was a fictional character has since has been confirmed by careful research into the matter.
As I wrote in the liner notes of my Bill’s 2011 Christmas Music Sampler:
It is unfortunate that Rudolf has assumed such a ubiquitous presence in popular accounts of Santa's transportation system since he is well-documented as being entirely fictional. His creator, Robert Lewis May, admitted that he invented the character based upon his own childhood traumas and fantasies.
In 1939, Montgomery Ward department stores distributed a free children's book that he wrote which told the now-familiar story of how a misfit young reindeer with a neon nose became a Christmas hero. In 1947 the company gave permission for May's brother-in-law, songwriter Johnny Marks, to use the then-out-of-print reindeer character in a song. Gene Autry’s commercial success with it in 1949, when the song rose to the top of the pop charts and sold over 2 million records in the first year alone, has led to numerous other attempts to introduce other fictional characters into the Santa Claus canon but none has been so enduring as the reindeer with a red nose.
If there were to be a reindeer with a red nose, according to Prof. Odd Halvorsen of the University of Oslo in a 1987 peer-reviewed paper in Parasitology Today the cause would likely be due to blood oozing from a parasitic infection in Rudolf's respiratory system. Reindeer are uniquely suited for arctic conditions. Their noses have elaborately folded turbinal bones covered with blood-rich membranes that warm the air when they breathe in, and recapture the warmth as they breathe out.
Unfortunately, this creates a perfect environment not only for the usual parasites that prey upon ruminates but also twenty other types of parasites that are specific to reindeer. This would greatly weaken Rudolf but at least it would be a plausible explanation for why the other reindeer instinctively shunned. However, there is no known circumstance under which this would create sufficient redness as to provide illumination.
There have been other more recent hypotheses presented to explain Rudolf’s glowing red nose, such as bioluminescence and genetic manipulation. They are not persuasive. Even aside from Robert L. May’s own admission that he fabricated him as a fictional character there is a simple fact of physics: As anyone who has tried to drive a car in the fog or snow with his or her high beams on knows, a bright light at the front of the reindeer team is highly unlikely to be useful for navigation.
I don’t know if Matt Anderson knew that he was propagating a hoax when he wrote this retelling of the familiar children’s ballad. His website is rather skimpy on biographical information and his Wikipedia entry is limited to the facts, for example that his career began in New Brunswick where he grew up. It does say that his recording label is True North Records but it can’t point out that is like a guarantee of being among the very finest of Canadian musicianship. It doesn’t say that his singing can gently interpret a song with simplicity (as in his acapella singing of Silent Night in my Dec 18 posting) or he can focus his 350 pounds of weight into sheer power if that is what a song’s interpretation needs. He pours every ounce of himself into his craft.
As for his song-writing, this song is an example of that. Here are Ol’ Nick and Rudy’s lyrics:
It was the night before the day
Ol’ Nick shined up his sleigh
Rounded up with a sack packed full of toys
With just a few more hours to go
The sky filled up with snow
And he knew there’d be some sad girls and boysNow young Rudy was a buck
Who had no chance with luck
With a light bulb where a cute black nose should be
He couldn’t land himself a doe
When that nose would start to glow
You could hear them call him names like Christmas TreeNow the stars were all but gone
From the storming going on
And Ol’ Nick he as struck hard with a plan
He’d get that lit up deer, to guide ‘em outta here
And get those toys sent out across the landHey Rudy, won’t you guide my sleigh tonight
Hey Rudy, get yourself geared up for flight
You’re the only one I know who can get us through this snow
Hey Rudy won’t you guide my sleigh tonightRudy as quick as that had a harness on his back
When Nick said go, that boy was gone
They went screaming through the sky
All you heard as they went by
Was Ol’ Nick yelling out: Ho hold onHo hold on Ho hold on
Ol’ Nick yelling out hold on
They went screaming through the sky
All you heard as they went by
Was Ol’ Nick yelling out Ho hold on
I rather like what the Globe & Mail music critic Brad Wheeler said when reviewing one of his concerts: “His songwriting is nothing spectacular, so he enlivens the material with big-hearted vocals, mischievous guitar virtuosity and a firm understanding of dynamics. He's a one-man show, sure thing.”
Dec 24 – It’s Christmas Eve – Beware of falling reindeer dung!