It was a hot afternoon in the summer of 1945, when a 19-year-old singer named Mel Tormedrove out for a working session with his songwriting partner, Bob Wells. Wells lived with his parents in a home in the San Fernando Valley, where it was at least ten degrees warmer than in town.
There was no air conditioning yet, and before Torme’s arrival, Wells had tried everything to escape the heat, including a swim, a cold shower, and musing about Christmas and cold winter scenes from his boyhood days in Boston. Upon arriving, Torme, a frequent visitor, walked in and called for Bob. When there was no answer, he walked over to the piano where he spied a writing pad resting on the music board. Written on the open page were four lines of verse:
Chestnuts roasting on an open fire
Jack Frost nipping at your nose
Yuletide carols being sung by a choir
And folks dressed up like Eskimos.
“What’s this?” Torme asked when Wells appeared. Wells explained how tired he was of being hot and thought writing about something wintery would help distract him from the heat. Torme later described his friend’s efforts as trying to “stay cool by thinking cool.”
Listening to his friend’s explanation, Mel looked again at Wells’s handiwork, then back at Wells. “You know, I think there might be something here.” Immediately the two sat down at the piano, and within 45 minutes they hammered out the complete lyrics and melody of “The Christmas Song.” It was originally titled “Merry Christmas to You,” although many know it as “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire.”
Thanks, But No Thanks
Ecstatic at what they’d written and how easily it came together, the two drove to the nearby Van Heusen Publishing company and shared it with Jimmy Van Heusen’s publishing partner, lyricist Johnny Burke. Much to their disappointment, the publisher passed, saying that they weren’t interested because the song would only be played at Christmas.
Disappointed, that same afternoon the songwriting duo shared it with a popular black singer named Nat Cole. After hearing the song once, Cole asked them to play it again. Before they finished, Cole stopped them and exclaimed, “That’s my song!” Torme and Wells huddled a moment before telling Cole he could have it. In fact, they wanted him to have it.
In his autobiography “It Wasn’t All Velvet,” Torme wrote, “It took a full year for him to get into a studio and record it, but his record finally came out in late fall of 1946; and the rest could be called our financial pleasure,” referring to the lifelong royalties the song yielded.
A 1979 photo of Mel Torme, co-writer of "The Christmas Song." Alan Light/CC BY-SA 2.0
The Right Sound
In 1946, Cole was the pianist and vocalist for a jazz and blues group called the King Cole Trio. As much as he liked “The Christmas Song,” the classically-trained Cole instinctively felt the tune needed a string accompaniment. His record company quickly nixed the idea of using strings for a jazz trio, so Cole recorded it in June 1946 with his bandmates: guitarist Oscar Moore and bassist Johnny Miller.
Cole is quoted in the 1991 liner notes of “The Complete Capitol Recordings of the Nat King Cole Trio,” “As soon as they played it back, I knew it was wrong, and finally convinced them to let me remake it with a string section added.”
Two months later he was back in the recording studio. Four strings, a harp, and a barely audible percussionist joined the King Cole Trio. Between the two recording dates, Cole had approached the prominent song-arranger Russ Case to write the accompaniment for the string section. But because Case was contracted with a different record label, he wasn’t allowed to work with artists who recorded on other labels. The task fell to Case’s assistant, Charlie Grean, who wove a minimalistic string arrangement which integrated seamlessly with the trio’s original sound.
The second version of the song became a hit for the Nat King Cole Trio and Capitol Records on both the pop and R&B charts, but interestingly, there was a small hiccup in the original two recordings. In the two 1946 recordings, Cole sang the word “reindeers” as a plural for the stanza “to see if reindeer really know how to fly.”
An ad for the Nat King Cole Trio in a 1947 copy of Billboard. Public Domain
Seven years later, Cole was a major singing star for Capitol Records. On Aug. 24, 1953 in Los Angeles, Cole recorded a new full album of Christmas songs, “Nat King Cole – The Christmas Song,” with a larger string ensemble that gave the now popular Christmas classic a fuller, lusher sound. The verbal gaffe heard on the first two versions was corrected.
Cole recorded a fourth version of the song in 1961 with a full orchestra utilizing stereophonic sound, a new technology developed in the late 1950s. This is the version heard most often today. In this last recording, Cole relinquished his piano playing and focused solely on singing.
Merry Christmas to You
The June 1946 recording of “The Christmas Song” was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1974. Billboard Magazine rated “The Christmas Song” as the fourth most recorded Christmas song in history behind “Silent Night,” “White Christmas,” and “Jingle Bells.” In December 2020, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers listed “The Christmas Song” as the 15th-most popular Christmas song, though Billboard ranks it 3rd.
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Dean George
Author
Dean George is a freelance writer based in Indiana and he and his wife have two sons, three grandchildren, and one bodacious American Eskimo puppy. Dean's personal blog is DeanRiffs.com and he may be reached at [email protected]
