Christmas Carols: Creating the Sounds of the Season

“Chestnuts roasting on an open fire…Jack Frost nipping at your nose…”

Chances are you are probably singing the rest by now; ”The Christmas Song” is one of the most popular Christmas carols of all time, covered by everyone from Nat King Cole to Frank Sinatra, James Taylor to Gavin DeGraw.

However, this iconic Christmas song started with “The Velvet Fog,” singer Mel Torme. On a blisteringly hot July day in California, Torme was working with composer Bob Wells when he noticed a couple of random lines scrawled in pencil across Wells’ notebook. Desperate to stave off the California heat, the New England-bred Wells had scribbled a list of memories inspired by his childhood winters to attempt to cool off.

As Torme told it, “They started, ‘Chestnuts roasting…Jack Frost nipping…Yuletide carols…Folks dressed up like Eskimos.’ Bob didn’t think he was writing a song lyric. He said he thought if he could immerse himself in winter he could cool off. Forty minutes later that song was written. I wrote all the music and some of the lyrics.”

A couple of randomly scribbled words inspired one of the most well-known carols of all time. At some point, every holiday or winter carol started as a handful of words, or the scrap of a melody.

John Jacob Niles, a composer and singer from Kentucky, gave up a lucrative career in opera to return to his true passion, which was collecting little-known folk music from the Appalachian mountains.

According to Niles, he found himself in Murphy, North Carolina in the summer of 1933. A family of evangelists had been camping in the town square for over a week, and their eviction was causing a hubbub in the streets of the small mining community. Suddenly, above the din of the hot, dirty street came a clear, sweet child’s voice, singing a song that Niles had never heard before. The voice belonged to Annie Morgan, the daughter of the evangelists, and she sang three haunting lines for twenty-five cents a go to help her parents buy the gas necessary to leave town. Niles paid her eight times to sing the song, and he scribbled frantically with his pencil on a small notebook as Annie Morgan sang a song that had been passed down among her family for generations.

When the Morgan’s decamped, they left Niles with three lines, a haunting melody and what Niles called “a magnificent idea.” He elaborated on the song at home, singing it in concerts for five years afterwards until it became a Christmas standard in its own right.

The song was “I Wonder as I Wander.”

When giving gifts this Christmas, a pencil might just be the gift that will keep on giving for years to come. Tucked in a stocking or tied on the ribbon of a larger package, the pencil encourages the songwriters, poets and artists in your life not only to keep creating, but to engage in the world around them. The inspiration for the next classic holiday song may be anywhere, be it in random scribbling of a friend’s notebook, or in the honest simplicity of a child’s song. It’s up to the artists to look, and to listen.

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Sing on, readers! What’s your favorite winter-time song? Any hidden gems we should listen to in the studio? Give us a note in the comments!