1956- "I'm Gonna Lasso Santa Claus"

.....Brenda Lee was born Brenda Mae Tarpley on December 11, 1944. This makes her the youngest artist I've posted so far, but the field of Christmas pop music is peppered with child performers, especially in the 1940's and 1950's, and I doubt she set any records with this first of several Christmas singles. It could be, though. Augie Rios would be a few months older when he recorded "¿DONDE ESTA SANTA CLAUS?" in 1958. Jimmy Boyd, although he started his career earlier, was about a year older when he recorded "I SAW MOMMY KISSING SANTA CLAUS" in 1952. Yet, for some reason, her label felt it necessary to lie about her age on this early single. Both sides are originals, I think, but I'm focusing on the B-side, which I have in front of me.

• -N/A- CHRISTY CHRISTMAS (Marty Symes, Tony Starr)
• 02:17 b/w I'M GONNA LASSO SANTA CLAUS (Frankie Adams, Wilbur Jones)
• performed by Brenda Lee
• original source: 7" Decca 30107 (US) Oct. 29, 1956
• as well as: Decca Children's Series 9-88215 (US) 1956
• and my source: VACD ROCKIN' LITTLE CHRISTMAS MCA Records MCAD-25084 (US) 12/90

.....The A-side, just for the record, has a running time of 2:22 according to Amazon. The first evidence I can find of it ever being made available on CD is as part of a Bear Family box in 1997. It then surfaced again on CD ROCKIN' AROUND THE CHRISTMAS TREE: THE DECCA CHRISTMAS RECORDINGS MCA 70090-2 (US) 10/05/99, which was repackaged as CD THE BEST OF BRENDA LEE: THE CHRISTMAS COLLECTION MCA Nashville/Chronicles B0000520-2 (US) 09/23/03. Since then it's been licensed for a handful of hastily assembled compilations of familiar holiday recordings. The song was filed for copyright in 1952, but unless it was released regionally by a small country label somewhere I'm going to have to guess that Lee was the first to record it.

.....I first heard the B-side on the vinyl counterpart, MCA-25084 (US) 11/86, of the CD in the citation. I upgraded to the CD when it became available because it's a concentration of great singles in different styles in the Eisenhower-Kennedy era from several labels which were later absorbed into MCA. It also has a note of introduction by Brenda Lee written for the LP. But the compilation also has a number of flaws that have always bugged me. For one thing, it's less than a half hour long. The LP could have comfortably accommodated nearly twice as much playing time and the CD just less than three times as much. What makes the skimpiness even more egregious is that nearly all of the songs on the album were from singles whose flip sides were also Christmas themed. That's just a relatively minor example of something that was a chronic problem at MCA before the merger with PolyGram. When MCA dragged its feet in regards to putting Brenda Lee's 1964 Christmas album (MERRY CHRISTMAS FROM BRENDA LEE) back into print, Lee recorded a new album for Warner Brothers, CD A BRENDA LEE CHRISTMAS Warner Bros. 9 26660-2 (US) 10/24/91. MCA responded by taking the 1964 album, removing two songs from it, and issuing it on CD as CD JINGLE BELL ROCK MCA Special Products MCAD 20728 (US) 1992. The program order is otherwise intact. To add insult to insult, the two tracks that were removed became the lead tracks on a CD issued on a subsidiary called Hand the following year. CD MERRY CHRISTMAS FROM BRENDA LEE Hand/MCA HAND 22098 (US) 08/93 (which you may note uses the original title) not only was made entirely of tracks from the 1964 album again, but removed two different songs and rearranged the program order so that Lee's fans would first see the two songs not previously available and, perhaps, buy it before they realized that they already owned the rest of it. In other respects, ROCKIN' LITTLE CHRISTMAS avoids some of the characteristic sleaziness of MCA's vinyl days. For example, there are producer credits for some of the songs, yet no songwriting credits, something most major labels would consider a matter of basic competence. But even there MCA falls short. The song "I'M GONNA LASSO SANTA CLAUS" is credited to producer Owen Bradley, who took over production of Lee's sessions in 1958. This post's single was the second of Lee's first six, which were produced by Paul Cohen (except for the third, produced by Milt Gabler) from 1956 to 1957.

.....The 'lasso' image was in keeping with her Nashville recording locale, but like many young people who grew up immersed in country music during the fifties Brenda Lee leaned towards pop and rockabilly, eventually finding a broader audience than the one to whom she was marketed, as did The Everly Brothers and Buck Owens. But even the catchy, canter-like rhythm is not as memorable as her powerful voice. It's like getting hit on the head with a hammer by the sweetest little girl you've ever seen. Only five years later that same booming twang would be used to heartbreaking effect on the more adult song "BREAK IT TO ME GENTLY" while Lee was still in her teens. And the difference between her actual age and the mature sound of her voice certainly fueled interest in her records. This single, which was only her second release remember, carried the phrase "9 years old" on the label of the Children's Series copies although she would turn 12 just two months after its release. It may have been a ploy to make her obvious talent seem that much more remarkable but it caused a few headaches years later after she and her boyfriend, both 18 at the time, got legally married but had to continuously disprove poorly researched scandal sheet articles that claimed otherwise. For a saner and more concise look at her career, her official website has a clean look and is easy to navigate. It also has some brief notes specifically about her Christmas recordings.

1962- "Henry Had A Merry Christmas"

.....Well, I'm a little rusty at this. Let's start with something tricky, then the rest of the month will seem easy. I first found this number (both sides of the single, actually) on a two-for-one CD. Both albums were originally released in 1962 on the Liberty label:

• LP OLD RIVERS Liberty LRP-3233(mono) or LST-7233(stereo) (US) 1962
• LP 'TWAS THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS...BACK HOME Liberty LRP-3257(mono) or LST-7257(stereo) (US) 1962

.....Complication #2? These aren't even consecutive albums. Due to the success of his television series, "The Real McCoys", on top of decades of film work, Walter Brennan released five albums in 1962. If the release schedule strictly followed the order of the catalog numbers, these would be the first and fourth, respectively. More likely, the Christmas album was recorded and/or mixed fourth and held back until the holiday season, probably making it the last album of the year. He only made two further albums for Liberty as far as I can tell and did spotty, irregular recording before and after that. That he released more than two or three albums such as this in his lifetime, let alone more than eight is a testament to the public's boundless appetite for faux sentiment and maudlin kitsch. Brennan doesn't really sing so much as speak song lyrics as though he were giving a dramatic poetry reading in that rusty door hinge of a voice; his vocal chords were damaged by toxic gas during his World War I military service, according to imdb (The Internet Movie Database). The homespun plainsman demeanor was also an act, an amalgamation of numerous film characters he was often typecast to play. He was born and raised in Massachusetts and reportedly did not speak with either the accent or folksy idioms he affected when on mike. Most of his recordings are formulaic studies in insincerity, wistful recollections of a past he never lived, always including a calculated whine timed to imply how physically painful it is that there has been some form, any form, of change in the world. It's like someone spliced Ronald Reagan with Dr. Zachary Smith.

.....Complication #3? None of the songs here are given song-writing credits. The CD insert reduces the jacket art for the LP's in order to fit both on the cover. The interior of the insert reproduces the art from the backs of the jackets, but since the original format didn't have songwriting credits on the back, the CD doesn't either. There's no information on the inlay card or the disc surface. The label's website no longer lists the title. Predictably, websites offering song lyrics attribute credit to Brennan, but most of those sites don't even have the correct lyrics. Their only reason to exist is to be tar pits of viruses and pop-up ads, so they'll promise access to any kind of information but they gain no advantage in being accurate and suffer nothing for delivering misinformation. The next line of action would be to find a scan of the label, either for the single or for the full album. My usual sources turned up nothing but I noticed a number of You-Tube videos, some of which open and/or close with shots of the actual record and sat through a couple. Either the videos or my monitor wouldn't attain a sharp enough focus to read the label, unfortunately. Bored at the prospect of running down another blind alley, I read the comments left for the videos while I thought about what kind of search options I had left. One of the commentors claimed that their grandfather, Cliff Crofford, was the author. I took that with a grain of salt, since delusional people and would-be con artists are always claiming tangent relationships to fame, however minor. The name clicked for some reason, though, and when I reread the CD insert I noticed that the liner notes for the earlier of the two albums, OLD RIVERS, mentioned that the author of that title track was Cliff Crofford. It took little time to find a few different biographies of Crofford and the records of a library's holdings. The sheet music in the library corroborated what I found in the biographies, that Crofford did indeed write the song below and at least two others on the Christmas album.

• 02:30 "HENRY HAD A MERRY CHRISTMAS" (Chris Crofford)
• 02:29 "WHITE CHRISTMAS" (Irving Berlin) [see below]
• performed by Walter Brennan [and possibly the Johnny Mann Singers]
• original source: 7" Liberty 55518 (US) 1962 [probably December]
• and my source: CD TWO CLASSIC ALBUMS FROM WALTER BRENNAN: OLD RIVERS & 'TWAS THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS... BACK HOME EMI-Capitol Music/Collectors' Choice Music 72438-19218-2-1 (US?) 1996

.....Both sides were produced by [Thomas] "Snuff" Garrett and arranged and conducted by Ernie Freeman. Cliff Crofford, I discovered, was a staff writer at Liberty. That might explain why I couldn't find any trace of an earlier recording of "HENRY..." by Crofford himself. In fact, I couldn't find any recordings other than Brennan's. It's possible that he also wrote the poem about snow that Brennan recites during what would otherwise have been the instrumental break in "WHITE CHRISTMAS", but since the A-side is the focus of this post and the B-side is far from an original recording I'm going to absolve myself from tracking down that detail. Like Crofford, the Johnny Mann Singers were part of the Liberty staff and performed as backing vocalists for a number of artists on the label, occasionally releasing titles of their own.

.....Complication #4? Most sites still selling the two-for-one CD cite the release date as 2004. As I mentioned earlier, the label's site no longer offers it and my own copy was bought used. The price sticker has the name of a store that I seem to remember closing at about that time. It could be that the CD was pressed twice or it could be that the 1996 copyright date on my copy refers to an earlier cassette issue. For what it's worth, Amazon places the cassette as being released in 1998 and the CD in 2000. It could also be that the 1996 date is when Collectors' Choice made the CD available for mail order only and that 2004 was when remaining copies circulated through retail outlets. I remember being on CC's mailing list and receiving their catalog, even though I had never ordered anything from them. (I used to buy a lot of music, and, even before the days of the internet, if you paid by credit card you'd get some strange offers in the mail. The CC catalogs were interesting and full of artists not seen in years, but not on the bizarre end of the scale.)

.....If any reader has inside information on the CD package (or, ideally, the original vinyl), feel free to leave a note in the comment field. I'll be notified, even after the post has become old.