My two cents - `The Christmas Song’ didn’t just start inside a speaker

Chestnuts roastin’ on an open fire

Jack Frost nipping at your nose

Yuletide carols being sung by a choir

And folks dressed up like eskimos

A big part of each Christmas season is the music. It begins to come out of radios, store speakers, elevators and lots of other places to provide an audio background for the holiday season.

In this area, Christmas music fans can select from a variety of live Christmas music at all levels. With two university towns, the Palouse offers a rich variety each holiday season.

Nat King Cole’s The Christmas Song automatically arrives each year. It received a special launch for this area this year when the Spokane Jazz Orchestra presented “Holiday Songs of Nat King Cole” with Horace Alexander Young as vocalist. Young made a big contribution to jazz vocal and instrumental music while he was at Washington State University.

Cover from the 1992 EMI-Capital Music cassette.

Ever wonder where these songs get started? They seem like they’ve been around forever, but that’s not the case.

The Christmas Song really isn’t Nat King Cole’s song.

It’s Mel Torme’s song. Actually, it’s Bob Wells’ and Mel Torme’s song. Nat King Cole over the years acquired an automatic link to the song because he recorded the first major hit with it. His version has held up while hundreds of performers over the years have taken a shot at it. Cole, who died in 1965 at the age of 45, returns for a Christmas audience each year.

Most of the shoppers who hum along while “Chestnuts roasting” plays in the background probably don’t know the man who sang it started his career as a jazz pianist.

In fact, his King Cole Trio pulled down top awards on the jazz charts before they moved into the pop music field. They relished the top ratings from the Jazz periodicals at the time, but they also found, like most of the performers who hit the charts after World War II, that pop music was where they could make the big money.

After years of jazz recordings and club appearances, dating back to 1938, members of the King Cole Trio still didn’t have a lot of income.

The jazz background of the King Cole Trio actually surfaces on the first general release of The Christmas Song. Listen for the short jazz piano interlude in the middle of the well known lyrics, and then a short guitar solo.

That’s Nat King Cole, not a studio musician, playing the piano, and that’s Oscar Moore, the other original member of the trio present when they recorded it, on the guitar. Moore added another jazz signature, a “quote” from another tune at the very end; it’s Jingle Bells.

By then, Moore and Cole had played together for more than eight years. The third member of the original trio, Wesley Banks, had been called for World War II duty.

Bob Wells, already a well known lyricist, and Torme teamed to write the song in 1944. Those Christmas scenes were actually created during a heat spell in Hollywood.

According to the Cole biography written by Daniel Mark Epstein 10 years ago, Torme showed the song to Cole during one of the trio’s regular engagements at the Trocadero Club in Hollywood in May of 1946. The club at that time served as a home base for the trio when they weren’t booked at other engagements around the county. A special performance room was designed to accommodate them.

Epstein noted Cole immediately loved the song with its imagery, provided by Wells, and the haunting tune, developed by Torme. The group departed for an engagement in New York and recorded the first version of the song at the WMCA Radio Studio in New York June 14, 1946.

Music fans more than six decades later can wonder why Torme, who was already on the way to becoming a well known vocalist, shopped the song to Cole.

The answer doesn’t surface in Epstein’s book, but it probably relates to the relative career stages of Torme and Cole at the time. Torme was just 19 when he wrote the song. In 1946, the King Cole Trio was already a very big name. Among other hits, they had turned out Sweet Lorraine and Straighten Up and Fly Right.

The second tune was written by Cole, and it had become one of the informal anthems during World War II. When morale on the war front or home front lagged, fellow soldiers or workers would have a little face-to-face and recite Cole’s title line, “Straighten Up and Fly Right,” according to Epstein’s book.

The debut of The Christmas Song had a unique hitch after the trio recorded it in June of 1946, and this is where Cole earns credit for making the song a hit. He insisted that they do it over with more than just the jazz trio.

The trio had been recording for Capitol Records, which at that time was a new organization, and the trio’s hit was a big part of Capitol’s early success.

Cole insisted the song would do a lot better if they added violins and maybe a harp. Capitol’s founders finally consented, and they went back to WWCA Aug. 19 and added four violins and a harp. Those violins start the song off and lead in to Cole’s warm vocal.

The second version of the recording was released in November, and, Epstein noted, it didn’t immediately go to number-one on the charts. Who had the number-one hit in November of 1946? The King Cole Trio with “I Love You for Sentimental Reasons.”

Moore, who had health problems and was unhappy with the transition from jazz to pop music based on Cole’s vocals, departed in 1947. Cole’s career went to mega heights during the 1950s, but he hit some rough spots, including a divorce, episodes with the IRS and racism. Cole was actually attacked and knocked over a piano bench while on stage in Birmingham, Ala.

That led to apologies from officials in Birmingham. Cole, who was known for his easy demeanor, responded by saying he was just trying to give a performance. Actually it was two performances, one for a white audience and one for a black audience under the southern segregation code which was enforced at the time.

Cole then also had to face the ire of the black urban press because he agreed to the segregated performance format.

One of the worst chapters in his professional life was the NBC Television episode in 1957. Television at that time was booking singers to do 30-minute weekly shows, and Cole sought out the opportunity. NBC finally signed him to a 7:30 weekly time slot with General David Sarnoff, head of RCA and founder of NBC, adding support.

Epstein pointed out The Nate King Cole Show was started by NBC on a “sustaining” basis, which meant the network put it on the air and hoped to attract a sponsor. Madison Avenue’s advertising executives could never sign a national sponsor because their clients questioned how audiences in the south would respond to the show and to their products.

NBC lost an estimated $500,000 sustaining the show which had attracted a large and appreciative audience. They eventually had to pull the plug. During the TV run, Cole also sustained an income loss because he had to forego live performance fees elsewhere to spend time in the TV studios each week in New York or Los Angeles.

A lineup of Cole’s friends and fellow performers helped reduce costs by making guest appearance on the show for “scale” pay, then $155. Frankie Laine, who was getting $10,000 then for television appearances, was the first to be a guest on Cole’s show for $155, Epstein noted.

Among the long lineup of stars following Laine’s appearance was Mel Torme.