his section will remain up all year round as a constant reference for Christmas music from the ragtime era and beyond. It will be expanded from time to time, usually in November and December of each year. For more interesting Christmas facts and stories, please visit the Christmas page in my Nostalgia section.

lso, because it has been requested several times since it was first posted, I now will keep this link to my own personal and somewhat humorous Christmas story, How Baby Jesus Saved Me One Christmas Night, in hopes it will provide you a pleasant alternative look at the season from a musician's point of view. Have a cool yule, even if it's July!

    Although much of the origin of this famous crimson-beaked mammal is well-known to many around the world, there are parts of the story which are often overlooked. Rudolph evolved out of a very sad situation. Robert May was a copywriter for the now defunct Montgomery Ward department store chain, providing text for catalogs and newspaper ads. He had been picked on often as a child, and while many of his friends had gone on to prestigious careers he was barely surviving on his meager salary. In 1936 his wife Evelyn contracted cancer. By November of 1938 she was very ill and spent most of her time in bed or on the couch. Their 4-year-old daughter Barbara asked her daddy one evening why her mommy was so different from other mommies. Robert understood how dejected she must have felt, having gone through childhood pain himself. So he started to tell her a story he had been working on by a request from his manager for an anticipated handout booklet for Christmas. It was based in part on The Ugly Duckling and revolved around a reindeer with a red nose who lived in a colony with many other reindeer. The younger bucks did not accept this particular reindeer's abnormality and routinely shunned him. Still, he had a loving home and was fairly well adjusted. Then one Christmas Eve when the fog was thick and the weather foul, Santa Claus came to the reindeer village and Rudolph's home to deliver presents. He saw how this young reindeer's glowing red nose cut through the fog, and hoping to avoid further disasters that had plagued him throughout the evening, including a close brush with an airplane, he employed the young hero to help him with deliveries for the remainder of the trip. This made the youngster a local celebrity immediately, and he became well-loved and the stuff of legend.

Barbara loved the story and asked her daddy to tell it many more times until he finally got the details as he wanted them, expanding it a little each time. Among the details was the name. He started with Rollo, which was too stereotypically jolly. Then he tried Reginald, but that seemed rather stuffy. Then he chanced upon the unusual Rudolph, and it stuck. May was in the process of turning the story into a poem for the handout, using Clement Moore's The Night Before Christmas as a template, when his wife died. In constant grief, and clinging to Barbara for comfort, he soon finished the story (not in time for the 1938 season), binding it as Barbara's gift on Christmas morning. At a company holiday gathering later in the week, May reluctantly attended at the request of his associates. He read the poem to them and they responded favorably. While the promotions department thought to use it the following year, they were tenuous on this topic since the red-nosed feature could represent drunkenness, an unwanted image. Denver Gillen, who did artwork for the catalogs, sketched some reindeer at the local zoo giving them the scarlet proboscis. Based on his images the executives gave the go-ahead. So it was that Montgomery Ward used Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer: The Day Before Christmas as a handout the following Christmas, issuing some 2.6 million copies in the debut year of 1939.

Unfortunately for May, his work was the property of Montgomery Ward, who eventually printed a total of 6 million copies through 1946, in spite of a paper-conserving pause during World War II. There was lots of Rudolph-related merchandise offered by the store as well. The creator did not prosper in any way initially, and was still paying medical bills from his wife's cancer. Finally, in 1946, May was given the rights to the work by his employer, ensuring him some well-deserved financial security. He tasked his brother-in-law, Johnny Marks, to adapt the story into a children's song. Not much remained of the original story, but it was short and to the point. They shopped the piece around to many recording artists, including Bing Crosby, Dinah Shore, Perry Como and others. It was used with a chorus in the 1948 Max Fleischer Technicolor cartoon short based on May's story (currently available on DVD with the 1951 version of Scrooge) which was also released as a record on an independent label. As an afterthought they sent a copy to the well-established "Singing Cowboy," Gene Autry, who was as resistant as all the other artists. It was Autry's wife, Ina, who insisted that Gene record the piece for the Christmas sides he was working on in August of 1949. At the end of a very long recording session for three other holiday pieces, Autry decided to give it a try, and after a couple of rehearsals he recorded the song in one take. That one take still lives with us more than half a century later, and helped make Autry famous across multiple music genres. It is the third largest selling recording of all time behind Crosby's White Christmas and Elton John's Candle in the Wind 1997. Marks went on to write additional pieces for the 1964 clay-animated special of the same name featuring folk singer Burl Ives (including Holly Jolly Christmas). The flavor I have given Rudolph here is ragtime, of course, but is inspired by John Denver's take on the piece for his Rocky Mountain Christmas album of the 1970s.

Those of you who are my age (Aaaauuuggghh!) or younger will remember as a child one of their first experiences watching A Charlie Brown Christmas, particularly the musical content and Linus' stage presentation of a Gospel reading. In fact, I was among those eager young Peanuts fans who was watching the night that this sponsored show premiered on December 9, 1965. I really didn't care that I was seeing it in black and white. I remember the anticipation, the excitement from the tree we had just got in our living room, the smell of the electrical circuits and vacuum tubes on the TV, and my mother's encouragement that I should see this show. I was enthralled both watching and hearing these now iconic characters that had real children's voices and a jazz music soundtrack, unlike virtually any other cartoon on the air at the time. This was the first, and still most beloved of all of the Charlie Brown specials.

It came about from an association between the late creator of Peanuts (launched in 1950), Charles Schulz, and television producer Lee Mendelson. The latter had put together a 1963 segment for TV called A Boy Named Charlie Brown that showed the creation process of Schulz's comic strips, and included a few short minutes of animation of the characters. While he was unable to get it aired by any of the networks initially, an executive of the company saw the animation and was enthralled. In May of 1965 he approached Mendelson and his animation associate Bill Melendez (who cut his teeth at both Disney and Warner Brothers, and had done the animation for the short film) with the idea of a Christmas special featuring the Peanuts gang. They more or less told a white lie that such a show had been laid out, and proceeded to do exactly that over the next 48 hours. Coke bought the idea and set the December 9 broadcast date. This left six months to codify the storyboards, hire voice talent, animate 25 minutes of film at 12 drawings per second (around 18,000 drawings), and find music that would fit. Good Grief! Fortunately, the Peanuts strip was popular enough that Schulz had a great deal of pull in what went into the show and what did not. This included his insistence that the voices be done by children and not adults, that there be no laugh track as had been strongly suggested by Coca Cola and CBS, which eventually broadcast the show, and that Linus would read from scripture, most notably the King James version of Luke 2:8-14. In fact, his position as a practicing Christian was such that either Luke stay in or Peanuts was out. CBS hated the idea but Coke nervously pushed it through. It has been often considered that no other cartoonist would have been able to accomplish such a victory at that time. In the end, the memorable broadcast was a great triumph, coming in marginally behind Bonanza as the top show of the week. It has since won many accolades, including an Emmy and the coveted Peabody Award for broadcast excellence, and launched the series of still-popular Peanuts television specials and movies.

A standout decision by Melendez was the refusal to use stereotypical cartoon music, as Schulz preferred something more sophisticated and introspective as well as timeless (although he had a different idea than what was ultimately used). This made jazz an obvious choice. It was the suggestion of a San Francisco Chronicle music critic that they seek out composer/pianist Vince Guaraldi to handle these chores for A Boy Named Charlie Brown. Guaraldi was delighted at the idea of contributing more, and by the end of September had assembled and recorded the majority of the soundtrack that stands today as a unique fusion of piano jazz and pop culture. He and his trio recorded several original Guaraldi tunes, including the ubiquitous Linus and Lucy, a piece that has been used in all 48 of the Charlie Brown TV specials and several movies to boot. He then set out to redefine the Germanic O Tannebaum in an equally memorable manner. While dismissed by some hard-core jazz musicians for some time after their introduction, many, such as GRP's David Benoit and John Scott Trotter have created magnificent covers of the Guaraldi compositions and arrangements. The five that I have included here are based on the original soundtrack from A Charlie Brown Christmas, and are as much fun to play as they are to listen to. My Little Drum was ultimately not used, but it is one of the finer examples of simple beauty on the album. Also know that I still well up when I remember being six years old watching it for the first time, and the impact that Linus' scripture reading had, and frankly still has on me. Merry Christmas Charlie Brown!.