Stories Behind the Best-Loved Songs of Christmas

by Ace Collins

  In 1818, during a particularly cold winter, Mohr was making last-minute preparations for a special Christmas Eve mass, a service he had been planning for months. Everything from music to message was in place. But as he cleaned and readied the sanctuary, the priest encountered an unfathomable dilemma: St. Nicholas’s organ wouldn’t play. A frantic Mohr struggled with the old instrument for hours, making adjustments, fiddling with keys, stops, and pedals, even crawling behind the console to see if he could find a problem. In spite of his efforts, the organ remained silent, its voice as still as a dark winter’s night.

  Realizing he could do nothing else, the priest paused and prayed for inspiration. He asked God to show him a way to bring music to his congregation on the year’s most meaningful day of worship. Mohr would find the answer to his prayer born from events initiated almost two years before St. Nicholas’s organ played out.

  In 1816, while assigned to a church in Mariapfarr, Mohr had written a Christmas poem. The six unadorned stanzas were inspired on a winter’s walk from his grandfather’s home to the church. Though he had shared the words with a few friends, the priest never sought to have the work published nor attempted to come up with a melody to go with his words. When Mohr was transferred to the church in Oberndorf, he had brought the poem along with his few personal possessions.

  Digging “Stille Nacht! Heilige Nacht!” from his desk, Mohr read over the words two years later. Up until that moment the verses hadn’t seemed very important to the priest, but as he read them again, it was as if the Lord was tossing him a lifeline of hope. Bouyed by new and unfolding expectations, he shoved the worn paper into his coat pocket and rushed out into the night. Only hours before the Christmas Eve midnight mass, the priest fought his way through snow-covered streets.

  On that same evening, thirty-one-year-old schoolteacher Franz Gruber was struggling to stay warm in his drafty apartment over the schoolhouse. Though he had once studied organ with noted teacher Georg Hardobler, he now played the instrument only for St. Nicholas’s modest services. As he went over notes from one of his lessons, Gruber must have been surprised to hear an insistent knock at his door and find Father Mohr on the other side. By that time, the priest should have been at the church preparing for services, not making rounds, visiting old friends and colleagues.

  After a quick “Merry Christmas,” the obviously agitated priest pulled the teacher to the apartment’s small table and signaled for Gruber to sit down beside him. In a distressed tone, Mohr explained the problem they faced. After he convinced Gruber nothing could be done to fix the organ, Mohr showed Franz his poem.

  “Franz,” he begged, “can you write music to these words that can be easily learned by our choir? Without the organ, I guess the song will have to be played on a guitar.” The priest glanced at the clock on the table, and added, “The time is so short!”

  Studying the poem, Gruber nodded his head. The look in his eyes and the smile on the schoolteacher’s face showed that he felt up to the challenge. Confident again that God somehow had a special plan for this Christmas Eve, Mohr raced back across the snow to the church, leaving Gruber alone with his thoughts, a ticking clock, and a prayer for inspiration.

  Silent night, holy night!

  All is calm, all is bright.

  Round yon Virgin, Mother and Child.

  Holy infant so tender and mild,

  Sleep in heavenly peace,

  Sleep in heavenly peace.

  Silent night, holy night!

  Shepherds quake at the sight.

  Glories stream from heaven afar

  Heavenly hosts sing Alleluia,

  Christ the Savior is born!

  Christ the Savior is born.

  Silent night, holy night!

  Son of God love’s pure light.

  Radiant beams from Thy holy face

  With the dawn of redeeming grace,

  Jesus, Lord at Thy birth.

  Jesus, Lord at Thy birth.

  A few hours later the two friends met at St. Nicholas. There, in a candlelit sanctuary, Gruber shared his new music with Mohr. The priest approved, and after learning the guitar chords, rushed it to the choir members, who were waiting for their scheduled rehearsal. What should have taken weeks was accomplished in hours. In the little time they had, Mohr and Gruber taught the choir members the four-part harmonies to the last two lines of each verse.

  Just after midnight, Mohr and Gruber stood in front of the main altar and introduced their simple little song. As they sang, they couldn’t have guessed that “Stille Nacht! Heilige Nacht!” would be remembered not only the next Christmas in their small village, but almost two hundred years later, around the world.

  A few weeks into the new year, Karl Mauracher, an organ builder and repairman from the Ziller Valley, traveled to Oberndorf to fix St. Nicholas’s organ. While Karl worked, Mohr shared the story of how he and Gruber had used a guitar and an original composition to save the Christmas Eve mass. He sang the song he considered an answered prayer. Impressed, the repairman jotted down the words and learned the melody. Over the next few years, as he went about his profession, Mauracher introduced “Stille Nacht!” to many churches and towns.

  During the nineteenth century, Austria and Germany had scores of traveling folk singers. Most of the groups were composed of family members who not only sang but worked specialized jobs to earn their keep as they journeyed from town to town. In 1832, the Stasser family folk singers appeared in a small community where Mauracher had recently installed an organ. During their stay, the family of singing glovemakers learned “Stille Nacht!” A few weeks later, at a concert in Leipzig, the Stassers performed the carol in front of a large crowd that had gathered for a fair. Moved by the song’s deep spiritual message, King William IV of Prussia requested his nation’s Cathedral Choir sing “Stille Nacht!” at his annual Christmas celebration. Due in part to the king’s favor, “Stille Nacht!” stormed across much of Eastern Europe and pressed west to Great Britain.

  In December of 1839, another Austrian family group, the Rainers, traveled to New York. As part of one of their performances. the family sang “Stille Nacht!” in English for a huge crowd at Trinity Church. It was such a popular number that other local groups began to sing it in churches. By the Civil War, “Silent Night” had become America’s most popular Christmas carol. During the battle between the Union and Confederacy, it was not unusual for hostilities to cease for four days starting on December 25, with troops from both sides laying down their arms to come together to worship, share gifts, read Scripture, and sing “Silent Night.”

  As the carol’s popularity spread, so did the legends about its origin. At various times music publishers gave composition credit to Beethoven, Bach, and Handel. It was only when Franz Gruber began a letter-writing campaign to newspapers and publishers, producing a copy of one of his first arrangements, that the true origin of “Silent Night” was finally recognized. Yet even with the melody’s rightful history secured, fanciful stories about the song’s lyrics continued to spread.

  Joseph Mohr died penniless in 1848, before being recognized as the carol’s writer. Without the priest alive to refute the story, it became generally accepted that the song’s lyrics had been written in haste after it was discovered that mice had chewed through the organ’s bellows and disabled the instrument rather than the fact that it was old and simply broke in the extremely cold temperatures. Though a wonderful story and still accepted by millions, it is one of fiction much more than fact.

  By the late 1800s “Silent Night” had been translated into more than twenty languages and was a vital part of Christmas celebrations all around the world. And by the twentieth century, like the celebration of Christmas itself, “Silent Night” had moved out of the church and into the mainstream.

  In 1905 the Haydn Quartet cut the first recording of “Silent Night.” This first trip up the popular hit parade was just the beginning; literally thousands of others from around the world would record the simple carol in year
s to come. By 1960, the carol was recognized as the most recorded song in music history.

  Despite its popularity, “Silent Night” remains in most minds what it was written to be—a simple, direct ode of praise. Created to make a Christmas service more meaningful, the old Austrian carol is as powerful and fresh today as it was on that first Christmas Eve it was sung at St. Nicholas Church. An answer to prayer, few words have better captured the story of a Savior born in a manger than “Silent Night.”

  26

  SILVER BELLS

  Jay Livington and Ray Evans rank as one of the most successful songwriting teams in history. With Livington composing the music and Evans writing the lyrics, the men scored time and time again with award-winning hits such as “To Each His Own” and “Another Time Another Place.” By the early ‘50s, having already taken Academy Awards for “Buttons and Bows” and “Mona Lisa,” they were two of the most sought after songwriters in the country; every movie studio, radio show, and recording artist wanted their latest offering. Though they scored with hundreds of songs and sales of their tunes climbed into the hundreds of millions, the two are now best remembered for a strange song about a horse and a beautiful ballad about Christmas. Both songs are so popular that most Americans of all ages can sing the words to them.

  In 1951 Bob Hope was one of the world’s brightest stars. His name not only guaranteed big box office response at movie theaters, he already was a longtime radio star and had made a successful move to television. Beloved for his selfless work with U.S.O. tours in World War II and then Korea, Hope was “Mr. Christmas” to many members of the U.S. Armed Forces, even though he had never scored a hit with a Christmas song. From 1942 on, Bob spent every holiday season with men and women in uniform.

  Paramount Pictures scheduled Hope to film a remake of the movie The Lemon Drop Kid, a perfect vehicle for his trademark humor. In the film, Hope would play a small-time gambler who owed a large sum of money to the mob. Unable to pay it off, the Kid would work a scam. In the midst of trying to outcon the cons, Bob’s character would fall in love, reform, and escape a large number of near-fatal attacks. Of course, Hope would also find time to sing a song or two. With a cast of great characters surrounding the star, the cast and film crew began work in early 1951.

  Livington and Evans, who had put together the wonderful score for Hope’s box office smash Paleface, were called in to write the score for The Lemon Drop Kid. As they reviewed the script, they noted that it was a holiday movie with a new twist. Holiday Inn, Christmas in Connecticut, and a long list of other films had always been set in the country; now, for the first time in Hollywood history, songwriters were being asked to come up with a Christmas number that didn’t embrace the pleasures of rural life during the holidays. It was a perspective American movies and songs had yet to explore.

  After determining where music was needed, the songwriters had a brainstorming session in Evans’s office. As they discussed the script, one of the men picked up a small silver bell and played with it. The tiny noisemaker magically transported the writers to the sidewalks of New York. As they began to think about the way streets and display windows were decorated, the attitudes of happy store managers and anxious shoppers, and the looks on expectant children’s faces, the song they needed for Bob Hope and costar Marilyn Maxwell’s duet quickly came together.

  The team had been writing hits long enough to know when they had one, so Livington and Evans couldn’t wait to take their latest work to the studio. But before the duo could share their latest composition with Bob Hope, they decided to sing it to Ray’s wife. The men were chagrined and confused when the woman giggled as they sang. As she doubled over in laughter, the team wondered what had gone wrong.

  When Mrs. Evans composed herself, she informed the duo that the chorus was all wrong. It wouldn’t work, she assured them. She pointed out that when others heard it, they would laugh as hard as she had.

  The song’s problem could be traced to the small bell that served as its inspiration. Livington and Evans had named their song after that tiny instrument, and the song began, “Tinker bell, tinker bell, it’s Christmastime in the city.” As the writers once again listened to the words, they grinned along with Mrs. Evans. They quickly crossed out the word tinker and substituted the word silver.

  When released, The Lemon Drop Kid was a moderately successful movie. Yet the film would have probably been quickly forgotten if not for the song “Silver Bells.” Film patrons fell in love with it. This new genre of Christmas song fit well in the new America. After World War II, Americans had moved to urban areas in droves. This migration meant that more and more people were experiencing the bustle of holidays in cities than ever before. Livington and Evans’s unadorned descriptions of everything from stoplights blinking red and green (the yellow caution light had not yet been added) to thousands of shoppers rushing from store to store struck a chord with millions who were exposed to those things every day. The bells that anchored the chorus were everywhere too. They rang in cathedral towers, jingled along horse-drawn carriages, and were constantly chiming in the hands of men and women seeking donations to help feed the poor and needy. In the city, bells, much more than anything else, signaled the coming of the holiday season. “Silver Bells” fully captured this experience in song.

  Bob Hope may have introduced “Silver Bells” to the world, but it was his friend Bing Crosby who cashed in on the song’s market potential. Bing recorded the hit version of the Livington-Evans collaboration, and soon everyone else seemed to be recording the hit too. When President John F. Kennedy declared it his favorite Christmas song, “Silver Bells” rang out loudly in the White House. By the year 2000, hundreds of different versions of the song had rung up more than 150 million record sales, proving that JFK wasn’t the only one who embraced this sentimental holiday offering as a favorite.

  After completing The Lemon Drop Kid, Bob Hope continued to sing “Silver Bells” to U.S. troops at Christmas for more than four decades. His work in Vietnam and other combat arenas helped make him the most honored private citizen in United States history. Hope’s holiday entertainment junkets to the far parts of the globe also earned him the label of “the G.I.’s Santa Claus.”

  Though they could have retired and lived on the royalties from their Christmas hit, Jay Livington and Ray Evans continued to write. In 1956 they won their third Oscar for “Que Sera Sera” and scored again with the title song from Tammy. Yet it was the theme song for a very unique television series that ranks right up there along with “Silver Bells” as their most remembered work. The same writing duo that composed the incomparable “Mona Lisa” and incredible “Silver Bells” also gave the world the whimsical and silly theme from “Mr. Ed.”

  27

  THERE’S A SONG IN THE AIR

  In the summer of 1904, Karl P. Harrington was working on the most important assignment he had ever been given. The teacher, composer, and church music director was helping to assemble a new Methodist hymnal. As he reviewed hundreds of familiar songs previously published in other songbooks, Harrington carefully considered the task at hand. In between the covers of the hymnal had to be songs that would address every worship need of countless different congregations. That meant he had to include music that could be sung by huge church choirs in places like Boston and by tiny congregations in places like Salem, Arkansas. Every pastor and song leader would be depending upon the songs included; other than the Bible itself, his project would be the most important tool found in most churches. The missionary task of leading the lost to Christ—and inspiring the saved to work for the Lord—would be helped or hindered by the songbook. Even for a man of Harrington’s education and experience, the job he faced was overwhelming.

  The middle-aged Harrington had been chosen for the project because he had studied at a dozen different colleges in the United States and Europe. A talented organist, he knew worship music well and had penned several original songs while also developing new arrangements for dozens of recognized work
s. As a Wesley University music professor, he had the time to properly study thousands of songs and consider their merits. Yet even though his hours spent with students gave Harrington a new perspective and energy, his months employed studying hymns and making cuts in the hymnal seemed to zap his vigor and strength. Why have I accepted this job? he must have wondered. What chance do I have of satisfying the needs of everyone who picks up the songbook? Can I find one song that will touch all those who use this hymnal?

  Harrington loved to read; it was one of the ways he relaxed. In an attempt to get away from the demands of his work, the teacher often turned to one of his favorite authors, Josiah Holland. As he toiled over the hymnal, his reading of Holland’s works became more and more of a refuge.

  Josiah Holland was born in 1819 in Massachusetts. After trying to master the new art of photography, Holland went to college and became a doctor. Soon, however, his love for literature exceeded his passion for medicine. By the time he reached the age of forty, he had given up his practice and was on the staff of the Springfield Republican. A few years later he founded Scribner’s magazine. While editing the prestigious monthly, Holland began to write novels. His works of fiction reflected his own moral upbringing. In each of his heroes readers found strong figures who might have been tempted, but never strayed far from the straight and narrow.

  In the midst of turning out several best-selling books, Holland also wrote poetry. A deeply religious man, the editor used the story of the first Christmas to create a poem for an 1874 Sunday school journal. “There’s a Song in the Air” combined a sweetness and majesty rarely found in holiday verse. The way the writer mixed the image of a young mother, her new baby, the events of the birth, and the revelation that this child was the King of all creation was indeed inspired. Yet this unique view of Christ’s birth might have been lost if the author hadn’t decided to reprint it in an 1874 book entitled Complete Poetical Writings. Three decades later, more than twenty-five years after Holland had died, it was Complete Poetical Writings that Karl Harrington chose to help him escape from the rigors of finding songs for a hymnal.