Stories Behind the Best-Loved Songs of Christmas (13 page)

I
n 1938, as the Great Depression wound down and even as the prospect of better times loomed on the horizon, Bob May was looking toward another bleak Christmas. An advertising copywriter for Montgomery Wards, living on a meager salary, May was on the brink of bankruptcy and exhaustion. After fighting cancer for two long years, his wife, Evelyn, was losing the battle. Staring into each other’s eyes, they both knew she wouldn’t last long. Their daughter knew something was wrong too.

On a cold December night, after visiting her bedridden, emaciated mother, their four-year-old, Barbara, climbed up into her father’s lap. “Why isn’t my mommy just like everybody else’s mommy?” she solemnly asked.

How could he explain to a small child that her critically ill mother wanted to play with Barbara, read her stories and—more than anything in the world—be with her for every important moment in life? How could he tell an innocent girl that illness and death were a part of life? That Evelyn wanted
to be like other mothers, but illness had excluded her from all the activities that children and their mothers normally enjoyed? How could he give her the answers she needed without breaking little Barbara’s heart in the process?

In their drafty, two-room Chicago apartment, with the cold north wind rattling the windows, Bob May held his daughter in his arms and struggled to answer the child’s simple question. He recalled the pain he had always felt growing up because he had been considered different. May had been a small, thin child, constantly picked on by other children, called “sissy” and other names he didn’t want to remember. Even in college he was so slightly built that he was often mistaken for a boy.

Despite having a college degree, the country’s sorry financial state had made it almost impossible for May to find any other job than the position at Wards that was far beneath his skill level. Yet when he found Evelyn and they fell in love and married, Bob suddenly felt like a king. For the first time he had a place in the world where it was all right to not fit the mold. Their daughter’s birth seemed to assure the man that good times were just around the corner. But then Evelyn got sick and the cost of fighting the cancer stole not only his wife’s energy but the family’s savings as well. Bob sold everything of value and they lived in what amounted to a slum.

But on that cold, windy night, even with every reason to cry and complain, Bob wanted his daughter to somehow understand that there was hope…and that being different didn’t mean you had to be ashamed. Most of all, he wanted her to know she was loved. Drawing from his own life experiences, the copywriter made up a story about a reindeer with a large, bright red nose. And as little Barbara listened, May described in story form not only the pain felt by those who were different but also the joy that can be found when someone discovers his special place in the world.

The tale was a big hit with Barbara, and thereafter she demanded that her father tell it to her each night. With every new telling the plot grew more elaborate, and the reindeer, Rudolph, became less a fictional character and more a member of the May family.

Unable to purchase a gift for Barbara that Christmas, Bob decided to carefully craft his story about Rudolph into a homemade book, drawing on his own abilities as an artist for the pictures. Many evenings after his wife and daughter had gone to sleep, Bob carefully worked to finish his unique present. But tragedy struck the May family before Christmas could arrive: Evelyn lost her battle with cancer.

Though the last few pages of his gift book were stained with tears, Bob would not give up on Rudolph. He knew that his daughter needed the uplifting story now more than ever. He prayed for the strength to finish the project. His efforts were rewarded when a thrilled Barbara found a completed copy of
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
waiting for her on Christmas morning.

Though he hardly felt like celebrating, a few days later Bob was forced to attend a Montgomery Wards’ employee party. His coworkers in the ad department asked May to share his children’s story that night. Though he didn’t feel like it, he took his book and, at the appointed moment, climbed before the crowd and read the story. After the scores of holiday revelers laughed, they stood and gave May and his children’s tale a thunderous ovation. They all loved
Rudolph
and wanted copies of their own.

The head of the company felt that Wards could benefit from Bob’s gift to his daughter. For a modest sum, Stewell Avery, the chairman of the board of Montgomery Wards, bought all rights from the cash-strapped and debt-ridden May. Avery then had
tens of thousands of copies of
Rudolph
printed and shipped to Wards stores across the nation in time for Christmas 1939. The response was so positive that for the next six years, each child who visited a Santa in a company store got a copy of May’s book.

By 1946 Wards had given away six million copies of
Rudolph
and Stewell Avery was being besieged by offers from every major publishing house wanting to print a new version of the story. In one of the most generous decisions ever made by the head of a large company, the CEO gave all rights back to Bob May. A year later the mass-market release of the book made the Wards copywriter a rich man.

With the book a best-seller, numerous toy and product deals were soon cut and May’s entire life revolved around a story he had told to comfort a worried daughter. Remarried, and with a growing family, Bob couldn’t imagine anything else that could improve his wonderful life. Then his brother-in-law, Johnny Marks, decided to adapt the story into a song.

Marks, who had written music for a number of major recording stars, hoped that the “Voice of Christmas,” Bing Crosby, would record the song “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” When Crosby passed, Marks offered the song to Dinah Shore. She wasn’t interested either. Other artists were given the demo, but none of them
wanted it. Finally cowboy star Gene Autry was approached. Marks figured that Autry might be looking for a follow-up to his earlier Christmas hit, “Here Comes Santa Claus.” Besides, Gene, unlike Bing and Dinah, often sang kids’ songs. Children were his main audience.

Like Crosby, Shore, and the other artists, Autry was unimpressed. He had already discovered a song he felt would become a seasonal children’s classic in “If It Doesn’t Snow This Christmas.” There was no doubt that the favored title was a great song and a perfect children’s single, but Marks begged Gene to give “Rudolph” a second listen. The writer figured that Autry might find a place for the misunderstood reindeer on the “B” side of the record.

Gene took Marks’s demo home and played it for his wife, Ina. As they listened, Autry scoffed that there were already too many songs about reindeer. Ina thought differently. When she heard the line “they wouldn’t let poor Rudolph play in any reindeer games,” it broke her heart. She insisted that her husband cut the song.

Columbia Records wanted Autry to record four sides (songs) for a Christmas release. “Rudolph” was the last song chosen and cut. A few weeks later, when Autry sang “Rudolph” at the Madison Square Garden rodeo, the crowd went wild. As the cowboy’s fans rose to their feet, the underdog deer flew past the other three new Christmas cuts and became the singer’s holiday release for 1949. While Bing Crosby and Dinah Shore looked on, Gene Autry’s “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” streaked to number one on the charts. It would soon become the second best-selling Christmas song of all time, just behind “White Christmas.”

Through books, records, television specials, and movies, for tens of millions of children of all ages, Rudolph has become as
much a symbol for the secular wonder of the Christmas season as Santa Claus. While there are many lessons to be learned from this magical story—including that while it takes courage to be different, being different can be a blessing—there is an even greater lesson from this story and song that is now all but forgotten: When you give a sincere gift of love from the heart, that gift will come back to you magnified beyond all expectations and measures. It is a lesson that the fictional Rudolph and the very real May family are still living more than six decades after the story was first told.

E
ven though “Silent Night” has been recorded more than any other song in history, the fact that we know it at all is a miracle. Created out of necessity and performed in a tiny village on a solitary Christmas Eve by two ordinary Austrians and a tiny choir, this incredibly beautiful and simple carol owes its debut to an organ that wouldn’t play and a priest who wouldn’t hold a Christmas mass without special music. Later, just weeks into the new year, the beloved carol’s march to worldwide popularity was begun by the man who came to fix the faulty instrument.

In 1817, twenty-five-year-old Joseph Mohr was assigned to the position of assistant priest at St. Nicholas Church in Oberndorf, Austria. A lover of music since his boyhood in Salzburg, Mohr was placed in charge of the music used at the small church and he even wrote poems and song lyrics for special services. A seemingly tireless and giving man, he
spent much of his spare time ministering to children from the area’s poorest families. In his desire to serve and inspire, if ever a man fulfilled the full description of the word
pastor
, it was Mohr.

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.

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 years 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.”