The music
The songs on the broadcast, and the stories behind them
The songs on WMRG's Christmas Eve broadcast are the favorites of radio's golden age, plus a few carols that were old long before radio came along. Most have a better story than you would guess, and three of the wintriest were written in the heat of July.
Every production casts its own guest singers, so the voices change from town to town. Two spots in the broadcast belong to a local high school choir, and the choir chooses its own songs for them. Every other song is the same at every production, and here they all are.
Leroy Anderson started writing it during a July heat wave in 1946, while he was digging trenches in his yard in Connecticut to find some old water pipes. The Boston Pops first played it in 1948, and the words came two years later.
Perry Como recorded it first, and Bing Crosby a month later. Its writer, Meredith Willson, was a radio music director at the time. His musical The Music Man opened on Broadway six years after this song came out.
Lyricist Dick Smith drew on memories of playing in Central Park as a boy. The Central Park in Honesdale, Pennsylvania, where a state historical marker now tells the story.
Irving Berlin's song was first heard on Bing Crosby's radio show, on Christmas Day, 1941. Crosby's original recording was used so heavily that it wore out, and in 1947 he recorded it again. The second version is the one you usually hear today.
On a sweltering July day, Bob Wells jotted down some wintry lines to take his mind off the heat. Mel Tormé saw them, and the two finished the song in under an hour. The Nat King Cole Trio made it famous the next year.
The songwriters were thinking of the bell ringers on New York's street corners at Christmas. The first title was "Tinkle Bell," until Jay Livingston's wife pointed out what "tinkle" means to most people.
In December 1965, the two astronauts of Gemini 6 told Mission Control they had spotted an object in orbit, flown by a pilot in a red suit. Then they played Jingle Bells on a harmonica and a handful of small bells. It was the first time anyone played a musical instrument in space.
Radio made it a hit. Eddie Cantor sang it on his radio show in November 1934, and it went to the top of the sheet music charts. ASCAP, the songwriters' society, found it was the most-played holiday song of the 50 years up to 2016.
Rudolph began in 1939 as a free booklet the Montgomery Ward stores gave to shoppers, and his creator tried out other names first, Rollo among them. Ten years later Johnny Marks made the story a song. Perry Como passed on it, and Gene Autry took it to number one.
Hugh Martin threw the melody in the wastebasket, and his partner Ralph Blane fished it back out. Judy Garland then turned down the first words as too gloomy to sing to a little girl, so Martin rewrote them for the film Meet Me in St. Louis.
Americans heard this music before Russians saw the ballet. Chicago heard the Nutcracker Suite in October 1892, two months before the ballet opened in St. Petersburg. In 1960 Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn swung it as "The Volga Vouty."
Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne wrote it in a July heat wave in Hollywood, when a winter song sounded better to them than a trip to the beach. Listen closely: it never mentions Christmas.
Irving Berlin wrote it for a 1937 film, but the hit came years later from Les Brown's band. After the band played it on Bob Hope's radio show, Brown said, his record company rushed to have him record it. He told them they already had it: his 1946 recording was sitting in their vault.
The tune is Welsh, from a New Year's Eve song called "Nos Galan." In 1862 the Scottish writer Thomas Oliphant gave it new English words about Christmas, and they have been decking halls ever since.
Six-year-old Barry Gordon had the hit in 1955, the same season four other versions made the charts. He grew up to be the longest-serving president of the Screen Actors Guild.
Bing Crosby's record reached number 3 in 1943, in the middle of the Second World War. In December 1965, the Gemini 7 astronauts asked Mission Control to play it for them in orbit, the same week the Gemini 6 crew played Jingle Bells.
Its composer, Adolphe Adam, also wrote the ballet Giselle. You may have heard that O Holy Night was the first music ever broadcast on radio, on Christmas Eve 1906. It is a lovely story, but it rests on a letter written 26 years later, and radio historians doubt it happened.
It was first sung on Christmas Eve 1818 in Oberndorf, Austria, to a guitar: Joseph Mohr sang and played, and Franz Gruber sang with him. In the radio age, the opera star Ernestine Schumann-Heink's broadcasts of it became an American Christmas tradition.
Benjamin Hanby wrote it in New Paris, Ohio, and for decades publishers printed it without his name. His authorship was finally confirmed in 1942, and Ohio named a Benjamin R. Hanby Day in his honor.
The carol comes from England's West Country, where versions of it were sung at the door. The one everybody knows is Arthur Warrell's arrangement, first sung by his Bristol choir in December 1935.
Meet the characters, and read up on your part in the show.
