Welcome back to our annual sampler of holiday music! I guess this is my version of an Advent calendar. Instead of chocolate, you get a song each day.
Some of the songs we’ll try this December may be unfamiliar, and you might prefer that some of them had stayed so. But we always start with a classic, and this one comes from the King himself.
“Santa Claus Is Back In Town” is from 1957, when Elvis had started to do movies but hadn’t gone fully down the road that would eventually lead him to do some pretty pedestrian songs (those songs and movies definitely belong on this site somewhere). He was in the studio making a Christmas album and the album was a song short. So the entourage called Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, the duo who’d written “Hound Dog,” “Trouble” and “Jailhouse Rock” for the King. Not only did they want a song for the album, they wanted it that day.
As Lieber and Stoller wrote in their memoir, they drove right over to Radio Recorders studio in LA. Elvis loved having them around, called them his “good luck charms.” Colonel Tom Parker did not, and asked them why they hadn’t already written the Christmas song they’d only just been called to write. The two went over to a piano in the studio; in maybe fifteen minutes they’d written some basic Christmas-themed lyrics over bluesy chords – just the kind of number Elvis could tear into.
That’s what Elvis thought, too; when he saw the song, he said “now that’s what I call a goddamn great Christmas song!” The ever-cheerful Parker asked – remember, they’d written this song in fifteen minutes! – “What took you so long?” “Writer’s block,” Lieber deadpanned. Elvis got the money take in just a handful of tries and now it’s one of the great holiday songs of its era or any other.
It’s also the first song on my household’s enormous streaming Christmas playlist, by the way. For a long time the first track on that set was “Last Christmas” because my wife was a pretty big Wham! fan in their day; she even saw them in concert. But “Santa Claus Is Back In Town” is so undeniable that I moved it to the top of the list for myself, and now for you.
