Stories Behind the Best-Loved Songs of Christmas (7 page)

D
uring Hollywood’s Golden Era, the movie studios kept the songwriting team of Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane busy. The men worked together and separately on such classic musicals as
Girl Crazy, Broadway Rhythm,
and
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,
as well as scores of other successful presentations. The men also wrote tunes for Broadway and radio that were sung by the likes of Lucille Ball, June Allyson, Lena Horne, Ethel Merman, Mickey Rooney, and Ann Miller. Even though they won many awards and were responsible for millions of record sales, these Hall of Fame writers penned their most beloved hit when MGM asked them to write the music for
Meet Me in St. Louis.
Yet it would take the insight and help of an entertainment legend to put the finishing touches on what would become a timeless holiday offering.

Filmed toward the end of World War II,
Meet Me in St. Louis
starred some of the brightest names at MGM. Mary Astor, Leon Ames, June Lockhart, and Margaret O’Brien were all on
the bill and helped make this motion picture one of the finest musicals ever produced. But the movie ultimately belonged to a twenty-two-year-old screen veteran who, five years before, had charmed everyone as Dorothy in
The Wizard of Oz.

While she was one of Hollywood’s top box office draws, Judy Garland needed a strong film to help her overcome the juvenile image created by her role in
The Wizard of Oz
and a long line of teen musicals that had teamed her with Mickey Rooney. To be recognized as a serious actress, she had to have a part that would allow her to shift from child star to legitimate adult lead.
Meet Me in St. Louis
provided the vehicle Garland needed to take her career over the rainbow and onto solid ground. It was Judy’s own instincts and sincere voice that made one moment in the film an unforgettable holiday gift that still touches people today.

For one of the film’s key scenes, Judy’s character, Esther, was to sing a song to her sad little sister, Tootie. The younger girl was worried that when her family moved to New York from Missouri, Santa would not be able to find her. Esther was concerned as well, but not about Saint Nick. She had just fallen in love and realized the family’s move would end her cherished relationship before it really got started. Though the scene was set on a beautiful Christmas Eve night, both sisters felt they were facing the end of the world.

Looking out over a snow-covered lawn from an upstairs window, Judy’s character wound a music box and began to sing. The songwriters felt that to make the most of the film’s suddenly tender and sad atmosphere, they needed a song that was full of irony and pain. So at the beginning of the song, the men penned, “Have yourself a merry little Christmas; it may be your last; next year we will be living in the past.”

Thinking they had written a perfect song for this touching and tragic moment in the film, Blane and Martin were probably shocked when Garland refused to sing their “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” She sent the song back to the writers demanding that they put a more positive spin on the number. Judy’s desires were backed by the film’s director and her future husband, Vincente Minnelli. Unable to convince either of those powers that their instincts were right, Blane and Martin went back to work.

Even though Blane and Martin had guessed right about the needs of the movie, Garland had a better instinct for what the country needed at that moment in history. During much of the past three years Judy had spent every spare moment entertaining American troops. She had visited with the young men, sung for them, and read the fan mail they had written to her. She knew that most of them were young men her age who had spent years fighting for their lives, defending a nation. What these men wanted—more than anything else—was to somehow live through the war and come back home. They wanted,
needed
to believe that there was a lot of life left in front of them.

As she entertained the G.I.s, Garland discovered that her biggest hit, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” had a much deeper meaning for the men than it did for the casual listener. For millions on the battle lines, “over the rainbow” meant coming home. Judy felt the new Christmas song that would be a part of
Meet Me in St. Louis
needed to bring the same kind of hope as “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” did.

By request, Blane and Martin obligingly wrote a far more upbeat, new opening. There was an obvious encouraging tone in “let your heart be light; from now on our troubles will be out of sight” that presented the kind of message Garland felt America needed. Judy embraced the revised “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” with a passion and emotion that few could understand. This wasn’t just another song to Garland; it was a prayer for the millions wanting nothing more than to be home for Christmas. In the new version of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” listeners in the U.S. and overseas could believe that the war was almost over, that families would be reuniting, and that the promised joy that had been a part of Christmases past would soon be here again.

As moving as Judy’s performance of the song in the film was, the Decca single that was released for Christmas 1944 was just as touching. Garland’s rich voice revealed the full range of emotions found in the song’s lyrics. In an era when Christmas songs seemed to mean more than they ever had before, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” was one of the best. When Judy sang it to soldiers at the Hollywood Canteen, there wasn’t a dry eye in the place. When battle weary men in Europe and the Pacific heard it, they clung to the song as if their dreams were carried on each word and note.

For the next twenty-five years of her often troubled life, Judy Garland seemed to always come alive during Christmas. The holidays somehow renewed the star. It was almost as if singing her signature Christmas standard gave her the gift of new vision and hope, just as the song did for millions of others who felt lonely and sad during the holiday season.

They say that timing is everything. If the original version of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” would have worked in
Meet Me in St. Louis
, it probably wouldn’t have jumped off the
screen and taken on a life of its own. But thanks to the instincts of Judy Garland, the song became far more than a moment in a film; it became a timeless, emotional statement about what we all want to have each year, a very merry little Christmas and hope for tomorrow.

M
any view Henry Wadsworth Longfellow as America’s greatest poet. Today, 120 years after his death, he is still a giant in literature, and many consider his work inspiring and uplifting. Yet when he wrote, “Believe me, every man has his secret sorrows, which the world knows not; and oftentimes we call a man cold, when he is only sad,” Longfellow was surely writing from his own experiences. He knew what it was like to be down and forlorn.

During the nineteenth century—a time when many Americans were first-generation immigrants—Longfellow’s family had already been on American shores for several generations. The first Longfellow came to America from Yorkshire, England, in 1676. Among Henry’s fabled ancestors were John and Priscilla Alden, as well as an uncle who was a colonial general in the Revolutionary War. Henry was the son of well-known New England lawyer Stephen Longfellow. Born in 1807 in the picturesque seaport of Portland, Maine, the boy first went to school at the age of three. By six, he was already
reading classical literature and writing stories. At the tender age of nineteen, the college graduate was given the position of professor of modern language at Bowdoin College. In this role, he not only taught during school terms but also traveled and studied in Europe.

A man of the world by twenty-two, Longfellow wrote his own textbooks. Married in 1831, by 1834 Henry was already viewed as one of his country’s most respected scholars. It was hardly a surprise when Harvard wooed him away from Bowdoin. With a wonderful wife, a dynamic reputation, and a fine house overlooking the Charles River, Henry seemed to have it all. Yet, tragically, within a year of his move to Massachusetts, his wife became ill and died.

In an effort to deal with his grief, a mournful Longfellow poured himself into his teaching. It took seven years before he recovered enough from his loss to remarry. With a new love as his foundation, the good life returned to the scholar. One after another, the Longfellows welcomed five children into their home. During this happy period Longfellow wrote such classic poems as “Evangeline,” “The Song of Hiawatha,” and “The Courtship of Miles Standish.” By 1860 he had found wealth and worldwide fame, lionized as one of the greatest writers ever produced by the New World.

However, at the very moment when Henry should have been celebrating the joys brought by his talents, financial security, and stature, tragedy again struck. In spite of being given honorary degrees at Oxford and Cambridge, and an invitation to Windsor by Queen Victoria, 1861 was a year filled with great sadness. While lighting a match, Longfellow’s second wife’s clothes caught fire and she burned to death. Then, even before he could regain his stride, his faith was again challenged by the American Civil War.

Longfellow hated the Civil War. It tore at the very fiber of his being to see the United States of America—a nation his family had fought to create and help build—divided by the greed and sinful nature of man. An ardent believer in the power of God to move on earth, the poet all but pleaded with his Lord to end the madness of the war. When his oldest son, nineteen-year-old Charles, was wounded in battle and sent home to recover, the poet’s prayers turned to rage.

As Henry tended his son’s injuries, saw other wounded soldiers on Cambridge’s streets, and visited with families who had lost sons in battle, he asked his friends and his God, “Where is the peace?” Then, picking up his pen and paper, he tried to answer that haunting question.

It was the ringing of Christmas bells that probably inspired the cadence found in his writing on December 25, 1863. That day Longfellow hung his whole message on the tolling of the church bells. Yet while most Christmas verse is light and uplifting, America’s greatest poet set his lyrical ode in tones that were largely dark and solemn.

In the original seven stanzas of “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day,” Longfellow focused on Christmas during the Civil War. In his lines one can easily sense the writer’s views of slavery
and secession; his words divide the war into an effort of God’s love and understanding against the devil’s hate and anger. It would have been a poem completely void of hope, a testament to the power of Satan, if Henry hadn’t finished his work with two verses that embraced the thought, “God is not dead, nor doth He sleep. The wrong shall fail, the right prevail, with peace on earth, goodwill to men.” This was a poem that would inspire not only the Union, but soon the whole world.

Almost ten years later, in 1872, an Englishman named John Baptiste Calkin decided to marry music to Longfellow’s Christmas poem. The organist and music teacher wrote a soaring melody that contained the power to not only convey the bleak imagery of Longfellow’s sadness in the poem’s tormented first few verses, but the poet’s deep and abiding faith in the ode’s exhilarating conclusion. When published, this combination of British music and American lyrics quickly made “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” one of the most popular carols in both Europe and the United States. Except for the deletion of the two verses that dwelled on the poet’s view of the Civil War, the song remains the same today as it was when first published.

While it has been arranged in anthem form for numerous choirs and recorded countless times by a wide variety of artists, “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” is still a very personal song. With its plea for sanity in a world often gone insane, with its hope that somehow the joy, comfort, and peace that Christ was born to offer would be realized, the song has been a musical anchor for millions during the dark days of World War I, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. Even today, when conflicts and turmoil rule so many different lives, millions still ask where peace and goodwill reside. The answer is one that Longfellow not only knew, but also shared, in his most beloved work.