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The story behind “The Christmas Song”
The background of “The Christmas Song” is probably the most amusing story of all Christmas music because it was written in the intense heat of a July in Southern California. We have the song today because of two men, Mel Torme and Robert Wells. Mel was a famous entertainer who grew up in show business and became an actor and songwriter. Robert was also a songwriter and good friend of Mel’s.
Mel tells the story:
I saw a spiral pad on his piano with four lines written in pencil. They started, ‘Chestnuts roasting…Jack Frost nipping…Yuletide carols…Folks dressed up like Eskimos.’ Bob didn’t think he was writing a song lyric. He said he thought if he could immerse himself in winter he could cool off.”
Ace Collins gives us the rest of the story:
It had been chestnuts that started Wells’s strange train of thought. He had seen his mother bring in a bag of them to stuff a turkey for dinner. Wells was thrown back to the days when he saw vendors selling chestnuts on New York City street corners. Yet while Wells was after nothing more than an attempt to “think cold,” Mel caught a glimpse of a song in the phrases he had written. With the temperature in the nineties and both men sweating through their clothes, they got to work on what was to become a Christmas classic. It took just forty minutes. The assigned movie…
