You better watch out,
you better not cry,
you better not pout
I’m telling you why
because this is the story behind one of the most popular Christmas songs ever written!
The year was 1932. While riding on the subway in New York City, songwriter Haven Gillespie had an idea for a song pop into his head. He pulled an envelope from his pocket and before he got off the train he had written the lyrics to Santa Claus is Coming To Town.
Gillespie was a songwriter in New York’s fabled Tin Pan Alley who is credited with writing many popular songs at the time, including “You Go To My Head” and “That Lucky Old Sun”. He shared the lyrics with John Frederick Coots, an accomplished American songwriter, but Coots initially dismissed it as being a kids song. A kids song! Of course it is, it’s about Santa Claus! Aren’t we all kids at Christmas time?
As it turned out, Coots had a change of heart and wrote the melody in 10 minutes!
Unfortunately others in the music business felt the same way that Coots initially had so they could not find anyone to produce it.
The completed song wasn’t even sung until 2 years later when Coots and then his wife successfully lobbied Eddie Cantor to sing it on his weekly radio show.
So on his Thanksgiving radio show in 1934 Eddie Cantor opened with Santa Claus Is Coming To Town. With it being at the height of the depression, Cantor added a couple of lyrics encouraging people to help out those who were down on their luck.
The response from the American public was immediate and overwhelming! The morning after the broadcast, there were orders for 100,000 copies of sheet music for the song and, by the time Christmas rolled around, sales of the song’s sheet music had reached an incredible 400,000!!
In the midst of the depression? Wow. Those sales figures are truly astounding.
Of course, without the song having been recorded, the only way for the public to get access to the song was to get the sheet music and then hopefully have a piano or other instrument, along with someone who knew how to play the instrument, to learn the song so others could sing along to it. Compare that to simply downloading a song in today’s world!
As it turns out, the song was actually recorded one month before the radio show. This earliest known recording was on October 24, 1934 by banjo player Harry Reser and his band with Tom Stacks on vocals.
One year later, Tommy Dorsey and his orchestra would release a version, featuring Cliff Weston and Edythe Wright on vocals.
Santa Claus Is Coming To Town would go on to become one of the most recorded Christmas songs ever. According to the performance rights organization ASCAP in December 2014 Santa Claus Is Coming To Town was the most performed holiday song EVER.
Prior to the 1960s, the most popular versions were by Bing Crosby with The Andrews Sisters and Perry Como.
Once the young kids started digging that rock and roll, more and more artists lent their talents to this holiday favorite. The Four Seasons version was the highest charting version, reaching number 23 on the charts in 1963. Yes, Frankie Valli hit it out of the park with his “You better not cry yi yi”. Other artists that recorded versions were The Jackson 5, The Supremes, Charlie Daniels, George Strait, Mariah Carey, Michael Buble‘, and Justin Bieber. In what can only be described as You Got To Hear It To Believe It, even Alice Cooper recorded his version of the song in 2008. Welcome to Alice’s Christmas Nightmare!!!!!
Of course the most popular version of the rock era is the version by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. Recorded live at C.W. Post College on December 12, 1975, the song became such a staple of radio airplay that it routinely made the charts for years in the months of November and December. It took 10 years for the song to be available to purchase, finally being released as the B-side of the single “My Hometown” in 1985, a single that yours truly still owns to this day. I find it quite ironic that for the first 10 years of Bruce’s version, you could only hear it on the radio – coming full circle to when Eddie Cantor first sang Santa Claus Is Coming To Town on his radio show almost 40 years earlier.
I would like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and a safe and joyous New Year. And to those who are fortunate enough to have Santa bring them a shiny new drum, or a trumpet, or even an electric kazoo, remember – PLAY IT LOUD!!!
