Song of the Day 12/14: Johnny Marks, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”

Johnny Marks is responsible for more of the Christmas music you hear than any other composer. He’d be in the running if all he had written was “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” a hit for Brenda Lee, and “Holly Jolly Christmas,” a hit for Burl Ives. But those successes pale beside the song Marks will always be known for, a little ditty about a reindeer with a birth anomaly. It’s the second most-recorded yuletide song after “White Christmas.”

A huge hit for Gene Autry in 1949 and subsequently recorded by at least half of the heavenly choir, “Rudoplh the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and its story were cemented into Boomer consciousness by the 1964 stop-motion animation musical special, which featured a spate of Marks’ holiday tunes. In this video he explains how he came to write the song, then plays a spirited arrangement for the interviewer. One thing he doesn’t mention — the book that inspired the song, written as a Montgomery Ward giveaway, was penned by a guy named Robert L. May, who happened to be Marks’ brother-in-law.

Autry didn’t want to record the song, but his wife convinced him to give it a shot. It reached No. 1 over the holiday, so it was the first No. 1 record of 1950, then fell completely off the chart.