Song of the Day 12/13: Brenda Lee, “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree”

If you venture out in public much you’re probably sick of Christmas music by now, but it’s my policy to listen to only 12 days of Christmas music. I’m starting a day early this year because a record most people have heard their entire lives just made it to No. 1 on the Hot 100.

“Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” was written by the king of Christmas songs, Johnny Marks of “Rudolph” fame, and he specifically wanted Brenda Lee, one of the top-selling artists of the day, to sing it. Lee sounds like an adult but was only 13 when it was recorded in 1958 with Nashville legends Hank Garland on guitar, Floyd Cramer on piano and Boots Randolph on sax. It wasn’t an immediate hit – it reached No. 14 on Billboard’s Hot 100 only in 1960, after Lee reached No. 1 with “I’m Sorry.”

Billboard’s rules for compiling the Hot 100 have varied over the years – some years it opted for a Christmas Singles chart, and “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” was No.3 in 1965. At other points recurrent songs were disallowed and there was no holiday chart, so many now-classic songs were never chart hits. That changed a decade ago when Billboard started tracking digital sales and streaming data. Suddenly old Christmas songs appeared on the Hot 100 every year, culminating in Mariah Carey’s 1994 record, “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” hitting No. 1 in 2019. No 2 that year and several years since: “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.”

Its ascent to the top this year set several records – Lee is the oldest artist to reach No. 1, has the longest gap between No. 1 hits and so forth – and Lee released a new video in which she lip-synchs the tune to a holiday-party background. It’s already been viewed more than 8 million times.