Song of the Day 12/14: Buck Owens, “Santa Looked a Lot Like Daddy”

I think most people sour on the Christmas music played on the radio and at commercial establishments because the playlist is too short. It consists of five or six dozen songs familiar to almost everyone, most of them recorded by dozens of artists. They vary only in their arrangement and production – the songs themselves we all know by heart.

The situation is ironic, because hundreds of new songs are released every year hoping to make the Christmas canon, and almost none of them do. (Mariah Carey’s 1994 “All I Want for Christmas Is You” is widely considered the most recent addition, and it took another decade, and an appearance in an inexplicably popular holiday film, to get it there.) Granted, most of the rejected aspirants deserve their obscurity, so when I hear a Christmas song that’s 1) new to me and 2) doesn’t suck, I’m all ears.

That was the case when I heard this tune last month, I forget where. Co-written by Owens and Buckaroos lead guitarist Don Rich – that’s him singing harmony – it sold well when it was released in 1965, making it to No. 2 on Billboard’s Christmas singles chart, but failed to catch on beyond that. Maybe it was held back because the lyrics are just a retread of the already-canonized “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” minus the hint-of-adultery coyness.

I don’t listen to much commercial country, so I didn’t realize the tune got popular among the cowboy-hat singers of the ’90s – Travis Tritt, Brad Paisley and Garth Brooks all covered it – but it took Bowling for Soup to rock it out on their 2009 Christmas LP, “Merry Flippin’ Christmas.”