Song of the Day 12/20: Seymour Swine and the Squeelers, “Blue Christmas”
Elvis Presley made this cowboy Christmas song a classic, but I can’t listen to it without thinking of this porcine parody, which pretty much ruined Elvis’ version for me. Yes, I know it’s politically incorrect to laugh at stutterers. So does everybody else, and they’ve made this a popular if polarizing record anyway.
The novelty single used to be played almost surreptitiously on the radio, usually without attribution. Now it’s widely available on the internet, often billed as Porky Pig’s rendition, but that’s not Mel Blanc on vocals. It’s another voice actor, a guy named Denny Brownlee, who in 1985 was working for a morning-show DJ team in North Carolina dubbed John Boy and Billy (that’s John laughing in the background throughout). They printed up a few thousand 45s that are now collector’s items, selling for about $40 apiece, and when those ran out bootleggers stepped into the breach. That’s why the record spread without most people knowing who made it.
The bootlegged version speeds up the tape, better matching the pitch Mel Blanc used for Porky but also raising the key of the song a step. This is how it originally sounded.
Elvis popularized the song when he included it on his 1957 Christmas LP, still the best-selling Christmas album of all time, but it wasn’t released as a single until 1964. Its place in the Presley canon was cemented when he performed it on his 1968 comeback TV special.
The song was nearly a decade old when Elvis cut it. The first version appeared in 1948, sung by Doye O’Dell of the Sons of the Pioneers, best known as the backing outfit for their former bandmate Leonard Slye when he gained film fame as Roy Rogers. It became a hit the next year for Ernest Tubb.
