Song of the Day 12/16: The Quinto Sisters, “A Holly Jolly Christmas”

I’ll wait a moment for El Somnambulo to leave the room. This is, I believe, his least favorite Christmas song, and I doubt that hearing its first recorded version is going to improve his opinion.

The song was made famous by Burl Ives in his role as Sam the Snowman on the animated “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” TV special, first aired in December 1964. But the tune, like several others featured in the show, was initially recorded earlier by a California family of singing children.

The Giaquinto girls were trained by their mother, who got them on “Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour,” the “America’s Got Talent” of its day, and “Sing Along With Mitch,” which has no modern equivalent. How they hooked up with Johnny Marks is unclear — their record company gave them the songs that appear on their only LP, released in summer of 1964. It also included some of the other songs that turned up in the TV special later that year, including “We Are Santa’s Elves,” written specifically for the production. Marks said he wrote “Holly Jolly Christmas” two years earlier, but it had gone unrecorded.

“Holly Jolly Christmas” didn’t become one of the 25 most-heard holiday tunes based on that rendition. It took Ives’ folksy reading on the TV special to do that. His appearance in “Rudolph” convinced him to release his own Christmas album the next year, for which he re-recorded the song with more orchestration and at a slower tempo. That’s the one you hear on the radio, and it always sounds wrong when it comes on.