You'll Go Down in History...
I couldn’t tell you when I first heard Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. As a child, the song seemed always to have existed, and I’d never have given a thought as to its origins or who actually wrote it. A random social media posting a few days ago revealed the interesting story behind this seasonal ditty, accompanied by some original sketches.
Rudolph was the creation of Robert L May, a struggling writer who wrote advertising copy for the Montgomery Ward department store in Chicago. The store had previously given away colouring books to children at Christmas time, but for the 1939 season decided to produce a story book. May was tasked with creating a cheerful, appealing character in the Walt Disney mould, and chose a reindeer for its associations with Christmas. The commission came at a tough time for May: he was heavily in debt and his wife Evelyn was dying of cancer. She would not survive to see the story completed, but their daughter and her grandparents were immediately won over by May’s tale when it was completed in late August.
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| A page from the original rough layout from 1939. Note the very modern use of 'er...' |
At this point, Rudolph’s story was told in verse, rather than the song by which it has become universally known. The resulting softback book was an immediate hit with shoppers at Montgomery Ward, with 2.4 million copies given away. Wartime restrictions on paper precluded a reprint before 1946 when its success exceeded the first year of publication.
May was approached by the RCA Victor company who wished to do a recording of the poem, but the copyright resided with his employers, Montgomery Ward. In an astonishingly generous gesture, Ward made over the full copyright to May effective from 1 January 1947. The following year, May, who had remarried, enlisted his brother-in-law Johnny Marks to turn the poem into a song. Recording artists of the day were initially reluctant, but finally, a 1949 recording by ‘singing cowboy’ Gene Autry topped the Billboard charts, selling 1.75 million copies on its first release:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjLTDaCUYuQ
Totting up its many cover versions, the song has shifted 150 million copies over the years and lies second only to Bing Crosby’s White Christmas in all time sales. Crosby had passed on Rudolph when the song was first offered to him, but Autry’s success clearly changed his mind, and in 1950 he committed his own version to shellac.
Once enshrined in song, there was no stopping Rudolph. Within a year he was already recognised as a new cultural icon, with the Chicago Tribune describing him as ‘the first new and accepted Christmas legend since Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.’ With the benefit of hindight, they might have added ‘the first of many’ – but few have had the staying power of that shiny-nosed reindeer.
For many Americans, Rudolph’s apotheosis came in 1964 with the production of an animated TV special first shown on December 6 of that year, and recently repeated by NBC on its sixtieth anniversary. Here in Britain, ITV initially held the rights to the special, which was shown the following year on the afternoon of Christmas Day. The BBC came rather late to the party – thirty years late, in fact, with their first screening coming on Boxing Day 1994. Is a sixtieth anniversary repeat too much to hope for here in Britain?
I like a bizarre fact to end on, so here it comes – when searching for a name for his cute creation, Bob May very nearly settled on Reginald… wouldn’t have been quite the same, would it?
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| The 1964 stop-motion animation, beloved of Americans but less well known in Britain |
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