By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
I’ve never seen chestnuts roasting on an open fire, nor eaten any of them, but every December they make me think of Christmas. That’s because my mother loved Nat King Cole.
They never met in person. It was a musical affair.
Born in 1930 as the youngest of six children, Mom grew up in Burlington, Vermont. By the end of her first decade of life, radios (but not TV sets) were common in most American households, including where she lived.
Mom reached her teenage years while World War II raged in the mid-1940s. To distract herself from worrying about two brothers and one brother-in-law fighting in Europe, Mom listened to music on the radio.
The man topping the charts back then was Nat King Cole. Soon he was my mother’s favorite singer. Nat worked hard for that honor.
Nathaniel Adams Coles was born on St. Patrick’s Day—March 17, 1919—in Montgomery, Alabama. When he was four years old, his family moved to Chicago where his father Edward became a Baptist minister.
The Coles loved music.
Nat’s mother Perlina—the church organist—taught him to play the organ and piano at an early age. As a youth, Nat joined a band and snuck out at night to visit jazz clubs. By age 15, he’d dropped out of high school to pursue a music career.
Nat quickly found work as a jazz pianist in the mid-1930s but with his distinctive voice, soon he was singing songs too. Eventually, he adopted the professional stage name of Nat King Cole.
By the 1940s, Nat’s voice was a fixture on radios like the one in my mother’s home. It was the beginning of a marvelous career that would span three decades.
During that time Nat sang over 100 songs that became hits on the pop music charts. He sold some 50 million records.
From 1956 to 1957, Nat even had his own variety show on NBC, the first nationally broadcast television program hosted by an African American.
Nat performed for President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s televised 1956 birthday celebration and sang at the Republican National Convention that same year. Cole also attended the Democratic National Convention in 1960 and performed at JFK’s 1961 inaugural gala.
It’s fortunate he launched that wonderful career so early in his life, because he left us way too soon. Nat King Cole died of lung cancer at just age 45 on February 15, 1965, the day after Valentine’s Day. His final album—one of his finest and released just before he passed away—was titled L-O-V-E.
I’m not sure exactly which of Nat’s songs first made Mom one of his biggest fans.
It may have been “(Get Your Kicks) on Route 66” or “(I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons,” both released in 1946. Perhaps it was the 1950s hit “Mona Lisa.” No matter what started it, by the time Nat sang “Unforgettable” in 1951, Mom was hooked.
A parent is the first musical influencer in the life of his/her child. That’s why my kids like The Beatles, Elton John, and Queen. And that’s why I like Nat King Cole.
As I was growing up, we did not have a lot of record albums in our house. We did, however, have Nat’s greatest hits, and we had a 1963 Christmas album on which Nat sang a song about chestnuts roasting on an open fire.
His rendition of that now-classic melody has its own interesting backstory.
In 1945, the Jewish composers Robert Wells and Mel Tormé unintentionally wrote a Christmas holiday hit. They did it during the blazing heat of a California summer, when Wells was simply trying to cool down by writing down his winter memories.
One of them was “chestnuts roasting on an open fire” with “Jack Frost nipping at your nose.” Tormé liked the words Wells wrote so much that he composed music for them.
Wells and Tormé named their masterpiece “The Christmas Song.”
Nat King Cole recorded it three different times. The last (and best) time was for a 1963 album (with the same name) produced by Ralph Carmichael, a composer/arranger now regarded as one of the pioneers of contemporary Christian music.
Like Nat, Carmichael had impressive music industry credentials. He wrote for Elvis Presley, the Carpenters, Ella Fitzgerald, Bing Crosby, Peggy Lee, and Roger Williams. He also scored several films produced by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.
The 1963 album “The Christmas Song” was Nat’s only complete album of Christmas songs. It also was a best-selling album of the 1960s, reaching number 1 for two weeks on Billboard’s holiday music chart.
My mother was one of the millions of persons who bought the album, and we listened to it very December while I grew up. But that’s not the only place I heard it.
In the early 1970s, my family drove a champagne-gold colored Ford Maverick, an inexpensive two door compact sedan. As explained in my 2021 Monastery Mornings memoir, we used it to visit our friends—Trappist monks—living at our second home, a Catholic monastery in Northern Utah.
As youngest in the family, I always was stuck in the back seat, an automotive exile leaving me far removed from control of the car radio. More often than not my mother—presiding from the all-powerful passenger-side front seat—chose our travel soundtrack.
She always turned the radio dial to 570 on the AM channel. KLUB 57 played the music of Mom’s teenage years from the 1940s.
And so, on most trips to the old Huntsville Trappist monastery, we listened to Glenn Miller’s big band sounds, heard Bing Crosby and Perry Como croon, and were serenaded by Nat King Cole, including his Christmas music.
If nothing else, overexposure destined and doomed me to enjoy Nat and his famous Christmas tune almost as much as my mother. But all that happened not just due to osmosis.
Nat’s 1963 stereophonic version of “The Christmas Song” starts off with intriguing piano notes as well as elegant violin strings. And then Nat starts singing with his smooth and rich baritone voice and near-perfect pitch.
The full background orchestra arranged and conducted by Carmichael is the exclamation point on what is, quite simply, a very lovely song. Nat’s rendition is generally regarded as the definitive version.
In 2022, the Library of Congress selected it for preservation in the United States National Recording Registry as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
No wonder Mom played it so often, and I still play it every year.
My mother gave me many wonderful things. Two of the best—especially each December—are the gift of Nat King Cole’s voice and the vision of chestnuts roasting in my mind.
***
“The Christmas Song”
Chestnuts roasting on an open fire.
Jack Frost nipping at your nose.
Yuletide carols being sung by a choir
And folks dressed up like Eskimos.
Everybody knows, a turkey and some mistletoe
Help to make the season bright.
Tiny tots with their eyes all aglow
Will find it hard to sleep tonight.
They know that Santa’s on his way.
He’s loaded lots of toys and goodies on his sleigh.
And every mother’s child is gonna spy
To see if reindeers really know how to fly.
And so I’m offering this simple phrase
To kids from one to ninety-two.
Although it’s been said many times, many ways,
Merry Christmas to you.
(Photos by Erin and Adam Dahlberg.)
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.
