Dylan's Early Christmas Present

Gary Miller, FilmMagic / Getty Images News of Bob Dylan’s album of Christmas songs shocked fans. But his official historian-in-residence, Sean Wilentz, detects not a single ironic or parodic note in Christmas in the Heart—just a sincere homage to American Christmases past.

When word spread last summer about the contents of Bob Dylan’s second album of the year, Christmas in the Heart, there were almost audible gasps of astonishment on the Dylan fan blogs and Web sites. It mattered little that Dylan was about the only major popular American singer or musician of modern times who had as yet failed to make a Christmas album. Bing Crosby made several, springing in part from the all-time popularity of his “White Christmas,” but the list has run the gamut from Frank Sinatra to Joan Baez, the Ronettes (as part of a compilation album produced by Phil Spector) to the Ventures. Even Jewish singers, including Barbra Streisand and Neil Diamond, released Christmas albums. In 1934, Eddie Cantor (born Edward Israel Iskowitz) had a huge hit with a brand new song that other major singers had turned down as too childish: “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.” One of the most beloved holiday standards, “The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire),” was co-written by the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants whose name, before they changed it, was Torma—Mel Tormé.

One of my favorites of all the Christmas records—recorded by Elvis Presley, titled simply Christmas Album, and released in 1957—includes old standbys such as “White Christmas” and Gene Autry’s “Here Comes Santa Claus” on one side, and carols and black gospel songs on the other. (The latter include Presley and his backup singers, the Jordanaires, performing Thomas A. Dorsey’s “Peace in the Valley,” which was still a daring thing for an up-and-coming white Southern singer to do in 1957; and the performance, for purely spiritual reasons, moves me more with each passing year.)

The album is a sincere, raspy-voiced homage to a particular vintage of popular American Christmas music, as well as testimony to Dylan’s abiding spiritual faith.

But no matter how many singers had come before, to fans who still remember Dylan as the rebellious voice of the counterculture, or even those who have appreciated the older, sophisticated re-assembler of American music and literature, the thought of him recording anything as sentimental as a Christmas album has seemed odd. Is Dylan up to his old tricks, changing his style dramatically just when listeners and critics thought they had him pegged? Is it all just a high-spirited spoof?

In fact, making this record is a generous act that is fully in keeping with Dylan’s past and with his ever-developing art. The crass reason for artists to release special albums of Christmas songs had always been to cash in on the lucrative Christmas sales market. Dylan understands as much—but in the Christian spirit of caritas, he has donated all of his royalties from the album ahead of time, and in perpetuity, to buy meals for millions of needy persons through the organizations Feeding America, Crisis (in Great Britain), and the United Nations’ World Food Program. The artistic reason for cutting special Christmas collections had always been that there are so many wonderful Christmas songs, old and new—not least those in the American songbook of the past century and a half—and ambitious musical artists have been tempted to take them on. This is Dylan’s motivation as well. Some listeners who heard bits and pieces of Christmas in the Heart in advance pronounced it, with knowing irony, a parody of 1950s white-bread music. But the album contains not a single ironic or parodic note. It is a sincere, raspy-voiced homage to a particular vintage of popular American Christmas music, as well as testimony to Dylan’s abiding spiritual faith; hence, its title.

Like Elvis’ Christmas Album, but in a more jumbled way, Christmas in the Heart mixes traditional carols (roughly one-quarter of the album) with Tin Pan Alley holiday songs, one seasonal hit that has become attached to Christmas (“Winter Wonderland”), and a novelty song or two. The album could have appeared as a large chunk of an episode titled “Christmas” on Dylan’s Sirius-XM Radio show, Theme Time Radio Hour, but this time with Dylan performing all of the songs instead of acting as DJ.

But the most salient thing about Christmas in the Heart is how much of it consists of hits written and originally recorded in the 1940s and early 1950s—the years of Dylan’s boyhood when these songs formed a perennial American December soundscape, even for a Jewish kid. “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” first appeared in the film Meet Me in St. Louis in 1944, as sung by Judy Garland. Other standards on the album come from the same era: “The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire)” (1944) later made famous by Nat King Cole; the Andrews Sisters’ “Christmas Island” (1946); Autry’s and, later, Presley’s “Here Comes Santa Claus” (1947); and Dean Martin’s “The Christmas Blues” (1953).

It is also striking that, much as Charley Patton’s shade presides over Dylan’s superb album of 2001, Love and Theft, the benign spirit of Bing Crosby haunts Christmas in the Heart. This is not entirely surprising: After Crosby recorded “White Christmas” in 1942, he practically owned the franchise on making popular recordings of Christmas music. Still, it cannot be coincidental that, of all the Christmas material available to him, Dylan has included three of the songs most closely identified with Crosby—“I’ll Be Home for Christmas” (1943), “Silver Bells” (1952), and “Do You Hear What I Hear?” (1962)—as well as other songs that were successful for Crosby, including “Here Comes Santa Claus” (written in 1947, recorded by Crosby with the Andrews Sisters in 1949), “The Christmas Song” (recorded by Crosby in 1947), and “Winter Wonderland” (written in 1934 and recorded by Crosby in 1962). In all, 13 of the 15 songs on Christmas in the Heart, including all of the carols, were also recorded by Crosby.