SHERMAN OAKS >> Seventy Christmases ago, Los Angeles crooner Nat King Cole warmed winter hearts the world over with a Yuletide song that began with “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire.”
But who knew the postwar hit describing “Jack Frost nipping at your nose … and folks dressed up like Eskimos” was penned by singer Mel Tormé and lyricist Bob Wells on a sweltering summer day in the San Fernando Valley?
“I am proud, incredibly proud,” said singer James Tormé, 43, of Sherman Oaks, son of the late pop-jazz singer known as the Velvet Fog. “Right song, right time, right artist.”
“This song represents something timeless and lasting — a permanent part of the American holiday.”
• VIDEO: Mel Tormé sings “The Christmas Song,” which he co-wrote with Bob Wells
The romantic Christmas classic first recorded by the Nat King Cole Trio in 1946 still ranks among the top holiday favorites of all time — played from radio stations to digital streams, while being piped into shopping malls and airports across the world.
Officially known as “The Christmas Song,” it ranked No. 7 this week on the Billboard Holiday 100. A 1961 solo Cole recording helped sell six million albums, putting it among the top-selling Christmas albums ever.
More than 100 singers, from Ella Fitzgerald to Christina Aguilera, have matched their pipes to it. Yet the first holiday standard sung by an African-American still captivates listeners with its holiday glow.
“That’s my song!” Cole said the day he first heard it from Tormé and Wells at his long-ago house in Hancock Park.
• VIDEO: Nat King Cole sings “The Christmas Song”
To understand the magic of “The Christmas Song” is to step into a home devoted to the late Tormé by his son James, who told the story of his father’s famous all-time hit.
“My home is the museum that nobody comes to see,” joked the young Tormé from a hillside home south of Ventura Boulevard. “There is so much cool stuff.”
Cool stuff such as the Grammy Awards and gold records by one of the country’s greatest pop-jazz singers, plus the Wurlitzer organ on which the Chicago native arranged all his tunes.
• VIDEO: James Tormé talks about his father, Mel Tormé, who co-wrote “The Christmas Song”
It was in July 1946 that the grandson of Russian-Jewish immigrants, who would later be dubbed “Mr. Christmas,” traipsed from his home in Beverly Hills to the Valley burg of Toluca Lake, where he and Wells hoped to compose a couple of movie scores.
The temperature had soared into the triple digits.
When Tormé arrived, his son James said, his music collaborator was nowhere to be found. So he let himself in and strolled up to a parlor piano. A sweating songwriter soon joined him.
“I saw a spiral pad on his (Wells’) piano with four lines written in pencil,” Tormé, who died in 1999, recalled in his autobiography, “It Wasn’t all Velvet.” “They started, ‘Chestnuts roasting …, Jack Frost nipping …, Yuletide carols …, Folks dressed up like Eskimos.’
“Bob didn’t think he was writing a song lyric. He said he thought if he could immerse himself in winter he could cool off. Forty minutes later that song was written. I wrote all the music and some of the lyrics.”
• PHOTOS: James Tormé’s father, Mel Tormé, co-wrote “The Christmas Song”
With the movie scores in the rearview mirror, the two then raced over to Hancock Park, where they introduced the song to Cole. He told them to play it again. And the rest is history.
Unlike other Christmas hits, James Tormé said, “It has no hook, no chorus, only verses. It just has a really memorable, beautifully constructed chord melody.”
The young Tormé attributes the success of his father’s “The Christmas Song” to an initial recording heard by millions of GIs returning from World War II who came to associate it with world hope and peace. It was also secular, warming hearts across all religions. Wells, its co-writer, died in 1998.
Tormé, an award-winning crooner like his dad, finally recorded a version last year ahead of his second album, “Strange Little Planet,” a soon-to-be-released tribute to the early vocal harmonies of his father.
To commemorate the 70th anniversary of the song’s initial 78 rpm recording, the Sherman Oaks tenor performed it this week with the Modesto Symphony Orchestra and sang it Thursday evening in L.A.’s Pershing Square.
“I feel that song is one of the few Christmas songs of that era … that really nails the concept of just the goodwill we experience at holiday time,” said Tormé, his gray eyes flashing beneath dark brows and a pompadour. “And the way that two people from totally different backgrounds — and who may disagree on everything in this world — might actually pass each other on the street and say, ‘Hey, how you doing? Happy holidays.’
“What could possibly be more relevant in the current age of unbelievable division in our own country … such a good message, year after year.”
