In Search For A Christmas One Hit Wonder

I was musing with my girlfriend the other day that all of the biggest stars of the 20th century have at least one Christmas classic. Bing Crosby. Frank Sinatra. Paul McCartney. John Lennon. Stevie Wonder. Elton John. Mariah Carey. I then tried to make the point that there was one giant star missing: Michael Jackson. The proverbial “King of Pop” didn’t leave his indelible mark on the holiday season. That’s when my girlfriend had to remind me that Michael was also a member of the Jackson 5. Their versions of “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” and “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” were inarguable December classics.

My faux pas aside, this got me thinking about how most Christmas classics seem to be by artists who were already very famous. I couldn’t think of any artists who performed a holiday favorite and had little to no career otherwise. Because I don’t trust my intuition, I decided to go look.

One Christ-like Hit to Rule Them All

We are all destined to be holiday artists. You can be Bing Crosby - not only one of the biggest music stars but the first multimedia star, dominating music, movies, television, and radio during the 1940s - and still largely be remembered for a string of holiday hits by those who were born after you died.

Then again, being remembered for a holiday classic might not be the worst thing. As I noted at the start of this piece, the biggest stars of the last century all seem to have left their mark on the holiday season. It like a rite of passage for our most successful stars. But I wanted to see if the opposite existed. Were there musical nobodies whose only true success was a perennial holiday favorite?

To do this, I mined two playlists on Spotify: Christmas Classics and Christmas Hits. The former purports to be “Timeless heart-warming classics from 1940-1980” with songs like “(Everybody’s Waitin’ For) The Man With The Bag” by Kay Starr and “The Holiday Season” by Andy Williams. The latter, by contrast, contains “The biggest Christmas songs of all time” with songs like “Underneath the Tree” by Kelly Clarkson, and “Thank God It’s Christmas” by Queen. 29 songs overlap on both playlists.

Among the 82 artists on the playlists who (a) were not classical composers (e.g., Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky) and (b) were not singing a duet (e.g., “Baby It's Cold Outside” by Michael Bublé & Idina Menzel), I looked up all of their respective songs to land on either the Billboard Hot 100 or Billboard’s Best Sellers in Stores chart. I had to consult two charts because the Hot 100 began in August 1958. The Best Sellers in Stores was one of multiple pop charts that ran from 1940 through the launch of the Hot 100.

If we assume each artist on those playlists has indeed made a Christmas classic, then my general hunch was in the right direction. 80% of artists had at least five songs to chart across both pop charts, meaning they surely had careers outside of Christmas. Still, that left 20% of artists with fewer than 5 hits. I took a close look at those artists to find out if there are any true Christmas one-hit wonders.

There were a few artists who initially seem to fit the bill. Maybe you could make a case for Shakin’ Stevens or The Pogues. Stevens’ “Merry Christmas Everyone” and The Pogues’ “Fairytale of New York” are both well known holiday songs, yet neither artist had any hits on the charts that I was looking at.

That said, I don’t think it would be fair to call either of those artists a Christmas one-hit wonder. Stevens and The Pogues both had a handful of hits throughout the United Kingdom and Ireland. Like these two, I think there are a few other acts we have to discount on technicalities.

• Eartha Kitt: Mostly remembered for “Santa Baby”, Kitt did have a few other hits during 1953 and 1954, one of which was quite notable: “C'est si bon”.

• Darlene Love: Known for “A Marshmallow World”, “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)”, and “Winter Wonderland” - the trio of classics that she sang on the Phil Spector-produced album A Christmas Gift for You - Love did sing lead on a few big hits, though almost none were under her own name. Furthermore, she had a long career as a back-up singer.

• Thurl Ravenscroft: Though he had early success as a member of the vocal group The Mellomen, Ravenscroft made his name as voice actor behind many notable characters, including Tony the Tiger. He also put his voice acting skills to work on “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch”, his surly Christmas classic. It felt unfair to include him because his most notable work was as an actor rather than a singer.

• Band Aid: The supergroup behind the charity single “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”, Band Aid literally has no songs beyond the B-side to their holiday hit. So, while they are a Christmas one-hit wonder, they were assembled to create one song, which isn’t really what we are looking for.

• Laufey: An emergent jazz singer who made her name on TikTok, Laufey is part of a small contingent of artists on these playlists who are very early in their careers and don’t really have a Christmas classic. Spotify has just chosen to include their rendition of an older song, in this case Laufey’s version of “Winter Wonderland”. Anyway, you can’t declare someone a “one-hit wonder” when they haven’t been around for that long.

With all of these artists excluded, who are we left with? Is there any artist who sings a Christmas classic who truly has no other well-known music? Yes. By the data that I have, there is only once choice: Gayla Peevey.

In 1953, 10-year-old Gayla Peevey sang the holiday novelty “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas”. The song was very popular upon release, resulting in the young girl being mobbed in her native Oklahoma City and an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. In the ensuing years, she did record some more music. The only other arguable hit she had was “My Little Marine”, which peaked at number 84 in 1960 under the pseudonym Jamie Horton, an attempt to distance herself from her Christmas song.

In 2014, when Vox dove into the question about why musicians continue to record holiday music, their answer was pretty simple:

But for most artists (and probably even those who genuinely love this music), making a holiday album is about money … Because holiday songs are classics, the copyrights for composition rights often have lapsed, are owned by the public, or never existed at all. That means that when an artist performs a Christmas song, instead of both the copyright holder and the performer needing to be paid, only they (the performer) get any revenue from of the song, which in turn means more money.

But as we’ve seen here, if you want to make one of these lucrative holiday songs, you’re probably going to have to be a pretty notable musician already. If you end up being someone like Gayla Peevey, recording one holiday hit and then never to be heard from again, you will indeed make some money - her interview with the New York Times claimed the song earned around $100k between 2008 and 2016 - but you’ll also need to get another job. Peevey got a degree in elementary education before opening a small advertising agency. Even if a hippopotamus is all that you want, it might not be enough to pay the bills.

Chris Dalla Riva is a musician who spends his days working at Audiomack, a popular music streaming service. He writes a weekly newsletter about popular music and data called Can't Get Much Higher. His writing and research has also been featured by The Economist, NPR, and Business Insider."