This legendary Christmas song was once a throwaway B-side. It’s now one of the biggest-selling tracks of all time
In 1938, Robert L. May was given an assignment by the Montgomery Ward department store chain: Come up with a character it could use in a Christmas campaign. The result was the story of Rudolph, a little reindeer given a weird passive-aggressive treatment by his fellow reindeers when some body-shaming was flipped on its head. Reindeers suck when it comes to compassion, apparently.
Montgomery Ward loved Rudolph and the resulting book, Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer, was published. His songwriting brother-in-law, Johnny Marks, turned the story into a song. At first, he threw the song in a drawer because he believed it was the worst song he’d ever written. Later, though, he had a change of heart, so he reworked it into something he didn’t feel ashamed of.
The following year, Johnny showed the song to his sister, Mae. She was married to Gene Autry. She also loved little Rudolph and encouraged Autry, one of the biggest celebrities of the 1930s. He did not like it. Not a bit.
But Mae was insistent and after substantial nagging, Autry went into the studio and cut it on June 27, 1949. But because Autry thought the song was a stiff, Columbia Records would be release it as a children’s record–and as a B-side at that. The big song was supposed to be the A-side, “It Doesn’t Snow on Christmas.” It hit the market as an early 45 RPM release that September.
But by November, it was clear that the A-side wasn’t working. Columbia then re-released the 45, bumping “Rudolph” to the A-side. The goal was of to make it the number one song in America that Christmas. It worked
The first chart to show it at number one was published on January 7, 1950, after selling nearly two million copies that season. For Christmas 1950, it sold another 1.5 million units. .
Autry’s version came back year after year after year. The best anyone can tell, it has sold 12.5 million copies. But then there are all the covers. “Rudolph” has beenr recorded by hundreds of other singer. Total up the sales of all those records and you come up with a figure of something beyond 150 million copies. Where that stands in the pantheon of the best-selling songs of all time is up for debate but it’s somewhere in the top three. (Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” has sold at least 50 million on its own, and it, too, has been covered a gazillion times, so it’s probably number one.)
In December 2018, Autry’s original recording of the song (there was a 1957 re-recording with a full orchestra) once again made the Billboard charts, reaching number 36 that month, rising to number 16 for the chart published January 5, 2019.
Not bad for a song that was first rejected by its writer, then it’s original singer, and its record company. I can’t imagine the royalties the song has generated since 1949.