Some of the Christmas songs we’ve highlighted so far have been written in a very short amount of time, when a gust of inspiration fills the sails in a songwriting teams’ heads. Mel Torme and Bob Wells finished “The Christmas Song” in less than an hour, and Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn had “Let it Snow! Let it Snow! Let it Snow!” completed in one afternoon. Some songs, however, take decades to come to fruition, and that just so happens to be the case with Frank Pooler and Richard Carpenter’s “Merry Christmas, Darling.”
The story begins in Wisconsin in 1944, when the 18-year-old Frank Pooler composed a yuletide love song for his high school sweetheart. The two were spending the holiday apart, so Pooler’s lyrics reflected his longing to be with her during the most magical time of the year. Unfortunately, like most teenage relationships, the two grew apart. However, Pooler held on to the song. He had it published and recorded, but it was never distributed.
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In 1959, Pooler moved to Long Beach, California, where he lead the University Choir at California State University. Two of his students, Richard and Karen Carpenter-siblings from the nearby LA suburb of Downey-were members of a rock band that was starting to get a lot of attention. In 1966, Richard lamented to Pooler that he was growing weary of performing the same repertoire at Christmas parties. Pooler recalled the song he had written twenty-two years earlier, and handed it over to Richard with the suggestion that he give the lyrics a better musical setting than the one he had written himself. Richard did just that, and his trio added “Merry Christmas, Darling” to their set list.
By the fall of 1970, The Carpenters had become a household name. A year after signing with A&M Records, they scored two major hit singles with “Close to You” and “We’ve Only Just Begun.” After completing their second album, Close to You, they returned to the studio to record “Merry Christmas, Darling.” Richard worked his arranging magic, and a gorgeous saxophone solo was improvised by Bob Messenger. When the recording was completed, Richard called Pooler to the studio to let him hear the tune. In a 2005 interview with the La Crosse Tribune, Pooler recalled that at first, he had no idea what he was hearing was the song he had written nearly a quarter of a century earlier.¹ The single was released on November 20 and went straight to #1 on Billboard‘s Christmas charts. It would return to that spot again in 1971 and 1973. In 1978, at Karen’s request, the vocals were re-recorded for the release of Christmas Portrait, their first Christmas album. (A second Christmas album, An Old-Fashioned Christmas, was released in 1984, a year after Karen’s death, and included several unused tracks from the 1978 recording sessions.)
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So whatever happened to the girl for whom Pooler wrote the song back in Wisconsin in 1944? In 2002, he found her, just a short distance away in Palm Springs! He arranged to meet, where he informed her that she had been his muse. She responded, “Now I have a treasure.”² And so do we. “Merry Christmas, Darling” may have taken over twenty-five years to get from paper to vinyl, but it will forever remain a classic in the American Christmas songbook.
¹http://lacrossetribune.com/courierlifenews/news/local/pooler-s-song-dashed-off-for-a-girl-became-a/article_eb1aeb3a-3466-57fa-ac0a-4951ae9b8c31.html ²Ibid.
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