74. The time I *sorta almost* altered authorship of the greatest Christmas song ever.
I love this time of year because every year about this time I begin to hear “Merry Christmas, Baby,” which, in case you were somehow unaware, is the greatest Christmas song ever. What’s that you say? “White Christmas” is the biggest selling holiday single of all time? Don’t care. You keep it. I’ll take “Merry Christmas, Baby” every time. More than eighty artists have recorded the tune, and I like all of them, especially Ike and Tina Turner’s rendition, which, I am convinced, could get a railroad tie moving a little. I am particularly fond of Elvis Presley’s version, too. (Even though Elvis never got around to singing the final verse.) But the finest version—the one that should have been on that Voyager Golden Record that NASA blasted into space fifty or so years ago—is, without a doubt, the original.
Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers’ version appeared in November 1947. The Los Angeles-based trio’s recording featured Moore on electric guitar, Eddie Williams on bass and the great Charles Brown on piano and vocals. Keith Richards once said the back-and-forth style of seamlessly swapping the lead with the rhythm that he and Ron Wood manage with their guitars is an “ancient art of weaving,” and it is that level of artistry that I hear when listening to Moore’s electric guitar and Brown’s piano play off of each other on the first recording of “Merry Christmas, Baby.” And Brown’s vocal is classic West Coast cool. His singing actually makes the song the classic it is. That, and the words.
I have this habit of looking up who actually wrote songs I enjoy, and years ago, I looked up who wrote “Merry Christmas, Baby.” I discovered that it was credited to two people—Johnny Moore and “Lou Baxter.” Moore made sense, as it was his band that recorded the first version. But I wondered who “Baxter” was. So I began digging, and things got so interesting I wrote a piece about it for Smithsonian Magazine.
Then came a phone call from an attorney.
But first let me explain:
Basically, Brown, who died in 1999, always claimed that Moore, while a fine and innovative guitar player, had nothing to do with composing “Merry Christmas, Baby.” Brown said he wrote the song, and he said he did so as a favor for “Lou Baxter,” who, he said, was a L.A.-based songwriter who asked Brown to record one of his songs so he could afford a throat surgery. Brown claimed that he looked over a few of Baxter’s songs and transformed one into the song we know today as “Merry Christmas, Baby.” Brown said when the song was released, he was shocked to not be listed as a co-writer.
But I wanted to know who this “Baxter” was, and there wasn’t much of a trail. He certainly wasn’t a performer. Or, if he was, he never recorded. I eventually discovered that he was a credited writer on a few other songs from that late 1940s/early 1950s era (including some with T-Bone Walker), but none had much chart success. This just made me more interested, and I kept on and on until one day, through a process that I promise was boring and probably autistic, I discovered that “Lou Baxter” was a pseudonym for a man named Andrew Whitson Griffith. Griffith was an Army veteran who, when not running a dry-cleaning business, shopped blues lyrics around the L.A. music scene. He was also smart: Between writing lyrics and passing them around, he deposited copies of his compositions in the U.S. Copyright Office. That is where I found a copy of a song he wrote titled “Merry Xmas Baby,” which he placed in the office in September of 1947. Those lyrics, though different, were definitely the basis for “Merry Christmas, Baby.”
This seemed to prove Brown’s version of who wrote the song—at least that’s how one of the executors of Charles Brown’s estate felt. His name was Howell Begle and, a little while after the Smithsonian piece was published, he called me and said, “Do you recognize my name?” When I said I did not, he explained that he was an attorney who specialized in helping blues artists recover back royalties owed to them. He said he wanted to begin a lawsuit and get my Smithsonian article in front of a judge, basically in the hopes that at some point in the legal process the record company (I forget which it is) would agree to change the official authorship of “Merry Christmas, Baby” from “Johnny Moore & Lou Baxter” to “Johnny Moore, Lou Baxter & Charles Brown.” I said that sounded good to me, or something. Then he let me know why it mattered.
“Please Come Home For Christmas” is a pretty well-known Christmas tune, he said, and Brown wrote it, in 1960. During the final three months of 2017, Begle told me, “Please Come Home For Christmas” generated roughly $300,000 worth of royalty checks to Brown’s estate. I’m not sure how I responded to that. But I’m sure I thought, “Damn.”
A few months after that phone call I saw Howell Begle’s obituary in the New York Times. Then I saw one in the Washington Post. He had been skiing in New Hampshire when he struck a tree. He was 74, and I reckon the effort to get Charles Brown credit for writing “Merry Christmas, Baby” died with him.