Yuletide song introduces us to Parson Brown

One of the amazing Christmas season characters we meet up with this time of year is Parson Brown. He pops up early into the holiday love song “Winter Wonderland,” written in 1934.

In the meadow, we can build a snowman.

We’ll pretend that he is Parson Brown.

He’ll say, “are you married?”

“We’ll say, no man,

But you can do the job when you’re in town.”

Lyricist Richard Bernhard Smith was most likely referring to a fictional pastor. In the 1930s, protestant ministers who were called “parsons” often traveled from town to town to perform weddings for couples who didn’t have a local minister of their faith where they lived.

 

The implication was that when the young lovers in the song were ready to tie the knot, they’d come see Parson Brown. 

Smith’s images of a “Christmas card-perfect winter wonderland” were drawn from his hometown of Honesdale, Pa. It’s a picturesque community situated on the Lackawaxen River in the Pocono Mountains. 

Smith grew up in a house directly across from the town’s Central Park, so viewing glistening new fallen snow, playing in the drifts, building snow persons, ice skating on the pond and going caroling were idyllic memories.

 

Smith graduated from college at Penn State in 1925 and began pursuing a career as a poet and songwriter. He was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1931 and underwent treatment at West Mountain Sanitarium in nearby Scranton, Pa. 

It is here that Smith wrote “Winter Wonderland” as a poem. He shared it with a friend, Felix Bernard, a professional pianist and composer, who set it to music. Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians recorded the song with a foxtrot beat, and the tune reached the number two spot on the 1934 Hit Parade. 

Smith died in 1935, a day shy of his 34th birthday. But his song would live on to be covered by more than 200 artists through the years. 

Matt Micucci, online editor at JAZZIZ Magazine, pointed out: “Though Christmas is never mentioned (in the song), “Winter Wonderland” is regarded a holiday classic and is still hugely popular to this day.” 

Lots of music fans believe Perry Como sang it best in 1946.

 

Peter Becker, managing editor of the Tri-County Independent newspaper, which is published in Honesville, said the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers has consistently ranked “Winter Wonderland” in its top four secular Christmas songs of all time.

WCIC, a contemporary Christian music radio station in Peoria, Ill., reported that the song’s lyrics about a couple’s romance during the winter season were revised in 1947, to be “more acceptable to children.” 

That version transformed “a romantic winter interlude to a seasonal song about playing in the snow.” 

WCIC said: “The snowman mentioned in the song’s bridge was changed from a minister to a circus clown, and the promises the couple made in the final verse were replaced with lyrics about frolicking.” 

Compare if you care. 

Just for the record, if you believe that Bobtail is another noteworthy but obscure Christmas song character, I’m sorry to burst that bubble. 

Bobtail is not the name of the horse in “Jingle Bells,” a song composed in 1857 by James Lord Pierpont of Boston, and originally titled “The One Horse Open Sleigh.”

                         

Bobtail actually refers to the style of the horse’s tail – a tail cut short, or a tail gathered up and tied in a knot, which you sometimes see in dressage.