Little Drummer Boy

Written by Katherine Kennicott Davis, 1941 · First recorded by the Trapp Family Singers, 1951 · Popularized by the Harry Simeone Chorale, 1958

Come, they told me, pa rum pum pum pum
A newborn King to see, pa rum pum pum pum
Our finest gifts we bring, pa rum pum pum pum
To lay before the King, pa rum pum pum pum
Rum pum pum pum, rum pum pum pum.
So to honour Him, pa rum pum pum pum
When we come.

Little baby, pa rum pum pum pum
I am a poor boy too, pa rum pum pum pum
I have no gift to bring, pa rum pum pum pum
That’s fit to give a King, pa rum pum pum pum
Rum pum pum pum, rum pum pum pum.
Shall I play for you, pa rum pum pum pum
On my drum?

Mary nodded, pa rum pum pum pum
The ox and lamb kept time, pa rum pum pum pum
I played my drum for Him, pa rum pum pum pum
I played my best for Him, pa rum pum pum pum
Rum pum pum pum, rum pum pum pum.
Then He smiled at me, pa rum pum pum pum,
Me and my drum
Me and my drum
Me and my drum
Me and my drum

About the Song…

Chances are you’ve always assumed this one was ancient — something medieval, handed down through the centuries. It isn’t. It was written in 1941 by a schoolteacher in Concord, Massachusetts, who was trying to take an afternoon nap.

Katherine Kennicott Davis was born in St. Joseph, Missouri, in 1892, and composed her first piece of music at fifteen. She went to Wellesley intending to study English, switched to music in her junior year, and spent a long, quiet career teaching piano and theory and writing choral pieces for school groups — hundreds of them, most of which nobody outside a schoolroom ever heard. That afternoon in 1941, a melody she’d known from an old European carol got stuck in her head and wouldn’t leave, and a new English text came with it. She got up and wrote it down. She called it “Carol of the Drum,” credited the tune as a Czech carol freely adapted, and published it under a pen name. It was meant for school choruses. She never expected anything more from it.

For ten years, nothing happened. Then the Trapp Family Singers — yes, those Trapps, the ones the von Trapps of The Sound of Music were based on — recorded it in the early fifties. A few years after that, an arranger named Jack Halloran made a version for Dot Records, which the label failed to release in time for Christmas. A producer at Dot named Henry Onorati took that same arrangement with him when he moved to another label, handed it to a conductor named Harry Simeone, and in December of 1958 it came out under a new title: “The Little Drummer Boy.” It went to the top of the charts and was re-released every Christmas for years.

And here’s the part that still stings. When the credits were printed, Simeone’s name appeared as a writer. So did Onorati’s. Neither man had written a note or a word of it. Davis, then in her sixties, had to fight to hold onto a share of her own song, and she kept only part of what was rightfully all hers. She lived until 1980, long enough to hear a tune she’d scribbled down after a failed nap become one of the most recorded Christmas songs in the world — and to know that two men who had merely arranged it were collecting alongside her the whole time. Her original manuscript is kept at Wellesley to this day.