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Little Drummer Boy
Written by Katherine Kennicott Davis, 1941
Chances are you’ve always assumed this one was ancient, something handed down through the centuries. It isn’t. It was written in 1941 by a composer living in Concord, Massachusetts, and it came to her while she was trying to take an afternoon nap.
Katherine Kennicott Davis was born in St. Joseph, Missouri, in 1892, and wrote her first piece of music at fifteen. She studied at Wellesley College, and over a long, quiet career she wrote more than six hundred works, many of them for school choirs that no one outside a schoolroom ever heard. She called this one “Carol of the Drum.” On her manuscript she credited the tune to a Czech carol she had freely adapted, and she wrote the English words herself. It was a modest little piece, and she expected nothing more from it.
For ten years, not much happened. Then the Trapp Family Singers recorded it in 1951. They were the real Austrian family whose story later became The Sound of Music. In 1957 an arranger named Jack Halloran recorded it with his singers for an album on Dot Records, but Dot chose not to put it out as a single. Henry Onorati, a producer who had worked on that record, left Dot the next year to run 20th Century-Fox Records. He brought the song to his friend Harry Simeone, a conductor and arranger. Simeone hired many of the same singers, made a recording very close to Halloran’s, and gave the song a new name: “The Little Drummer Boy.” Along the way, the ox and ass of Davis’s original became an ox and lamb.
The Harry Simeone Chorale’s record came out in December of 1958 and climbed to number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100. It came back onto the chart every Christmas season through 1962, and it has been recorded by hundreds of artists since. The most unexpected version came in 1977, when Bing Crosby and David Bowie sang it together on television, weaving it around a new counter-melody called “Peace on Earth.”
And here’s the part that still stings. When the record came out, Simeone and Onorati were both listed as songwriters, though neither man had written the song. Davis learned it was a hit only when a friend called to tell her it was on the radio everywhere. She stood up for her rights and secured her credit and royalties, but the two men’s names stayed on the song beside hers. She never cared for the new title, either, and called it “cutie cute.” Katherine Davis died in 1980, and her original manuscript is held at Wellesley College.
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