Our 1940s Christmas music playlist hangs around 1949 with both sides of a Christmas single on MGM Records by the great Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys!
Here's "When It's Christmas on the Range":
And the flipside, "Santa's on His Way":
I like that a lot! I love the Western Swing sound and always appreciate unique songs!
But the Scrooges at "Billboard" didn't like this one either:
I don't know if "When It's Christmas on the Range" was ever properly recorded by anybody else. There are some similarly-titled songs out there, but they're different songs.
An intriguing one was recorded by Eddy Howard in 1940 on Columbia Records:
Not too westerny, this catches Eddy after he had left the Dick Jurgens band but before he started his own band, which caught on in 1946.
Coincidentally, singing cowboy Jimmy Wakely had an album of Christmas carols on Capitol Records in 1949 with the title "Christmas on the Range." Really nice, but no relation!
I think there was only one other recording of "Santa's on His Way," although there are bunch of similarly-titled songs for it too!
The version in question of "Santa's on His Way" comes from a likely source: latter-day Western Swing torch carriers Asleep at the Wheel, who included a faithful version on their 2006 album "Santa Loves to Boogie":
The Wheel has a couple of Christmas albums out there and they're a blast!
George Strait has also been known to remake some Bob Wills songs, so when his 1999 album "Merry Christmas Wherever You Are" came out and I saw that one track was titled "Santa's on His Way," I thought it might be the same song.
It's not, but it's still a good one:
Christmas + Western Swing = Fun!
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