The History of the Christmas Album: The Rise and Fall of Sheet Music (1840-1910)

I recently made the mistake of asking, “What was the first Christmas album?”

It seemed like an innocent, straightforward enough question. A quick Google should surely return the definitive first Christmas album, right? Like most things in life, it wasn’t that simple.

For starters, how do we define what first album means? Is it the first collection of Christmas songs to appear on a single piece of physical media?

If so, then it would likely be “Christmas Songs by Sinatra”, which was released by Columbia Records in 1948. This is generally regarded as the first Christmas album released as a single LP, or long play record. This brand-new format, unveiled by Columbia just a few months prior, allowed up to 48 minutes of music to fit on a single, vinyl disc.

Or, if we’re not hung up on the single piece of media requirement, does first album mean the first collection of Christmas recordings sold as a set? By that definition, Bing Crosby’s “Merry Christmas” is considered to be the first commercial Christmas album, released as a collection of five 78’s with one song on each side of each shellac disc.

While Google seemed to agree that Bing was the correct answer, record companies had been releasing box sets of 78’s for over 30 years by that time and I can’t imagine that a holiday release or two didn’t make it in there somewhere.

Or, maybe we get a bit more esoteric and ask if the first album needs to be an audio recording at all. Would a modern collection of holiday arrangements with lyrics be in the running for first Christmas album? What if it was a three-book collection? Could we consider that a Christmas box set that predates the invention of the 78?

But I’m getting a little ahead of myself now…

Attempting to answer my question sent me down the rabbit hole that is the fascinating history of the American music industry. From the music publishers of two hundred years ago to the consolidated recording industry of today and the technological advancements that have shaped how we listen and what we listen to every step of the way, Christmas music included.

While that journey was terrible for my general productivity, it was a boon for content.

In this first part of The History of the Christmas Album, we’ll look at the rise and fall of sheet music from roughly the 1840s to 1910, what Christmas music looked like during that period and how it set the stage for sound recordings.

Throughout the 19th century, music was primarily produced and consumed in a single form. Sheet music.

If you wanted to hear that catchy new Christmas tune “Jingle Bells” when it was release in the 1850s, there was no YouTube, no Tidal, no Bandcamp. No radio stations, no record stores.

You went to a specialty music store, purchased the sheet music, took it home and performed it yourself on piano. If you didn’t live near a sheet music seller, have the disposable income to purchase sheet music, possess the skills necessary to read and perform it or own the requisite piano, then you were out of luck.

Your next best chance of hearing “Jingle Bells” was to score a dinner invite from a friend, neighbor or family member who did check all the boxes above and hope the evening went well enough that it progressed from the dining table to the parlor. Or, if a new song was popular enough, you might be able to catch a public performance by a local community or church choir. But don’t hold your breath for the latter. “Jingle Bells” was far too secular for most mid-19th century church services.

Despite all the limitations of this early format, several factors led to the exponential rise of sheet music sales in the latter half of the 1800s. American music publishers, songwriters and composers began concentrating in an area along Manhattan’s West 28th Street, which would later be known as Tin Pan Alley. Initially a derogatory term for a run-down piano, due to the success of this cohort and the music they produced, “Tin Pan” quickly evolved to mean a “hit song writing business.”

In addition to the hit music itself, Tin Pan Alley also birthed the new promotional technique of “plugging” songs. This involved orchestrating national campaigns to promote awareness and demand for new sheet music by having the songs performed repeatedly all across the country by local and traveling artists.

This new form of marketing, coupled with the advent of less expensive, mass-produced pianos in the latter half of the 19th century brought sheet music to middle-class Americans and helped push sales to meteoric levels. Sheet music became so popular that it was no longer limited to specialty music stores, book sellers and publisher catalogs. You could buy the latest songs from any reputable general store and newspapers started including free sheet music inserts to boost circulation.

This period also saw the penning of many new Christmas carols that remain popular today, including:

• Silent Night (1818-63)
• Joy to the World (1839)
• Hark! The Herald Angels Sing (1840)
• It Came Upon a Midnight Clear (1846-50)
• O Holy Night (1847-55)
• Good Kind Wenceslas (1853)
• Angels We Have Heard On High (1855)
• We Three Kings of Orient Are (1857)
• What Child is This? (1865-71)
• O Little Town of Bethlehem (1868)
• Away in a Manger (1885-87)

The first secular American holiday songs, “Jingle Bells”, “Up on the Housetop” and “Jolly Old Saint Nicholas” were also written during this time.

Additionally, many older Christmas hymns also received English translations, re-arrangements, or new lyrics during this time, including:

• O Christmas Tree (2nd and 3rd stanzas added in 1824)
• Adeste Fideles (translated to English in 1841)
• The First Noel (re-arranged in 1867)
• God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen (re-arranged in 1867)
• Here We Come A-wassailing (re-arranged in 1871)

A clear example of the incredible growth in popularity of sheet music between the first and second halves of the 19th century can be seen in the sales of American music. Prior to the late 1840s, no American song had sold more than 5,000 copies of sheet music. By the end of the century, multiple songs had sold over one million copies each, a 20,000% increase in less than 50 years.

This trend continued into the early 20th century with over one hundred songs each selling a million or more copies between 1900 and 1910 alone. But, beneath those unprecedented sales, sheet music was already beginning to falter.

What appeared to be an unshakable industry at the onset of the 20th century was just a couple of decades away from becoming a casualty of the same middle-class consumerism that fueled its rise. The same families who were buying pianos and sheet music in the 1880s started buying phonographs and gramophones in the 1910s. This shift, along with other technological advancements, like the introduction of broadcast radio, caused sheet music sales to begin falling in the 1920s.

Quick side note: The first audio broadcast via radio occurred on Christmas eve, 1906. That broadcast included inventor Reginald Fessenden, who was performing the experiment, playing “O Holy Night” on violin.

Sales of sheet music continued to decline until music publishers were fully supplanted by recording companies as the music industry’s center of power a short time later. This rapid decline becomes very apparent when you look at lifetime sales numbers.

While many compositions from the 1850s through the early 1900s have amassed sheet music sales in the multi-millions, only a handful of songs from 1930 onward have been able to repeat the same success. Two notable exceptions include Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” from 1942 and Johnny Marks’ “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” from 1949, which have sold an estimated 5-6 million and 7-8 million copies of sheet music respectively since their releases.

While the technological leap from printing to recording sank sheet music, it didn’t stop Christmas from coming, it came. Composers and songwriters were now crafting Christmas tunes with recording in mind.

Irving Berlin and Tim Snyder’s “Christmas Time Seems Years and Years Away”, was not only written in 1910 but had a recording of the song, performed by singer Manuel Romain released the same year.

Traditional songs continued to receive new treatments during this time as well. Frederic Austin’s arrangement of “The Twelve Days of Christmas”, first published in 1909, quickly became the standard melody used by performers and recording artists.

While there were no Christmas sound recordings before the 1880s (and none surviving from before the late 1890s), there is one specific series of works from this period that I alluded to at the top, Christmas Carols, New and Old by John Stainer and Henry Ramsden Bramley.

Christmas Carols, New and Old was a series of 3 song books, published between 1867 and 1878. Altogether, the series contained 70 traditional and modern carols, with Bramley providing English translations and adaptations for several and Stainer creating many new arrangements.

The series marked the reintroduction to the American public of music and words set together for centuries-old carols like “The First Noel”, “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen”, and “Here We Come A-wassailing”.

To me, this series, which covers Christmas songs from the 14th Century German carol, “Good Christian Men Rejoice”, to John Henry Hopkins Jr.’s “We Three Kings”, which was barely a decade old when the first book was published, is a strong contender for Original Christmas Album or, perhaps more accurately, original three album compilation.

And with that, we’ll end this first part of our “The History of the Christmas Album” series. In part two, we’ll look at the first format war over recorded music, between Thomas Edison’s phonograph cylinders and Emile Berliner’s gramophone discs. And of course, what Christmas music was being created during that period.

Cheers and Merry Christmas!