The would-be Queen of Christmas has been unseated by Little Miss Dynamite.
Mariah Carey usually has the top spot on Billboard’s Hot 100 this time of year with her holiday perennial “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” a song best described as “unavoidable.”
This week, though, Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” has claimed the top spot, a mere 65 years after it was first released. It got there, as the song itself says in the “new old-fashioned way.”
The Hot 100 chart originally used sales and airplay data to rank records. Billboard reconfigured that a few years ago to give additional weight to streaming. This makes it more possible for an older tune to chart, since listeners can stream old favorite songs over and over.
Lee gave the song an additional push by releasing a music video featuring Tanya Tucker and Trisha Yearwood.
Lee’s diminutive stature – she’s 4-feet-9-inches tall – and her powerful voice earned her the nickname “Little Miss Dynamite” early in her career. “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” has become her best-selling release, but it got off to a shaky start. First released in 1958, when Lee was 13, the record failed to make much of an impact, and didn’t do much better when re-released a year later.
It was the little Christmas record that could, though. It eventually became a staple of holiday radio and Christmas compilations, and has been charting each Christmas season for years.
Lee, 78, is now the oldest woman to have a No. 1 Hot 100 hit, unseating previous record holder Carey, who was 53 last year when “All I Want” once again hit the top spot.
Third on that list is Cher, who was 52 when “Believe” went to No. 1.
Cher also is making with the holly-jolly this season, releasing her first Christmas album, titled (wait for it) Christmas. Also bearing that title is a Cher duet with Darlene Love on Love’s “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home).” A 17-year-old Cher sang background vocals on that very song when it was recorded for the 1963 release A Christmas Gift for You From Phil Spector. Cher’s future ex-husband Sonny Bono was part of Spector’s inner circle, so the flame of love and future litigation may have first sparked here.
Lee herself has a holiday E.P., A Rockin’ Christmas With Brenda Lee, featuring “Rockin’ Around” and three other favorites from 1964’s Merry Christmas From Brenda Lee. This particular stocking comes with a lump of coal in the form of a remix of “Rockin’” that tries to, I swear to Santa, merge Lee’s classic with Paul McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmastime,” and it’s as unseemly as it sounds.
Anyway, enjoy this rare instance of a December day without Mariah Carey at No. 1. For soon she will ascend once more to her throne, and the dark of winter shall engulf us. And the lamentations will be heard throughout the land, voices crying: “All I want for Christmas is to not hear ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You’ again!
