Download Instrumental   I just realized I have 3 different versions of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” on the Christmas list – must be my favorite holiday song.  I was going for “moody” on this version and I let Boots Randolph and Al Hirt carry the lead.  ‘Course, you’ll be singing the lead line, so Al and Boots can go away.  And if you don’t know who those two musicians are, you’re too young to be reading this article.  Google them.

In the long ago film Meet Me in St. Louis, Judy Garland first introduced this wonderful piece to the world.  She thought it was way too melancholy for the scene, so she set about rewriting some of the lyrics to make it more “uplifting”.  Even though the minor changes she made helped a bit, the song was still really too sad for the season.  Later on, Frank Sinatra came to the rescue.  He changed the line “until then we’ll have to muddle through somehow” (not a whole lot of holiday cheer there) to “hang a shining star upon the highest bough” (much better).  Thanks, Frank.

The song was written by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane – I never heard of them either.  They wrote the melody first and then tried to put lyrics to it.  Musically, it didn’t work.  The first line was supposed to be “Have Yourself a Merry Christmas”, but there were those pesky two extra syllables in the melody they’d written that didn’t quite fit.  So they added “little” to the title and everything was right with the world again.

As I mentioned, you have a choice of arrangements on the Christmas list, depending on where you’ll be performing the tune or what your mood is.  Don’t know why I keep arranging it differently.  It’s such a good piece of music you just naturally improvise, I guess.  There’s the big band style (#1), the smooth jazz (#2) and now this one (#3).  Just took me awhile to get it right.