The Washington Post

handout

slaveholder congress main shareimg

by Joseph Siffred Duplessis

Respond to prefers-color-scheme dark in app web views

Follow section front redirects in Spectrum

Enable NLP source in PCS for load testing

Switch off the News Alerts Survey Widget when we have enough responses

Poll to determine if new LUF updates are available

Allows the winning A/B test variant to be turned on without Spectrum deployment

Show infinite scrolling sections in Assembler MultiView

Show option for NLP article summaries in Action Bar

A general feature flag for Recipe Features that aren't yet released

Feature flag for media team features that aren't yet released

Use new Orca video player for preroll plugin in Spectrum

Show the snow tracker (instead of the heat tracker) on Spectrum

The 6 best things to do with kids in the D.C. area this weekend 

The 33 best things to do in D.C. this weekend and next week

Trevor Williams’s escape act helps Nationals blank Rangers 

Miss Manners: Offering my bedroom to guests

Ask Amy: My wife’s sister confessed her feelings for me

Carolyn Hax: Will request for a postnup offend much younger wife?

NASA moon capsule suffered extensive damage during 2022 test flight

Russian state media ramping up English, Spanish presence on TikTok, study finds

Apple is behind in AI and killed its self-driving car project. What’s next?

This masterpiece ‘Birth of Venus’ probably isn’t of Venus at all

The beginner’s illustrated guide to watching an F1 race

Wait, what is Stephen A. Smith talking about? Find out with our quiz.

Cat climbed into Amazon return box, found alive 630 miles away

Brave Little Hunter is free: Baby orca escapes lagoon for open seas

I learned to heal my sadness by cradling dying chickens 

That time football legend, rig-driving eligible bachelor Biden was arrested

Trump and allies say Biden pays rent for ‘illegals’ in Michigan. Not true.

Eighty percent of Ukraine-Israel bill will be spent in U.S. or by U.S. military

Young Georgians want to be part of Europe. Their government is in the way.

On Press Freedom Day, little to celebrate for Hong Kong’s journalists

Taxes are inevitable. Paying to prepare them doesn’t have to be.

What’s the best bus to New York? We tested 5 for comfort and value.

You asked: Do I need a passport for my cruise?

Adaptive equipment is making national parks more inclusive

Chinese EVs are good for the world. Biden says they’re bad for America. 

Why the Solomon Islands election matters to China and the U.S.

Biden calls ally Japan ‘xenophobic’ like China, Russia, at campaign event

Stephen A. Smith would like even more of your attention

Local sports networks go dark mid-game amid dispute with Comcast 

World Press Freedom Day, 2024

How Trump convinces Republicans to adopt extreme views

Campuses are grappling with the Gaza war. So are our columnists.

US President Joe Biden Departure

The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don't Be Late) - Alvin and The Chipmunks | Fox Family Entertainment

The chase was on, as it had been for years. After the tale of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” was put to music and sold in a frenzy in 1949, each yuletide brought a bumper crop of sonic delights (or irritants) in hopes of finding the next holiday smash. By 1958, there were reportedly hundreds of new attempts annually, in a scramble that one journalist dubbed “the nightmare before Christmas.”

“Gaily, madly, [songwriters] hang holly wreaths about the necks of practically every member of the animal kingdom,” Associated Press reporter Hugh A. Mulligan lamented. They put Santa everywhere “from inside jail to outer space, and fashion nonsense lyrics that are meant to be stammered, whistled, turkey-talked.”

There had been Christmas hits after “Rudolph,” even chart-toppers such as 1952′s “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” sung by 13-year-old Jimmy Boyd. But few were bona fide sensations from the start like “Rudolph,” whose original Gene Autry version sold 1.7 million records its first year. By 1958, the song was the genre’s top hit, with its many iterations having sold 27 million copies in the United States. (Irving Berlin’s earlier “White Christmas” trailed by a few million sales at the time, though Bing Crosby’s 1942 version now is listed by Guinness World Records as the best-selling physical single of any genre.)

But by the start of December 1958 — 65 years ago this month — another sensation was emerging: “The Chipmunk Song,” by the Chipmunks with David Seville.

It was gimmicky, cute and as catchy as a smile (or the flu, depending on the listener). In it, Seville coaxes a holiday ditty from his childlike chipmunk trio of Alvin, Simon and Theodore.

‘Schoolhouse Rock’ premiered 50 years ago — and shaped a generation

The song, which had been released in November, got a jump-start when DJs bucked a tradition of not playing holiday records before Thanksgiving, and it then spent December scaling Billboard’s Hot 100 pop singles chart. Three days before Christmas, it hit No. 1 and held the spot for four of its 13 weeks on the chart.

In a year that also produced Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” and Chuck Berry’s “Run Rudolph Run,” sales of “The Chipmunk Song” nonetheless shot into the millions before New Year’s Day — around 4 million, by some accounts — leading to reports that it was, at that time, the fastest-selling record ever.

It also was the last Christmas song to hit No. 1 for six decades, until 2019, when Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” finally got there, 25 years after its release. At the first-ever Grammy Awards the following year, “The Chipmunk Song” was nominated for Record of the Year. It lost that category — to Domenico Modugno’s “Nel Blu Dipinto Di Blu (Volare)” — but won three others, including Best Comedy Performance.

And it wasn’t even the only No. 1 hit of 1958 for  Seville, who had started the year as a struggling songwriter.

Damian Dovarganes

Seville, who died in 1972 at age 52, was the stage name of Ross Bagdasarian, a son of Fresno, Calif., grape farmers. He was an aspiring actor before serving in World War II and then buying his own grape farm in the late 1940s. He and his wife, Armen, started a family, but their crops didn’t sell, as grapes or raisins. “Finally, my mom said to my dad, ‘Ross, listen: You love music, you love writing songs,” recalled one of their three children, producer and voice actor Ross Bagdasarian Jr. “‘If we’re going to starve, I’d prefer doing it with your music. Let’s go to L.A., rather than having more raisin casserole.’”

In Hollywood, if not on the farm, he seemed like the kind of person to bet on.

“He was just bigger than life at 5-foot-7,” said the younger Bagdasarian, 74, who with his wife, Janice Karman, resurrected the Chipmunks and created the past four decades’ worth of albums, cartoon series and feature films. “A great sense of humor, a great storyteller. Just an incredible person.”

Jimmy Buffett’s hangover hit ‘Margaritaville’ made him a mogul

The family moved to Los Angeles in 1950. The following year, Bagdasarian scored a No. 1 hit when Rosemary Clooney recorded a song he’d written in 1939 with his cousin, Pulitzer Prize- and Oscar-winning writer William Saroyan: the jaunty “Come On-a My House.”

Over the next few years, he wrote a handful of successful songs, including Dean Martin’s “Hey, Brother, Pour the Wine” and the instrumental “Armen’s Theme,” and he appeared in films — notably, uncredited roles in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window,” Billy Wilder’s “Stalag 17” and Elia Kazan’s “Viva Zapata!” — with fallow spells in between.

Then, in early 1958, his son recalled, “with $200 left in the bank, he takes $190 of it to buy a varied-speed tape machine”— which the family still has — “and he starts to play around with the lyrics of [what would become the song] ‘Witch Doctor.’”

Singing extra slowly while recording at half speed, then playing back the tape at full speed, Bagdasarian created the pinched voice of a shaman who, in the song, gives a lovelorn man (also voiced by Bagdasarian, at regular speed) these magic words: “ooh-ee, ooh-ah-ah, ting, tang, walla-walla bing-bang.”

“Witch Doctor” topped the Billboard chart in April 1958.

“It’s a really interesting time in ’58, because you’ve got so much going on musically,” said Daniel Goldmark, a music professor at Case Western Reserve University who studies popular music and the music of cartoons. Rock ’n’ roll pioneers jockeyed for chart position alongside doo-wop groups, folk revivalists, R&amp;B stars, the surviving titans of big-band jazz and the future ones of bop. It also was the heyday of the loose genre of curios known as novelty records. And in his time, Bagdasarian was perhaps “its greatest popularizer,” Steve Otfinoski writes in his book, “The Golden Age of Novelty Songs.”

That wasn’t necessarily his goal. Ross Bagdasarian Jr. said his father was more reverent about music and orchestration than the term “novelty” might imply.

The Beatles played on a London rooftop in 1969. It wound up being their last show.

He’d never learned to read or write music but would hum or plunk piano keys to express his ideas. “I can do things which a trained musician wouldn’t do. He’d know better,” Bagdasarian told a reporter with the Newspaper Enterprise Association in 1963. “But I don’t know better, so I do them — and they work.”

Toward the end of the summer of 1958, Bagdasarian’s youngest child, 4-year-old Adam (now an author and National Book Award finalist), began asking his father: Is it Christmas yet? Dumbfounded at first, Bagdasarian began mulling that marathon wait for the holiday.

Using the technique from “Witch Doctor,” he gave voices and personalities to three chipmunks, while also voicing  Seville at regular speed. He borrowed the chipmunks’ names from the brass at his record label: Liberty Records executive Alvin Bennett, founder Simon Waronker and chief engineer Theodore Keep.

“The rest,” he told the Toledo Blade the next year, “is wonderful history.”

“The Chipmunk Song” stayed in the top 40 from December until mid-February — just long enough to overlap there with Bagdasarian’s next single, “Alvin’s Harmonica,” which reached No. 3. More hit records followed, and the Chipmunks jumped to TV for a few seasons in the early 1960s.

Decades later, the song remains in perennial rotation, casting a specific shade of nostalgia.

That long success may be, in part, due to mechanics: the song’s gentle, treadmill-like movement — and its brevity, at a little over 2 minutes, said Goldmark. “It’s good enough to know when to stop.”

For Ross Bagdasarian Jr., the alchemy — especially as generations came to know the characters — is perhaps in the ways listeners identify with a kid’s desire for a little independence and a parent’s impulse to do things his way. “Alvin was never mean-spirited or angry,” he said. “Alvin’s feeling was that he knew he had a great idea, and if Dave would just work with him on this thing, it would be great for everybody.”

It’s a feeling that motivated his father in 1958, too, in an industry he found leery of novelty.

“‘You can’t do that,’ they’ll say. ‘It’s never been done before,’” Bagdasarian Sr. told the Blade. “So what?”

Danny Freedman is a freelance journalist in Memphis. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post Magazine, the New York Times, Smithsonian Magazine and elsewhere.