Ghost of Christmas Past: Little Drummer Boy

The Little Drummer Boy Animated Special

Every academic has this nightmare come to life; you slave away on your magnum opus, that ONE paper, book, play, painting, sculpture, whatever and when unveiled, it gets absolutely no attention. But one little thing you do on a lark EVERYONE seems to pay attention to. It was nothing, didn't even take the effort of most of your other works, but THIS is the one that gets attention. For Arthur Conan Doyle, it was Sherlock Holmes. Tried to kill him off, but had to bring him back by popular demand. For Basil Rathbone, the quintessential Holmes, it was also the role that he could not escape. For A.A. Milne, it was Winnie the Pooh. Robert Plant hates "Stairway to Heaven". For Katherine Kennicott Davis, that work was "The Little Drummer Boy"

Katherine Kennicott Davis

How could you hate "The Little Drummer Boy"?  Every kid sings it, every band puts it on a Christmas album, even one of the best-loved Christmas specials was based on it.  That may be exactly the point.  Katherine Davis saw herself as a serious musician.  She penned over 600 works of music, including seven operas to her own texts, children's operettas, hymns, cantatas and choruses.  She wrote "Let All Things Now Living" to an old Welsh tune (the Ash Grove) in 1939, and it became a popular Thanksgiving tune for several churches at the time.  This song she published under the pseudonym "John Cowley".  She loved these great works, but it was the Little Drummer Boy that rose to the top.  She would say the song had been "done to death on radio and TV", but it keeps on a plugging along.

Bookends

St. Joseph High School c. 1900

Katherine Kennicott Davis was born in St. Joseph, Missouri on 25 June 1892 to Maxwell G. Davis, a shoe manufacturer and Jessie Barton Davis.  Quite the child prodigy, she is reported to have written her first music, "Shadow March" at the age of 15.  She graduated in 1910 from the St. Joseph High School, which was renamed Central High School that same year. My Grandma Shafer went to that high school later.  At the time, the high school was located at 13th and Olive Streets, behind Everett Elementary school (where Nadienne and I were briefly schoolmates at Everett during my six weeks in second grade there and her Kindergarten year).  Nadienne, Benjamin, Christian and I all graduated from the "new" Central High School at 25th and Edmond Streets.  From Central High School, Katherine Davis went on to study music and graduate from Wellesley College, just outside Boston, Massachusetts.

After graduation from college, she was hired to teach music theory and piano at Wellesley.  She would pursue further studies at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston and Nadia Boulanger in Paris.  Her "day job" would be teaching.  She taught at the Concord (MA) Academy and Shady Hill School for Girls in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  She wrote music almost until the end of her life, when illness forced her to stop.  She passed away on 20 April 1980 in Littleton, Massachusetts.  In her will she assigned all of her royalties to the music program of Wellesley College. Her grave is in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts.  She has a very simple stone, with no mention of any of her accomplishments.

Writing "Carol of the Drum"

Katherine K. Davis c. 1910

Exactly how Katherine Davis came to write what she called "Carol of the Drum" in 1941 is not known, but three stories circulate as authority.  My favorite says that she laid down to take a nap and the song came to her as she tried to sleep.  Another says that she freely adapted and translated a Czech song called "Carol of the Drum" and a third says that she arranged the song with Harry Simeone, Jack Halloran and Henry Onorati.  I rather think that she probably adapted or was inspired by the tune from a Czech song, but probably wrote the story, perhaps as she napped.  Heck, I wrote term papers while I was out on runs, and only had to type them out when I got back home or to the dorm.

The song got off to a slow start.  Before 1958, the song was only recorded twice.  One of these was by the Trapp Family Singers in 1955, shortly before their retirement in 1957.  In 1957 Henry Onorati re-arranged the song for the Jack Halloran Singers on Dot Records, but the recording didn't make it out before Christmas.  Onorati introduced the song to Harry Simeone, who re-arranged it renamed it and released it in the form we most commonly know it as a recording of the Harry Simeone Chorale on "Sing We Now of Christmas" in 1958.  This was the big time.  Harry Simeone worked on the music for several Bing Crosby pictures and conducted the band for The Firestone Hour on TV from 1952-1959.  Onorati and Simeone were given a co-writer credit on the song, but likely should only have credit for the arrangement. although their changes don't sound all that significant, just bigger.

Since the Simeone arrangement, the song has been recorded by over 200 artists.  Marlene Dietrich even sang a German version in 1964.  Besides the Harry Simeone Chorale soundtrack of the 1968 stop-motion special "The Little Drummer Boy", the best known version is likely the David Bowie and Bing Crosby duo that overlaid "Peace on Earth" on "The Little Drummer Boy".

The story

We all know the story.  Not the embellished version for the animated special (one of the all-time Christmas classics), but the song.  A little boy finds himself in the stable where Jesus was born.  Not having any riches, he played a song on his drum from his heart.  The gift is accepted with honor, as it was all that the boy had and played from a place of genuine love.  How much more of a Christmasey message can you get?

Life in St. Joseph

Maxwell and Jessie Davis Marriage License

The family moved several places in town, which was very commonplace.  In 1900, they were living at 215 S. 18th Street. The family at that time was Maxwell, Jessie, Katherine and Willard B (born April 1894), along with Jessie's mother, Lydia Barton. In 1920, Katherine was listed as living with her parents at 604 N. 8th Street.  When Maxwell Davis died in 1927, the family residence was 1917 Faraon Street. Jessie Davis was residing at 503 S. 11th Street when she died in 1947.

Katherine Kennicott Davis' father, mother and older sister (Dorothy, died of scarlet fever in 1892) are buried in a family plot in Mount Mora Cemetery in St. Joseph.  Section B, Block 11

Further reading

The Little Drummer Boy Special