"Merry Christmas Baby," Charles Brown (Exclusive)

This may be the first rock 'n roll Christmas song. Predating "Jingle Bell Rock," it's more of a blues tune, first done by Charles Brown in 1947 and widely covered by everyone from Elvis Presley to Chuck Berry to Bruce Springsteen to Otis Redding to Southern Culture on the Skids. It's this wide adoption by the rock world that justifies the first sentence of this post. Blues and Christmas seem not to go together, but this one has more of a happy ending. Note that Chuck Berry contemporized it by changing "radio" to "stereo" in the line "I'm feeling fine, got good music on my radio." From Mojo magazine, January 1997: "Brown... was approached by a songwriter named Lou Baxter who tried to sell him a seasonal ditty titled "Merry Christmas Blues." Brown then, allegedly, revamped the song... but listed Baxter's name as composer so that he would get a cut. Brown... recorded it as lead singer with Johnny Moore's Three Blazers and Exclusive Records promptly placed Moore's name on the label." Brown has recorded this several more times since the original performance under his own name. He recorded two Christmas albums in his career, one in 1961 and another in 1993.