In my last posting, a rant about Christmas music, I didn’t mention Chuck Berry’s 1958 novelty tune “Run, Rudolph, Run,” also known as “Run, Run, Rudolph.” Originally released on Chess Records, it’s had some staying power and is still a staple of the season more than half a century later. This year in particular, I’ve heard it more than I care to remember.
When the song was first published, it had a quirk. Written by Johnny Marks and Marvin Brodie, the original 45 rpm single listed the authors as C. Berry & M. Brodie. Now of course, funny business over authorship was commonplace in the music industry back then. But the typical shenanigans involved replacing the song’s actual author with a douche bag record executive.
Sometimes this was done quasi-legitimately, with the author selling the publishing rights to a song for a flat fee. Sometimes it was pure thievery, with a record executive simply adding his name to claim a co-writing credit, or even erasing the real author altogether and gobbling up all of the royalties.
But the chicanery surrounding the writing credit on “Run, Rudolph, Run” is the exact opposite of the stereotype. This isn’t a case of a some slime ball squeezing the artist. It’s an instance of the established industry type fading into the background and the artist replacing him. But why?
The secret unfolds in the career of Johnny Marks, who created an unusual niche for himself in the music business: He was a Jew who specialized in writing Christmas songs.
Born in 1909, Johnny Marks graduated from Colgate University, studied music in Paris, and served in WWII. Afterwards he returned home and fell into the music biz. And in 1949 he struck gold, with a little help from his brother-in-law Robert L. May. May was a copywriter who had penned a poem for the Montgomery Ward holiday catalog in 1939. It was called “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” and the store had distributed 2.5 million free copies of it.
By 1948, Marks was working as a radio producer in NYC when he wrote a song based on 
May’s poem. First he got the silky-voiced New Jersey native and radio star Harry Brannon to record it, and the next year it was covered by the singing cowboy and future California Angels owner Gene Autry, and the song began its ascent into popular culture.
With the success of “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer,” Marks began to develop a career dedicated to writing Christmas songs. In fact, he was so committed to the idea that in 1949 he named his publishing company St. Nicholas Music. During the early 1950s he established himself as the king of the seasonal song market by writing several more holiday tunes that did well at the time but have since been mostly forgotten, including “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day,” based on a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and recorded by Bing Crosby.
In 1957, Marks became the Director of The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), a performance rights organization that protects copyrights. It’s a position he would hold until 1961.
When Marks wrote “Run, Rudolph, Run” for Chuck Berry in 1958, it was the case of an industry insider, who had a reputation for authoring saccharine novelty songs, trying to cash in on the new craze sweeping the nation, which those crazy kids called “Rock and Roll.”
In some people’s opinion, *cough*, the man standing atop that mountain in 1958 was not the
white kid from Mississippi, but that black dude from St. Louis. Chuck Berry had burst onto the scene with “Maybellene” in 1955, had laid down the law with “Roll Over Beethoven” in 1956, and had popped off “School Days” and “Rock and Roll Music” in 1957. Then in 1958 he issued Rock’s most iconic and enduring anthem: Johnny B. Goode.
Marks thought Berry was the perfect person to record his latest Christmas tune, a genre-specific, updated version of his earlier breakthrough. But Marks was smart enough to know that as hip as Berry was to America’s teens, he himself was not. There was a revolution going on, and Marks was identified with the Old Guard that represented the squares. Marks had no problem with that. In fact, he had just written the uber square “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” for the squeaky clean Brenda Lee. But a song for Berry?
DJs and other purveyors of hip would spot Marks’ name in a heartbeat, so he took himself off the record’s label as the song’s author and put down Berry’s name in his place. It worked. Kind of. The song made a minor splash after being released.
But both Marks and the song would each have their own second acts. When the animation company Rankin-Bass decided to develop a stop-motion, claymation Christmas special based 
on the story of Rudolph, they tabbed Marks as the obvious choice to write the music. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer debuted on NBC the night of December 6, 1964, and it featured a whole new catalog of Marks’ music. Some of those songs, such as “Silver and Gold” and “The Island of Misfit Toys” are still primarily associated with the long-running show, now established as a classic. Others, such as “A Holly Jolly Christmas” and “The Most Wonderful Day of the Year,” were recorded for the show by the voice of Jiminy Cricket and avuncular HUAC name-dropper Burl Ives, and have since become yuletide standards.
And “Run, Rudolph, Run?” Even though it only reached #69 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1958, its association with Chuck Berry, as opposed to Marks, has led to covers by everyone from the Grateful Dead and Billy Idol, to Jimmy Buffet and Lynyrd Skynyrd (the post-plane crash re-constituted lineup).
Here’s the version by Motorhead’s Lemmy Kilmesiter, ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons, and Dave Grohl from Nirvana and the Foo Fighters. Happy Holidays.