Wikipedia Deep Dive

Johnny Marks

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The Man Who Wrote Christmas

Here's a peculiar fact about some of the most beloved Christmas songs in American history: they were written by a Jewish man from New York who never celebrated the holiday himself.

Johnny Marks didn't just write one Christmas hit. He wrote "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer." He wrote "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree." He wrote "A Holly Jolly Christmas." He wrote "Silver and Gold." Each December, his music becomes inescapable—playing in shopping malls, streaming through car radios, hummed by children who have no idea that a single songwriter is responsible for so much of their holiday soundtrack.

What makes this even more remarkable is that Marks considered himself somewhat trapped by his own success. The song he believed was his finest work? Not the reindeer anthem that made him famous, but a lesser-known piece called "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day," which set a Civil War-era poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to music.

An Unlikely Path to Christmas Fame

John David Marks was born on November 10, 1909, in Mount Vernon, New York, just north of the Bronx. His family was Jewish, and his father Louis was a prominent illumination engineer—someone who specialized in the science and art of artificial lighting. This was a genuinely important profession in the early twentieth century, when electric lighting was still transforming cities and changing how people lived.

Young Johnny started writing songs at thirteen. He was precocious and well-educated, attending the McBurney School in Manhattan before going on to Colgate University and then Columbia. After that, he did something that speaks to a certain restlessness and ambition: he went to Paris to continue his studies.

When World War II erupted, Marks served as an Army Captain in the 26th Special Service Company. Special Service units were responsible for troop entertainment and morale—organizing shows, sports, and recreational activities for soldiers. It was fitting work for a songwriter. He earned a Bronze Star and four Battle Stars during the war, decorations that indicate he saw real danger and served with distinction.

A Family Connection Changes Everything

The story of how Johnny Marks became the king of Christmas music involves a brother-in-law, a department store, and a reindeer with a glowing nose.

Marks married Margaret May, whose brother was a man named Robert L. May. In 1939, May was working as a copywriter for Montgomery Ward, the massive American retailer. The company asked him to write a Christmas story they could give away as a promotional booklet. May created a tale about a reindeer named Rudolph who was mocked for his unusual red nose but eventually became a hero when that nose helped guide Santa's sleigh through fog.

The booklet was enormously popular. Montgomery Ward distributed millions of copies. But it wasn't until 1949 that Johnny Marks saw the real potential. He took his brother-in-law's story and turned it into a song.

Gene Autry, the singing cowboy who was already one of America's biggest entertainment stars, recorded "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" that year. It became a sensation, selling two million copies in its first holiday season alone. To this day, it remains one of the best-selling singles in recorded music history.

Building an Empire of Seasonal Joy

Marks was smart enough to recognize that he had stumbled onto something valuable. In 1949, the same year Rudolph became a hit, he founded St. Nicholas Music, a publishing company that would control the rights to his Christmas catalog. This wasn't just artistic success—it was shrewd business planning that would generate income for decades.

Through the 1950s and into the 1960s, Marks kept writing Christmas songs. Many became standards.

"Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" came out in 1958, recorded by a thirteen-year-old singer named Brenda Lee. The song took a few years to catch on, but eventually it became one of the most-played Christmas songs of all time. Brenda Lee would later say she had no idea at the time that she was recording something that would define her career.

"I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day" appeared in 1956. Marks adapted it from a poem that Longfellow had written during the Civil War, while the poet was grieving his wife's death and worrying about his son who had been wounded in battle. The original poem is tinged with despair before arriving at hope—Longfellow wrote about hearing Christmas bells and wondering whether there was any peace on Earth. Marks's melody captured both the melancholy and the eventual comfort of the words.

The Television Special That Made Christmas

In 1964, something happened that cemented Johnny Marks's place in American culture forever. The Rankin/Bass production company created an animated television special based on "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," using a technique called stop-motion animation where physical puppets are photographed one frame at a time to create the illusion of movement.

Marks wrote the entire musical score. This meant composing not just the title song but all the other music in the program: "A Holly Jolly Christmas," "Silver and Gold," "The Most Wonderful Day of the Year," "We Are Santa's Elves," and more.

The special became an annual tradition. It has aired every year since 1964, making it the longest-running holiday special in television history. Generations of American children grew up watching the same puppet reindeer, the same misfit toys, the same Abominable Snow Monster. And they grew up singing Johnny Marks's songs without knowing his name.

Burl Ives, the folk singer and actor, voiced the narrator character Sam the Snowman in the special. He recorded "A Holly Jolly Christmas" and "Silver and Gold" as singles for the 1965 holiday season, and both became hits in their own right. Ives's warm, avuncular delivery became inseparable from the songs themselves.

The Song He Loved Most

Fame can be a strange prison. Johnny Marks became so associated with Christmas that people forgot he was capable of anything else. He wrote non-holiday songs throughout his career—love songs, novelty tunes, pieces about summer and autumn and ordinary days. But nobody particularly wanted to hear them.

This bothered him. He felt pigeonholed. When people asked him about his greatest work, he didn't name Rudolph or "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree." He pointed to "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day."

It's an interesting choice. The Longfellow poem is more complex than most Christmas fare, dealing with war and loss and doubt before reaching its conclusion. Perhaps Marks saw in it something more substantial than the cheerful simplicity of his other hits. Or perhaps he was simply tired of being known for a song about a reindeer.

A Strange Television Appearance

In December 1961, Marks appeared on the game show "To Tell the Truth." The format of this program involved three contestants all claiming to be the same person, with a panel trying to guess which one was telling the truth.

Marks wasn't there as himself. He was one of the impostors, pretending to be the owner of a herd of reindeer. Two of the four panelists voted for him, fooled by his performance. When the real contestant was revealed, Marks got to announce who he actually was: the composer of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer."

It was a playful moment, the songwriter hiding behind the very creation that had made him famous.

The Marks Family Legacy

Johnny Marks came from an accomplished family. His father Louis was a leading figure in illumination engineering, the kind of expert that cities consulted when they were figuring out how to light their streets and buildings. His uncle Marcus M. Marks served as Borough President of Manhattan, an important political office in New York City government.

Marks himself had three children: Michael, Laura, and David. In a curious footnote, he was the great-uncle of Steven Levitt, the economist who co-wrote the bestselling book "Freakonomics." The connection between a Christmas songwriter and an economist famous for analyzing unusual data might seem random, but perhaps there's a family thread of looking at familiar things from unexpected angles.

Greenwich Village and Beyond

Marks made his home on West 11th Street in Greenwich Village, the Manhattan neighborhood that has long attracted artists, writers, and musicians. The Village in the mid-twentieth century was a bohemian enclave, full of jazz clubs and poetry readings and unconventional people. It was an interesting place for a man who made his fortune writing the most traditional of American music.

He died on September 3, 1985, from complications related to diabetes. He was seventy-five years old. He's buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, a historic burial ground that's also the final resting place of Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, and other musical legends.

The Curious Case of Chuck Berry's Rudolph Song

One oddity in Marks's catalog deserves mention. In 1958, Chuck Berry wrote and recorded "Run Rudolph Run," a rock and roll Christmas song. But the writing credit went to Johnny Marks.

This wasn't because Marks contributed to the song. Berry wrote both the words and the music. But Marks held a trademark on the Rudolph character, and any song using that reindeer needed to go through him. So Berry's name doesn't appear on his own composition, a reminder that intellectual property law can produce strange results.

What He Built

In 1981, four years before his death, Johnny Marks was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. He had also served as a director of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers—usually called ASCAP—from 1957 to 1961, helping to shape the organization that protects and promotes songwriters' rights.

But his real monument is harder to quantify. Every December, his music fills the air. Children learn his songs before they can read. Adults hear them so often they sometimes claim to be tired of them, but the melodies stick anyway. "Rudolph" and "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" and "A Holly Jolly Christmas" have become part of what Christmas sounds like in America.

A Jewish songwriter who never celebrated the holiday ended up defining it for millions of people. There's something beautifully American about that—the way culture gets made by unexpected people, the way traditions emerge from commercial assignments and family connections and a willingness to write songs that make strangers happy.

Johnny Marks might have wished people remembered his other work. He might have wanted to escape the Christmas pigeonhole. But there are worse legacies than being the man who gave the world a red-nosed reindeer and a holly jolly Christmas, over and over again, every year, forever.