Happy Holidays from Frank and Bing (Frank Sinatra Productions, ABC-TV, aired December 20, 1957)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Later last night I watched a short (21-minute) oddball item called Happy Holidays with Frank and Bing, an episode of Frank Sinatra’s short-lived (one season) half-hour variety show on ABC in 1957 and one on which imdb.com credits Sinatra with directing as well as appearing. I’d heard the soundtrack from this show on a low-budget CD on the LaserLight label in the early 1990’s but had never actually seen it – and one surprise was that it was in color. At the time virtually all TV was in black-and-white and most people thought it would stay that way indefinitely. (One who didn’t was Walt Disney, who insisted on shooting the Davy Crockett TV mini-series in color – and when Walt’s brother Roy, who ran the business end of the company from New York, asked him, “Why did you spend all that extra money making the Davy Crockett TV shows in color? TV isn’t in color!,” Walt just smiled and said, “It will be.”) The show is a nice, homey get-together between the great teen-idol crooners of the 1930’s and the 1940’s, older, mellower, over their former rivalry (Bing had said when Sinatra first emerged in the 1940’s, “A voice like Frank Sinatra’s comes along once in a lifetime. Why did it have to be my lifetime?”) and at the peak of their vocal powers.

It begins with Bing and Frank duetting on the song “Happy Holidays” from Bing’s 1942 movie Holiday Inn and also on “Jingle Bells,” following which Frank warbles a bit of “The Wassail Song.” This leads into a section in which Frank and Bing blend surprisingly well into a choral ensemble representing street carolers singing “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen,” “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” (for which,due to censorship, they had to change “Offspring of the virgin’s womb” to “Offspring of the favored one”), “O Come, All Ye Faithful,” “The First Noel,” and solos for the stars, Frank on “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear” and Bing on “Away in a Manger.” (One disappointment was we didn’t get to hear Bing warble a bit of “O Come, All Ye Faithful” in the original Latin, as “Adeste Fidelis,” as he did on his Decca record. Bing had gone to college at the Jesuit-runn Gonzaga University in Washington state and therefore knew Latin.) The sacred part of the show ends with a duet on “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” and then it’s time for more secular fare. Bing does “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” including a second chorus that shows off his chops as a jazz singer (when Johnny Marks was shopping this then-new song around in 1949, both Bing and Frank turned it down, so it was introduced by cowboy-movie star Gene Autry on a yellow-label Columbia 78, meaning it was intended as a children’s record, and it became a mega-hit with adult buyers), Frank does “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,” the two duet on the Mel Torme-Bob Wells “The Christmas Song” that had been a hit for Nat “King” Cole, and the show closes with the inevitable: Bing singing “White Christmas,” which in 1957 still was the biggest-selling record of all time. This show was a lovely time capsule from an era in which entertainment of this quality was presented every week and pretty much taken for granted, and though there are a lot of modern-day singers I like, it’s nice to have this time capsule from a bygone era in which singers sang from the heart and could showcase gentler emotions like delicacy and grace.