“Merry Christmas Baby,” the first Yuletide song in the Blues Hall of Fame, remains a perennial favorite years after its first release by Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers, featuring Charles Brown on piano and vocals, in 1947. The record, on the Exclusive label from Los Angeles, made Billboard‘s race/rhythm & blues charts for three Decembers in a row, from ’47 to ’49, and has since been reissued many times on various labels. Brown also recorded later versions and today it is so identified with Brown that Moore’s roles as the original bandleader, guitarist, and co-composer (with Lou Baxter) are often forgotten. It has been so often heard on mainstream radio that many listeners may not even think of it as a blues record, but it is solidly within the famed soft blues ballad style that Brown developed under the influence of Nat King Cole.
