How fate and a last-minute rewrite saved the Bing Crosby-David Bowie Christmas collaboration
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I’ve written many Christmas columns in my career. As I began to consider a topic for this year’s piece, an idea caught my attention that fit the bill perfectly: the memorable Christmas duet that almost didn’t happen.
Danny Deraney, a well-known American public relations executive, posted on X on Dec. 22: “47 years ago, Bing Crosby, in his final Christmas special, teamed up with David Bowie in one of the most wholesome and beautiful duets of all time. Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy.” It received more than 2.3 million views in 24 hours.
“Perfect,” I immediately thought.
I’ve been meaning to write about the Crosby-Bowie duet for years. My interest intensified last Christmas when I purchased Bing Crosby’s Christmas Gems, produced by Crosby’s estate and Primary Wave Music. The CD brought together “holiday favourites” and a “collection of never-before-released tracks from Crosby’s musical archives that will bring select songs to streaming platforms for the first time ever.” The song with Bowie was one of several musical collaborations on it.
 Bing Crosby and David Bowie created a timeless Christmas classic. |
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Crosby and Bowie recorded their duet in September 1977 for Crosby’s TV special, Bing Crosby’s Merrie Olde Christmas. It turned out to be one of Crosby’s final performances, as the brilliant crooner passed away the following month from a heart attack.
Although Crosby and Bowie had never performed together, their powerful singing voices and immaculate pitch fit together in perfect harmony. Their duet combined American composer Katherine Kennicott Davis’s 1941 song, “The Little Drummer Boy,” with “Peace on Earth,” written by the TV special’s musical supervisors Ian Fraser and Larry Grossman, as well as scriptwriter Buz Kohan. It was a masterful and succinct performance, with each singer able to stay in tune and play off one another. It’s still regarded as one of the most popular Christmas songs of all time.
Yet, it wasn’t clear until the waning hours that these two men would perform together.
Andrea Warner’s Oct. 23, 2023, piece for CBC Music summarized the fascinating backstory behind what she described as the “strangest Christmas duet ever.” Bowie reportedly appeared on Crosby’s show with one goal in mind: to help mitigate some public relations damage he’d recently experienced. “Fresh off a debilitating drug addiction and accusations of Nazi sympathizing, David Bowie was ready to capitalize on the non-chart success of his latest record, Low, by appearing on Bing Crosby’s Merrie Olde Christmas,” noted Scott Elingburg’s Dec. 16, 2015, essay for McSweeney’s. “On paper it made sense to no one. But when these two icons met to record a television segment, it made even less sense.”
Why so?
According to Stephane Nolasco’s Dec. 12, 2023, piece for Fox News, “when producers of Crosby’s Christmas TV special asked Bowie to sing ‘Little Drummer Boy,’ he refused.” She, like Warner, quoted a Dec. 20, 2006, article in the Washington Post, in which Bowie reportedly said, “I hate this song. Is there something else I could sing?” The article was based on an interview with one of the musical supervisors, Fraser, who added, “We didn’t know quite what to do.”
Here’s what they did. “Fraser, Kohan, and Grossman left the set and found a piano in the studio’s basement,” the Post continued. “In about 75 minutes, they wrote ‘Peace on Earth,’ an original tune, and worked out an arrangement that weaved together the two songs. Bowie and Crosby nailed the performance with less than an hour of rehearsal.”
There’s even more to this intriguing tale. Crosby and Bowie, two men with fundamentally different attitudes about music and life in general, may or may not have been enthusiastic about recording together.
Bowie and his wife apparently arrived on set “wearing full-length mink coats, they have matching full makeup and their hair was bright red,” Mary Crosby, Bing’s daughter, was quoted as saying in the Associated Press on July 23, 2014. “We were thinking, ‘Oh my god.’” His son Nathaniel also chimed in, “It almost didn’t happen. I think the producers told him to take the lipstick off and take the earring out. It was just incredible to see the contrast.” Yet, there’s evidence that Crosby described Bowie as a “clean-cut kid and a real fine asset to the show. He sings well, has a great voice and reads lines well” several days after the recording took place.
That’s not the only contradiction.
Bowie reportedly said this about Crosby in 1978: “He was fantastic. That old man knew everything about everything. He knew rock and roll backwards, even if he didn’t know the music … I’m glad I met him.” His position had apparently transformed by 1999: “He was not there at all,” Bowie said, and suggested Crosby was “look[ing] like a little old orange sitting on a stool.” He apparently found the experience “bizarre,” and only went on the show because “I just knew my mother liked him.”
Here’s another strange fact: the song largely disappeared for several years.
“We never expected to hear about it again,” Kohan, the scriptwriter, told the Post, and the master tape was erased. The song survived as a bootleg, and the online mix version was released by RCA Records in 1982 as a single with Bowie’s “Fantastic Voyage.” Bowie was irritated with this decision and it caused him to leave the record label. Yet, it went to number 3 on the UK Singles Chart and became, according to the Daily Telegraph on Dec. 24, 2022, “one of the singer’s fastest-selling hits.” The song has since been released on various Christmas collections, including the CD I purchased.
How many of these stories about the duet are fact, and how many are fiction? Crosby and Bowie have both passed on, so we’ll likely never find out. It’s certainly interesting to know this popular and unlikely Christmas duet came exceedingly close to being a non-event. It could have been easily forgotten if it wasn’t for a bit of luck and several quirks of fate.
The road to greatness isn’t always paved in gold. When it shines, it does so with an unmistakably powerful beam of bright light. Just like the Christmas star, in fact.
Merry Christmas, everyone!
Michael Taube is a political commentator, Troy Media syndicated columnist and former speechwriter for Prime Minister Stephen Harper. He holds a master’s degree in comparative politics from the London School of Economics, lending academic rigour to his political insights.
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