“Christmas Time’s A-Coming” was written by Benjamin “Tex” Logan, a fiddler from Coahoma, Texas, who wrote it with Bill Monroe in mind while he was working with the Lilly Brothers. Logan was combining music with engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he took his bachelor’s degree in 1951. Five years later he moved to Bell Laboratories, where he spent most of his working life. In October 1951 Logan played his last show with Wilma Lee and Stoney Cooper, at a Baltimore coliseum where Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys were also on the bill. That gave him the chance to meet Monroe, and with Buck Graves’s help he played and sang the song for him. Monroe agreed to record it.
The plan was for Logan to play fiddle on the record, but car trouble kept him from reaching Nashville in time. The band recorded it on 28 October 1951 at Castle Studio in the Tulane Hotel. Monroe played mandolin and sang lead on the verses and tenor on the chorus, and Edd Mayfield played guitar and sang lead on the chorus. Gar Bowers played banjo, Gordon Terry fiddle and Shorty Sheehan bass, and Owen Bradley added vibraphone. Monroe later played the recording to Logan over the telephone, and Logan approved. Decca released it on 26 November 1951 (46386), backed with Monroe’s “The First Whippoorwill.”
The song is about going home for the holiday. Snow is falling, bells are ringing, holly is in the window and candles are burning. The singer, yearning for the folks back home, is so eager to get back to his country home that he can hardly walk for wanting to run.
Other artists recorded it over the following decades. The Lonesome Pine Fiddlers recorded it for Starday’s Merry Christmas Country Style (1963), and Larry Sparks and the Lonesome Ramblers opened Christmas in the Hills (King Bluegrass, 1976) with it. Emmylou Harris made it the first track of Light of the Stable (Warner Bros., 1979), with Ricky Skaggs on banjo and mandolin. Jimmy Martin recorded it for To Mother, at Christmas (Gusto, 1980), and Peter Rowan for Sugar Hill’s Sugar Plums (1991), with Sam Bush, Stuart Duncan and Jerry Douglas. Rhonda Vincent’s version opens Rounder’s O Christmas Tree! (2002).
