Bobby Helms, Jingle Bell Rock, and a Lesson in Loss

The man who made the Christmas song, "Jingle Bell Rock," famous is hardly remembered for it today.

Listening to the usual Christmas season jingles just now and along comes “Jingle Bell Rock,” a perennial favorite. The song has been “covered” by Neil Diamond, Hall & Oates, The Wiggles, even the Singing Chipmunks as well as hundreds of other recording artists.

Likely you’ve heard the song hundreds of times yourself, but you may not have heard the original version, a Top 10 hit in 1957 for Bobby Helms. Likely you never heard of Bobby Helms, either, but he had three Top 10 hits in the 1950s and for a time sold as well as Elvis Pressley and Buddy Holly, whom you certainly know.

Well, I knew Bobby Helms through my time reporting for The Indianapolis News and The Indianapolis Star in the 1980s and 1990s. While Pressley’s and Holly’s lives ended tragically early, albeit in differing circumstances, Helms’ decline was long and slow, and even more unfortunate.

Bobby Helms grew up in Bloomington, Indiana, the major college town in the state, but not near campus. Rather, he belonged to the poorer, working-class west side where most men were employed either at the RCA television or General Electric refrigerator factories doing assembly line work, or as cutters in the nearby limestone quarries and mills. He later settled in Martinsville, another working class and rust belt community 20 miles up the road and mostly famous for the high school where the late, famous coach John Wooden played high school basketball in the 1920s. It was in Martinsville that I first met the singer. An elderly woman had called me and reported that she had taken in the singer as a kind of boarder, that he was down on his luck and friendless and didn’t I want to know his story. I knew the name – Bobby Helms – and at least two of his songs (the way he sang “My Special Angel,” another one of his Top 10 hits, sounded more like a nasally “my spacial angel”) and I very much wanted to meet the man and hear his story.

I found Bobby to be Old School in that he met me formally at the door the day I drove down to Martinsville to meet him, then he led me to a dated, even stale living room where we sat on a floral-patterned sofa. I was struck by how frail and old the man looked. He stood about 5-foot-8 or nine, my height, but appeared to weigh no more than 120 pounds. I’d looked up pictures of him from his best performing days and he had a full head of hair early on, combed in the usual bouffant style of the day, and a big, toothy smile. The smile still was there, albeit retreating a bit, but his hair was thin and flat, his posture bent, his gait slow. He was only in his mid-50s at the time.

The lady of the house offered us tea – it was all so proper – and she excused herself because she wanted to let Bobby and me speak in private. She could have been a maidservant on “Downton Abbey,” yet this was a close, dark house in a rust belt town in Indiana, and she was a widower doing her Christian duty to help a man she knew of from her own better days.

I asked Bobby how he was doing, as if we were old acquaintances, and he said he was doing well. His weak, scratchy voice and that frail body told a different story. I later learned he suffered from emphysema and asthma but at the time I just wanted to get to know him better, to hear his story.

One older article I read in preparation for this newsletter said he’d struggled for years to be taken seriously as a country artist after ultimately being rejected by the teenyboppers who initially had liked his pop music. I think it didn’t help that he was perhaps too country and spoke like it, and he didn’t wiggle his hips or show a killer smile when he performed like some longer lasting rock and country music icons. In a sense, it was radio that made his career and TV that undermined it.

Bobby was most bitter about all the play that “Jingle Bell Rock” received each Christmas, but almost always someone else’s version. I found it hard not to empathize with him. Today we would speak of cultural appropriation if this were an African American “standard” and Bobby had been an African American singer, yet all the play and royalties were going to a better-known white singer. That’s how it must have seemed to Bobby, his hit tune heard hundreds of millions of times each Christmas, and yet here he was, a boarder in an older woman’s home in mostly rural Southern Indiana.

I didn’t want to write a “sad” story or one of those “whatever happened to” boilerplate pieces newspapers used to do. I ended up writing a little ditty about the kind woman who had taken in a once well-known singer, included some biographical details and pointed to places where readers could find the man’s music. I included one quote from a well-known Nashville record producer, whom I had interviewed for the story. “Bobby Helms had three more hits than most people who come to Nashville,” he told me. That quote not only summarized the high point of Bobby’s career, but also became a measure of gratitude for any small success I’d had in life up to that point or was to have later on.

Bobby Helms, Take Two

A few years later I received a call from a parent at Eastwood Middle School in Indianapolis; she had invited Bobby Helms to appear at a Christmas party for 7th and 8th graders that was themed after “Jingle Bell Rock.”

And he’d accepted! Did I want to cover that story, I was asked. Sure thing, I said, and a photographer and I dutifully appeared at the appointed night and hour.

Bobby still was small and frail, and he’d lost vision in one eye since we’d last met, but he looked upbeat in a Navy blazer and sailor cap. We spoke a while and he thanked me for the earlier story, which he said he’d saved, and he sounded optimistic in announcing that he would be opening a club in his own name in Myrtle Beach, S.C., the following year. He said he’d just completed a successful, eight-month engagement in Branson, Missouri, too. But he lip-synched “Jingle Bell Rock” to a recorded version of the song instead of performing it live and maybe the kids were just doing their parents a favor by listening politely to it. They got more “into” the evening when a hired DJ began spinning rap songs.

Besides the big plans for his own club in Myrtle Beach, Bobby also spoke of new contract negotiations with industry giant MCA. "They've been talking about me re-signing with them because I've got some new songs,” he told me. “I may go back with them, and I may not. I’m not really interested in recording again unless I can record songs I want. Not be bossed; just be able to say, ‘I don’t like that song, I don't do rock songs, that's too country for me.' Otherwise I'm just not interested in recording."

I didn’t remember this particular quote word-for-word but was able to find it an online database of old Indianapolis Star. I also did an internet search on what happened to Bobby’s career after I last met him. I found no evidence that he ever opened an eponymous club in Myrtle Beach, nor any evidence that he was able to sign again with MCA. Bobby died in 1997, five years after our last meeting; cause of death was emphysema and asthma. He’s buried in the Hillsdale Cemetery in Martinsville where I know he lived out the last years of his life. He didn’t have much of a career in the end, but I know he went out with his pride intact and he must have had some friends, too, because his grave is highlighted by a substantial headstone, his last name in large letters flanked by two engraved acoustic guitars.