Did the lyricist of the famous song actually get to go “walking in a winter wonderland?”

In a word: No. Why not? Because he was in a tuberculosis sanitarium. How weird and sad is that? Very.

So, back in the winter of 1934, 33-year-old Richard Smith was sitting in his room at the West Mountain Sanitarium after having a recurrence of his TB, trying to keep himself occupied by entering jingle contests for ad copy. (He actually won the Maybelline eye shadow contest with the slogan “The Eyes Have It.” Clever!) He could see children playing in the snow outside his window and was reminded of how much he’d enjoyed those same activities when he was growing up in the small town of Honesdale, Pennsylvania. A powerful nostalgia was at work here, but, given the actual wording of the song I think there was something else going on: he missed his wife, Jane, whom he’d married in 1930.

Let me see if I can boil this sad saga down into a reasonable length. We have no real idea of what it was like to live in a world without antibiotics and vaccines. At the time that Smith sat in his lonely room the advent of streptomycin was about a decade away, while tuberculosis had been killing people for millennia. No one knew how to cure it, but it was obvious that it was contagious. So once a person developed the tell-tale signs, including the rather horrifying bloody coughs, the best that could be done was to isolate the patient and subject him or her to a regimen of fresh air, good food, and whatever else was considered healthy at the time. If you really loved your loved ones you’d stay away from them, at least until or if your symptoms abated enough that you were considered cured, at least temporarily. People might go in and out of sanatoria throughout their lives.

Once we realize Smith’s situation, the words of the song start to make a lot more sense. They never mention Christmas at all; instead, the lyrics describe a young couple in love who are enjoying the beauties of winter but who have a shadow hanging over them. I’m going to speculate (something I rarely do) that there was a history of tuberculosis in Smith’s family; otherwise some of the wording makes no sense. With your permission, kind and patient readers, I’m going to go through some of the lines in excruciating detail:

The first verse is pretty clear and conventional, simply describing the joys of a winter landscape with glistening snow and sleigh bells.

The second verse hands us our first puzzle:

Gone away is the blue bird
Here to stay is the new bird
He sings a love song as we go along
Walking in a winter wonderland.

If you’re like me you’ve sort of assumed that the “blue bird” is an actual bird who’s gone away for the winter, right? And in his place is this “new bird.” But that interpretation doesn’t make any sense. Instead, we’re talking symbolism here, and note that it isn’t a “bluebird,” often seen as a symbol of happiness, but a “blue bird,” or one that’s sad. A lot depends on that one space! Sadness has flown away, and in its place is renewed hope for a loving future.

The happy couple stops and builds a snowman, and we’re handed another perplexity:

In the meadow we can build a snowman,
And pretend that he is Parson Brown.
He’ll say “Are you married?”
We’ll say, “No, man!
But you can do the job when you’re in town!”

What on earth? I’ve always vaguely thought that somehow the parson, or preacher, thought it was scandalous that a man and woman were out walking around together on their own without a chaperone and was therefore urging them to get married, and that idea makes some sense. However, the song was written in the 1930’s, not the 1830’s. Things aren’t quite that strict in the field of gender separation by then. Once we account for the TB threat and get a definition of “parson,” the murk clears up considerably. “Parson Brown” is almost certainly hypothetical name for a traveling preacher who goes from town to town on a ”circuit,” serving communities that aren’t big enough to have a full-time preacher in the pulpit. Couples would indeed plan to marry when the preacher came to town. And I wonder if there was an element of secrecy in this particular couple’s solicitation. Once they’re married no one can do anything about it, so if there’s any family opposition to the match it’ll be moot.

Think I’m so far out on a limb here that I’m in danger of falling off? Well, let me tell you that there’s a rather famous example of this couple-marrying-against-family-wishes-because-of-tuberculosis in the life of Richard Feynman the brilliant physicist, who worked on the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb. (He’s better known to moderns as the man who gave the striking demonstration at the Challenger disaster hearings by dropping an O-ring into a glass of ice water and then breaking it into bits to show how those same elements had failed at the ill-fated launch.) Feynman had a tragic first marriage to a tubercular young woman named Arline Greenbaum. Both families adamantly opposed the match since Arline had been given no more than two years to live and could possibly infect her new husband. (His mother even said that such a marriage should be “illegal.”) Feynman was determined, though, and in 1942 the couple got married at a registry office with no family members in attendance. The ceremony was witnessed by two strangers. Feynman took his new bride to a sanatorium and left her there, being allowed only to kiss her on the cheek and to visit her on weekends. She died in 1945.

The final verse from the original bears out my interpretation:

Later on, we’ll conspire,
As we dream by the fire,
To face unafraid the plans that we made,
Walking in a winter wonderland.

Again, if you don’t know anything about the author’s background you could just think that maybe he’s very conscious of the impact of marriage on one’s life. But if this idealistic couple is determined to face the future together no matter what tragedy looms, then his emphasis on the courage needed to carry out their plans makes sense. And (not to belabor the point too much), they’re “conspiring” to get married, a word that implies secrecy. (“Conspire” also rhymes with “fire,” so maybe that’s why he used it. Who knows?)

In 1934 Smith was released from the sanatorium and moved back to New York City with Jane. He’d had at least a start to a theatrical career there before getting sick and therefore had some connections. So he teamed up with a songwriter named Felix Bernard who wrote the tune, and the song turned into a monster hit. It’s not clear whether or not Smith lived long enough to see this success, as he died the very next year. I wonder if Jane got a cut of the royalties as his surviving spouse? I sure hope so.

About a decade after the song’s original release a new version of the lyrics was written in order to make it into more of a children’s song, with the snowman now being a “circus clown.” Some versions stick to one or the other set of verses; some combine them. My own choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale, is singing a particularly engaging jazz arrangement by the contemporary composer and arranger Greg Jasperse. Since the arrangement is fairly new I wasn’t able to find a ton of performances online and so went with this one–from Thailand! So great. You can hear a hint of a British flavor in their pronunciation, which is pretty funny as they sing this quintessentially American song. The headgear alone makes the video worth watching:

And, just because I can, here’s Roy Rogers and Dale Evans singing “The Circuit-Riding Preacher” along with a medley of old Gospel songs. Honestly, folks, Roy Rogers had a great voice. (Will it mark me as unbelievably ancient if I say that I used to watch the old “Roy Rogers Show” and fondly remember his singing “Happy Trails to You” at the end of every episode? Well, so be it!)

© Debi Simons