Saturday, March 31, 2007

Jimmy Boyd, "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus"
(December 27, 1952)

Surely you've suffered this song thanks to its broadcast every Christmas, and are well aware it's sung by a naif thinks his mom is cheating on dad with SANTA CLAUS, only he doesn't realize mommy is actually kissing daddy dressed as Santa Claus because he thinks (oh, for cute) that Santa Claus is actually real and stuff! When Jimmy Boyd records this, he's actually twelve years, eleven months old, plenty old enough to see through this charade. (According to a 2006 MSNBC poll, the average age a kid sheds his belief in Santa Claus is eight.) So Boyd is exactly the kind of kid I hated in my youth. I couldn't really articulate this loathing, of course, but I knew instinctually that kids who played up their infantile behavior to adults lacked dignity. They ceded too much of one's identity to an adult vision of what kids are "supposed" to be like, which (to my mind) was always less than they actually were or could be. Maybe you could call the behavior this record epitomizes kid minstrelsy -- kidface.

Boyd has a BIG adult voice, though: he can project it sort of the same way Kay Starr or Teresa Brewer can. Initially, it's startling, but repetition reveals all his painful limitations, his flatness, his lack of emotional range. (Not that the song demands emotional range, mind.) His voice never fools us into thinking he's actually an adult. Instead, he's a kid in big man's clothes; he's got the accoutrements of adultness without any knowledge of how to deploy them to mean much of anything. His precociousness only makes him more infantile, not less.

(In comparison, even though Michael Jackson was even younger -- barely eleven, in fact -- when he recorded "I Want You Back," his command of the singing vocabulary of soul music was already so total that I've never felt any friction between the "adult" stance of the lyrics and the voice singing them, even though it was always impossible not to know a youngster owned that voice.) 2

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