More than 80 years ago, a woman in Massachusetts was taking a nap when a song got stuck in her head. It wasn’t a song the world had heard — but it’d one day be one everyone can recognize.
Katherine K. Davis, who had graduated from Wellesley College in 1914, wrote what is now known as “The Little Drummer Boy” with inspiration during her nap by a French song, ‘Patapan,’ according to Claire Fontijn, chair of the Wellesley music department and Phyllis Henderson Carey Professor of Music.
“And then ‘patapan’ translated in her mind to ‘pa-rum-pum-pum,’ and it took on a rhythm,” she said in an interview with WGBH Radio’s The Curiosity Desk.
Davis was born in St. Joseph, Missouri on June 25, 1892, and moved to Massachusetts for college to study English.
“Davis was studying English composition or English literature up until her sophomore year, and then in her junior year decided music was really it,” Fontijn told WGBH.
During her senior year, Davis received Wellesley’s Billings Prize for excellence in music. The song is now performed during commencement at Wellesley. She also taught at the college, Shady Hill Country Day School in Philadelphia, and Concord Academy in Concord, according to the Concord Library.
When she published “The Little Drummer Boy” it was called “Carol of the Drum,” and it wasn’t under her full name.
By 1941, Davis was already a prolific composer of choral music but she began getting “the feeling that I had perhaps done too many carol texts,” according to The Chicago Tribune. So, she released it under another name.
The song wasn’t a big hit — at least right away.
The Trapp Family Singers of Austria sang the song. But it’d take another 17 years to start being recognized.
In 1958, Harry Simeone made some changes to the song. The Chicago Tribune said he changed “the ox and ass kept time” to “the ox and lamb kept time,” and released it as “The Little Drummer Boy.”
It made the Billboard pop charts five years in a row, and was at the top of the Billboard Christmas singles chart seven of the following eight years, the Tribune reported.
Since then, it has been recorded by more than 200 artists, including Bing Crosby, Pentatonix, Carrie Underwood, Justin Bieber and Frank Sinatra.
If you feel this song is overplayed, you’re not alone. Davis also thought the song had been ruined by being overplayed.
But all those royalties now pay for instrumental and vocal lessons at Wellesley College, according to The New York Times.
“Today, that money funds, among other things, free music lessons for non-music majors. They’re studying, let’s say neuroscience, this very heady thing, and they can play the piano or play the violin or sing and it gives them a real nourishment for the soul and for the body,” Fontijn said.
