“A Baby Just Like You” by Frank Sinatra, Saturday, December 2, 2023
Years ago, I started listening to the 2004 compilation, Frank Sinatra's The Christmas Collection. I still can't tell you Ol’ Blue Eyes’ signature Christmas songs because so many of Sinatra’s generation of singers covered each other’s songs. Besides the amount of songs I knew in the collection, I also noticed that there were several tracks that I had never heard before. I'm always looking for a hidden chestnut— a Christmas track that has been overlooked, waiting to be repackaged for a new generation of Christmas music listeners. We are certainly getting sick of the same hundred-something songs played over and over by different recording artists.
THE CHRISTMAS TIME WHEN I WAS YOUNG. When I heard “A Baby Just Like You,” though, I thought it was one of the worst Christmas songs and the worst Sinatra song I had ever heard. But as I listened to the album over and over, the song started to become a “so bad it's good” song, which made me consider writing about it last year. It turns out that the song is actually a lot more interesting than it is classic. “A Baby Just Like You” was written and first performed by John Denver on his 1975 Christmas album, Rocky Mountain Christmas. The album was released during the height of the singer-songwriter’s fame. Denver penned the song “A Baby Just Like You” for his adopted son, Zachary. Shortly after Denver released the song, “the king of the holidays” released his own version of the song. Over the course of his career, Frank Sinatra released four Christmas albums between 1948 and 1968. In December 1975, he released two holiday singles, “A Baby Just Like You” and “Christmas Memories.” John Denver had released his Christmas album Rocky Mountain Christmas in September of that year.
YOU’VE SET MY SOUL TO DREAMING. “A Baby Just Like You” was later released on a novelty album with The Muppets, the 1979 album A Christmas Together, one of several collaborations between John Denver and Jim Henson. I’m pretty sure that I had some awareness of this album, which is a mix of holiday classics peppered with a few originals. “A Baby Just Like You” is the only song without the cute, furry voices provided by Jim Henson, Frank Oz, and friends. Most of the songs on the John Denver/Muppets album are comical or use comedic devices, with Denver singing somewhat serious. As a novelty album, A Christmas Together fails to be remembered except for maybe kids who connected with it in 1979. What we end up with is a lackluster failure to commit to comedy or musicality, which feels strange over 45 years later. We’ve come to expect the weirder of artists—from David Bowie to Lady Gaga to make avant-garde collaborations, and a Muppet connection is not surprising. And while John Denver did do comedy, he’s not weird enough of an artist to make a classic Muppets record, and yet he did. But then I think about all of the serious acts that performed on The Muppet Show. The most memorable performances were when the singers let the Muppets get carried away, but that didn’t lead to Muppet albums to my memory. But again, that seems like a different time that doesn’t translate to what would work today.
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