How did the fallout of a performance at the 1968 World Series lead to the only English line in the biggest Spanish Christmas song of all time? This is the story behind…Feliz Navidad.
Not many iconic Christmas songs have been written after 1970, but Feliz Navidad is one of them. It was written and recorded by Puerto Rican singer/songwriter José Feliciano. José was recording a Christmas album and producer Rick Jarrod told him he should write an original to include on it.
José felt the idea was kind of pointless as he thought there were too many good ones out - but he gave it a shot. The melody came first, and didn’t take long to write…and then came the Spanish lyrics. José then decided that the song needed English lyrics if it was going to get airplay.
Two years earlier, José learned about the kind of pushback artists from different ethnic backgrounds could face from white audiences.
In 1968, José performed the Star Spangled Banner before Game 5 of the World Series between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Detroit Tigers in Detroit.
José opened for Frank Sinatra the night before in Vegas and then took a Red Eye to Detroit to sing the anthem the following night. It was the first time anyone had heard the anthem in a way that was different from how exactly it had been written.
José has said that he thought he was being patriotic by showing that only in America could a “poor blind kid from Puerto Rico” make this happen.
It sounded beautiful – but not everyone thought so at the time. No one had heard an arrangement of the American national anthem like that before. There was no crowd reaction during the performance. There were some polite cheers afterwards, but then José says he started to hear the boos. And it didn’t end there. Televisions stations across America got lit up with complaints, service clubs wrote resolutions and it was a major story on the nightly newscasts.
Afterwards, José lost airplay and live gigs. He had trouble getting his songs back on the radio…and he remembered this fall-out when recording Feliz Navidad. So he added in a line in English that was simple enough: “I wanna wish you a merry Christmas, from the bottom of my heart.”
There are only 20 words in both English and Spanish in the entire song. Its perfection is in its simplicity. The song’s popularity continues to grow. Feliz Navidad is the 8th biggest-selling Christmas song in Canada in the digital age, between 2003 and 2016, outselling songs like Last Christmas and Jingle Bell Rock in that same time period.
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