Snow on the record, sun through the studio window, and a voice that never let the difference show.
On the morning of August 6, 1959, Dean Martin walked into Capitol Records’ studio on North Vine Street in the middle of one of the hottest weeks of the year. He was there to record an album’s worth of songs about snow, sleigh bells, and cold winter nights. He reportedly found the whole thing very funny. It’s a fitting kind of joke for Martin, whose entire persona ran on the gap between what a moment called for and what he actually felt like doing.
That session produced two songs that would go on to define Martin’s relationship to the season: “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” and “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” cut back to back for the Capitol album A Winter Romance, arranged and conducted by Gus Levene. The song itself had been written fourteen years earlier by Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne, also during a heatwave, also in Hollywood. Cahn liked to tell the story: the two of them sitting in a stifling office, giving up on the beach, deciding to write about winter instead, purely out of spite for the weather. By the time Martin got to it, “Let It Snow” had already been recorded by Vaughn Monroe, Woody Herman, and Frank Sinatra, among others. None of those versions are the one most people hum today.
What Martin brought to the song wasn’t range or ambition. By his own reputation, he treated recording sessions the way he treated most things, with a kind of practiced ease that made the hardest part of the job look like the easiest. That relaxed, unbothered phrasing turned out to be exactly what “Let It Snow” needed. Where other versions leaned into the drama of the storm outside, Martin’s version leaned into the ease of not caring about it — a voice completely unhurried, completely warm, entirely at peace with staying right where he was. He liked the song enough to rerecord it in 1966 for The Dean Martin Christmas Album, this time with a more country-inflected arrangement. It’s still the 1959 version, piccolo duet and all, that radio has never really let go of.
The song didn’t chart at the time. It wouldn’t enter the Billboard Hot 100 until 2018, more than two decades after Martin’s death, once Christmas songs from decades past started earning their own kind of streaming afterlife every December. It’s a strange kind of vindication. A song recorded almost as a private joke about the weather, by a singer who died on Christmas Day itself, has become exactly the record so many households now reach for first, the moment the temperature actually does start to drop.