Song · Live covers
Winter Wonderland
A 1934 Christmas standard that Radiohead played, loosely, on a Christmas webcast in 2002.
1934
honesdale, and a sanatorium
Felix Bernard wrote the music and Richard B. Smith the words. Smith, from Honesdale, Pennsylvania, is said to have been moved to write it by the sight of Honesdale's Central Park under snow, and he wrote the lyrics while being treated for tuberculosis at a sanatorium in Scranton. Richard Himber recorded it first, and more than two hundred artists have since.
The song most people know is not quite the original. A 1947 revision added a children's lyric, turning a romance in the snow into playing in it: Parson Brown, the snowman the couple pretend to marry them, became a circus clown, and the promises in the last verse became frolicking. Singers from Johnny Mathis onward have stitched the two versions together.
dec 2002
inside out night
Radiohead played it on “Inside Out Night”, the partly festive webcast from their own site in December 2002, the same broadcast that first aired “Morning Mr Magpie”. It was a loose, knockabout take between studio talk, and it never went further than that night.
the video
Their R. Smith, F. Bernard cover.· Daniel Stashkinwatch on youtube →
sources3
- Ronald D. Lankford, Sleigh Rides, Jingle Bells and Silent Nights: A Cultural History of American Christmas Songs, University Press of Florida, 2013.
- “Honesdale lyricist wrote ‘Wonderland’”, The Scranton Times-Tribune, 25 December 2014.
- “Radiohead: Winter Wonderland”, Carousel, December 2011, for the 2002 webcast.