Biography
Haven Gillespie, the lyricist whose name remains most closely linked to the holiday perennial “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,” entered the world on February 6, 1888, in Covington, Kentucky. Employed as a typesetter at the Cincinnati Times-Star, he first placed lyrics with a local vaudeville troupe in 1911 yet continued setting type for years afterward, retaining his International Typographic Union card until the end of his life. His initial substantial success arrived with the 1925 release “Drifting and Dreaming,” followed the next year by “Breezin’ Along With the Breeze,” fashioned alongside his regular partner Dick Whiting. “By the Sycamore Tree” appeared in 1931, and three years after that Gillespie produced his lasting standard when he and composer J. Fred Coots wrote “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” during a fifteen-minute subway journey in New York. The piece reached listeners on Eddie Cantor’s Thanksgiving broadcast after Cantor’s wife Ida pressed for its inclusion, and sheet-music sales soon surpassed twenty-five thousand copies each day. In 1936, following an extended evening at a neighborhood speakeasy, Gillespie penned “You Go to My Head,” later interpreted by Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, and Peggy Lee. “That Lucky Old Sun,” issued in 1949, found its way to recordings by Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, and Jerry Lee Lewis. Inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, Gillespie died in Las Vegas on March 14, 1975; ten years later George Strait’s revival of the 1921 composition “Right or Wrong” earned the ASCAP Country Music Award.