"Jingle Bells," The Singing Dogs (RCA)

Dave Marsh and Steve Propes' book Merry Christmas Baby dates this record to 1955, but I thought it went back farther than that. Anyway, this record has become a Christmas classic. A fairly simple background track supports the sound of dogs barking the tune to the popular Christmas song. This was a lot harder to do in the 1950s than it is nowadays; it required hundreds of hours of recording barking dogs, putting the voices through a variable-speed oscillator to get the right pitches, then painstakingly editing the sounds into a song that fits in rhythm with the backing track. Today, you just sample half a dozen dogs into a computer and play it with a keyboard (see Jingle Cats). The creators didn't want their vision to be tied just to the holiday, though, so the B-side was "Oh Susanna." UPDATE: Fred Clemens confirms the original issue date of 1955 and notes the complete artist attribution should read "Don Charles presents The Singing Dogs directed by Carl Weismann." He also points out that the original issue had "Jingle Bells" in a medley with "Pat-A-Cake" and "Three Blind Mice," complete with a spoken introduction by a carnival barker, but was later, in 1971, edited down to just the familiar version, which itself was then re-edited to include an extra bridge and chorus. He also notes the following year (1956) the dogs, confirming that they were indeed nothing but hounds, issued "Hot Dog Rock 'n Roll" backed with "Hot Dog Boogie." Fred also sent us the cover scan of the original EP seen here.