The Carol King

By John Grossman

As a business, Ron Clancy’s company, Christmas Classics Ltd, still isn’t anywhere near break even. A few years ago the 64-year-old publisher declared personal bankruptcy.

Nonetheless, Clancy is sitting on an epic achievement, heroic in scope, of uncompromised quality, a quixotic venture born of a hobbyist’s passion and grounded in one of his earliest memories, the beginning, if you will, of a heartwarming Christmas story.

Raised in Catholic orphanages in Philadelphia, Clancy recalls a Christmas Eve midnight mass when he was a young boy. The Christmas tree-filled chapel smelled wonderful. His young eyes alit on the manger scene. And the nuns, he remembers, sang the most beautiful Christmas carols.

“I’ve loved Christmas music ever since,” recalls Clancy.

For decades, he collected Christmas albums. Then tapes and CDs, learning that Christmas music runs much deeper than popularly sung carols and has a rich, worldwide history, including Latin hymns, liturgical chants, and beautiful classical works by such composers as Bach and Schubert.

When yuletide rolled around, Clancy made tapes from his amassed recordings and gave them to friends as gifts, often annotating them with information he’d also collected, for instance, that White Christmas, written in 1940 during the filming of the movie Holiday Inn, won an Academy Award for best song in 1942. “You know, you could sell these tapes,” his friends implored.

In 1989, Clancy heeded those suggestions, and thinking big, set out rather like Ken Burns minus a cameraman, “to tell the story of how Christmas music developed.” Then self-employed as an executive recruiter, he stole time between projects, holing up in the Library of Congress and other musty scholarly haunts. For years, he researched the history of Christmas music and pinpointed the origins of the music he wanted to include in his labor of love.

As Clancy discovered more and more forgotten and little known songs and identified period artwork (for instance, paintings by Thomas Hart Benton and Norman Rockwell) to evocatively complement his annotations and song lyrics — he assumed the scope and historic nature of his project would have publishers fighting to package the fruits of his obsession.

He assumed wrong. There’s a reason most Christmas albums feature the same traditional standards like Silent Night. They’ve passed into the public domain and can generally be reproduced without paying [songwriters or their estates] for music score lyrics. Clancy, however, took on the task and expense of acquiring rights to Nat King Cole’s rendition of The Christmas Song and Bing Crosby’s original recording of White Christmas. The cost of that uncompromising vision plus the added expense of print lyrics and illustration royalties, scared off potential publishers.

Undaunted, Clancy became his own publisher. Incorporating in 1999, and borrowing his way deeper and deeper into debt, he’s managed to issue several critically acclaimed books, many of which come with music CDs, songbooks, and a stunning, four-color hardcover book. Most recently, Sterling published Clancy’s book Sacred Christmas Music: The Stories Behind the Most Beloved Songs of Devotion (Sterling 2008).

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To conserve money for his Christmas music project, Clancy and his wife, Renate Wilson, live in her 30 foot by 30 foot, one-story bungalow near Cape May, New Jersey. The house has a small kitchen, one bath, a tiny front porch, and two bedrooms, one of which serves as headquarters for Christmas Classics, Ltd.

Clancy and tough times go back a long way. His father, a house painter, died of kidney failure, probably caused by lead poisoning, when Ron Clancy was five. Home life after that was unstable. Clancy and his siblings lived for a time over a Philadelphia tavern in an apartment with no hot water or electricity. “I used to steal kerosene lamps from construction sites and my sister and brother and I would case stores to steal food,” Clancy recalls. He has fonder memories of Philadelphia’s St. John’s Orphan Asylum and St. Joseph’s House for Homeless and Industrious Boys. Imagine running to, not from an orphanage. Clancy did, to escape his woeful, broken home.

Good grades, plus a basketball scholarship helped get him into George Washington University, where he graduated with a journalism degree. He worked as a headhunter, but his training as a writer aided him as he wrote the manuscripts for his books.

“I never thought I’d end up being the publisher,” says Clancy, pulling out a file tabbed “Negative Correspondence” that’s easily two inches thick. He did, however, strike a deal with a division of Sony, which negotiated musical rights to many of the songs he’d chosen and also manufactured the music CDs for him. That still left Clancy with mountains of work and plenty of out-of-pocket expenses, such as securing the rights to print the lyrics to 170 songs.

“Mel Torme wrote the lyrics to The Christmas Song and said once that every year he’d get a check for $100,000 for that one song,” says Clancy, explaining he had to find his way to a music publishing company called Hal Leonard Corporation in Milwaukee, which administers the licensing rights to The Christmas Song lyrics. To print the words “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire” and the 15 lines that follow, cost Clancy three cents for every copy of his book American Christmas Classics that he printed, or $525 for his run of 17,500 books.

But first, he needed the rights to Nat King Cole’s legendary recording. Sony hadn’t been able to secure them for him—or successfully land him another song Clancy deemed essential to his next collection, Bing Crosby’s White Christmas. “When Sony told me they could not get the rights to Nat King Cole’s Christmas Song, I spoke with a fellow at the Alabama Music Hall of Fame, who gave me the name of someone, who gave me the phone number for Cole’s oldest daughter, Carol, not Natalie. All I know is after I spoke with her, something changed.”

After that, Clancy wrote to the Chairman of the Board of Universal Music, which controls the rights to Bing Crosby’s recording of White Christmas. Clancy explained he had every clearance for his collection but this one and he was ready to go to print. His persistence paid off—but he had to pay dearly for these last two recording rights.

Clancy’s meticulous records show his expenses for his 2001 book Volume 2, American Christmas Classics, breaking down like this:

* $189,000 to Sony for rights acquisitions and the manufacturing of 52,500 CDs
* $55,000 to print the books
* $13,300 to manufacture the decorative, four-color boxes
* 3,500 for book design
* $17,032 for image fees
* $17,700 for print lyric copyrights
* $14,400 shipping fees to get the books from his Hong Kong printer
* $6,600 assembly fees

In other words, he shot through more than $315,000 to get just one collection of Christmas music to market.

Sales have been respectable but he has not had a hit. Like many folks tilting at personal windmills, Clancy often slips into the third person in assessing the predicament his passion has left him. “Ron, are you trying to put a square widget in a round hole? Are you living in la la land here? Do you really think this will work?”

He pauses, then answers with the optimistic, forward looking spirit that has guided his entire life. “I really believe it can work,” he says. “It’s a matter of getting the word out and marketing, something I haven’t had much money for. I’ve been doing this pretty much as a one-man operation. I don’t have all the answers. All I know is, if I had Reader’s Digest’s direct marketing money and put my books in one of their campaigns, I’d sell 50,000 to 100,000 copies.”

“I credit Ron with his vision for the product, which was unwavering,” says former music industry insider John Penn, who knew Clancy’s collection intimately before leaving a few years ago as director of marketing for Sony Special Music Projects. “So many people who do these projects — and I did thousands of them in my time — sell out and take the most expeditious, cheapest way to go, a way that looks good but really doesn’t have the heart and soul—and that’s what Ron wanted. He wanted the very best of everything. And he held out. He had the willingness to say, ‘I’m not going to get it done by this Christmas or next Christmas. I’ll wait several years and do it the right way.’”

“Ron’s got a passion. You can’t squelch that,” says Clancy’s wife Renate, admitting, “We’ve both made compromises to let him shoot for the stars.”