“Jingle Bell Rock,” Bobby Helms’ beloved holiday classic, is the newest member of the Spotify Billions Club. The song has reached 1 billion streams on the platform, becoming Helms’ first to reach the milestone.
Helms was an established country western star in 1957 when he released the song that would become his signature hit. Laced with jingle bells, Hank Garland’s electric guitar, and backup vocals from the Anita Kerr Quartet, “Jingle Bell Rock” put a Christmas twist on rock ‘n’ roll. Its credited writers are a PR pro and an ad exec, but Helms made the song his own with an unmistakable vocal performance.
Upon its initial release, “Jingle Bell Rock” gained a foothold at country radio and crossed over to the pop charts. It only got bigger from there, returning to the newly launched Hot 100 singles chart several times through 1962 and entering into the canon of yuletide standards. The song surged back into the zeitgeist in the 1990s thanks to placements in the movies Home Alone 2: Lost In New York and Jingle All The Way.
But what really sent it jingling back up the charts was the rise of on-demand streaming. Helms’ holiday hit returned to the Hot 100 in January 2016, boosted by streams over the holidays. By December it was back on the chart at a new all-time peak. Slowly but surely, it kept achieving new chart milestones, ultimately ascending all the way to No. 3 in January 2020. Now all those streams have added up to more than 1 billion on Spotify alone.
The “Jingle Bell Rock” resurgence has been accompanied by new releases such as an official music video in 2019 and the new compilation album A Bobby Helms Christmas. The comp features “Jingle Bell Rock” and two other Helms holiday rarities, “The Bell That Couldn’t Jingle” and “Those Snowy, Glowy, Blowy Days Of Winter,” plus the Ryan Riback remix of “Jingle Bell Rock” and “Captain Santa Claus (And His Reindeer Space Patrol),” the B-side from the original “Jingle Bell Rock” single.
