A true national treasure, Darlene Love’s career has taken her from being one of the late Phil Spector’s go-to studio weapons to becoming the Queen of Christmas despite what all those Mariah Carey memes may say.
Love’s 1963 classic “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” is not only a centerpiece of the storied holiday compilation A Christmas Gift To You from Phil Spector that came out the same year, but it has become a perennial favorite covered by the likes of U2, Michael Bublé, and yes, even Carey herself.
And to be sure, Love will be busting it out at her annual Darlene Love: Love for the Holidays show that has become as traditional as the Rockefeller Christmas tree lighting. This annual event has been going on for the past two decades-plus and evolved from similar shows she did at the Bottom Line in the ‘80s when she came East from her native Los Angeles.
David Letterman was a fan who asked Love to first perform her signature Christmas song on his show back in 1986. It became an annual tradition that helped birth the current full-blown show the 84-year-old Rock and Roll Hall of Famer delights in performing every year.
“It’s amazing, because when I started doing Christmas shows, nobody but the Rockettes were doing Christmas shows,” she said with a laugh. “With this current show, I do my old songs. I tell my audience that I put them in a medley, but I do the whole song because back when we recorded all these songs: ‘He’s a Rebel, ‘Da Doo Ron Ron,’ ‘He’s Sure the Boy I Love.’ They were only a minute and a half long. And we, of course, have our favorite Christmas songs that are in there. And I tell a lot of stories about the Christmas songs and what I’m doing. The more I talk, it seems the more they love it because they get to know me better when you’re talking to them.”
Proving what’s old is new, old friend Cher not only recorded a new version of “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home),” but asked Love to join her in recording it. What makes this all the more meta is the fact that then-17-year-old Cher (then known by her birth name Cherilyn Sarkisian) sang back-up vocals on the original version of the song. It’s an anecdote Love delights in recounting.
“Sonny Bono used to work for Phil Spector, and he was dating Cher, who was called Cherilyn back in those days,” Love recalled. “Sonny would bring her to the studio just to be there—not to do anything, but to be there among all of us because we didn’t really care if people came to the sessions. One day, Phil asked Sonny if it was true that his girlfriend could sing. He said yes, and I hadn’t gotten to the session yet, and Phil called her in to do some ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs’ on ‘Christmas (Baby Please Come Home),’ and that’s actually how we started. She’s such a sweetheart. Whenever she talks about doing anything, she says it’s because of Darlene Love that she is actually in this business, because she had never sung before in front of a microphone. She had never been in a recording studio. I was amazed and thought that it was so wonderful of her to say that about me. The only problem was that her voice was so strong that Phil had to tell her to keep moving back. I said that if he kept backing her up, she was going to be in the next room. But that made for a very lasting relationship over the years. I even went out on the road with her during the Heart of Stone tour as one of her back-up singers.”
All roads to Love’s musical talents can be traced back to growing up as a preacher’s kid, starting at age 10, when she sang in the choir at her father’s ministry in Hawthorne, CA. It’s a time the octogenarian singer looks back at fondly.
“I came up singing in the church,” she recalled. “My father was a pastor—a minister. On Christmas and the holidays in most churches, people put on Christmas programs, Easter programs, or whatever the occasion was. I came up singing all those Christmas songs in church. I can remember that vividly because it was a time when we had so much fun, and the grown-ups let us be in charge of the services. So, I remember all those songs back in those days when you didn’t know whether you could sing or not, but you could hold a tune. I had three brothers and a sister, so we were involved in a lot of things that were going on at church, especially with the younger people that were in the congregation.”
She added, “I got a chance to sing solo in the choir, and I thought my voice wasn’t so bad. But I never thought I would have a career. I never really thought about having a career as a singer, but I did. And here we are, all these years later, and, wonderfully, I’m still friends with a lot of the people I knew from all those years ago. I call them, and we run into each other now and then.”
Fast forward to 2025, and the ageless vocalist is back during this special time of year, doing what she does best—spreading lots of musical holiday cheer.
Darlene Love will be performing her Love For the Holidays show on December 10 at The Patchogue Theatre for the Performing Arts, 71 E. Main St., Patchogue. For more information, visit www.patchoguetheatre.com or call 631-207-1313.
