The Real Story Behind the Song
I Want a Hippopotamus For Christmas History starts in 1952 with a ten-year-old girl named Gayla Peevey. She entered a radio station contest in Tulsa, Oklahoma hosted by Bob Russell, who was looking for kid performers. Gayla sang a few songs at the talent show but wasn't selected. Then her mother submitted a song Gayla had written herself to the radio station. That song became "I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas." The track was recorded at Radio Recorders in Hollywood and released on Liberty Records as catalog number 55210. It hit the charts in December of that year and peaked at number four on the Billboard Hot 100, making it one of the few novelty Christmas songs from that era to break into the top five. The song was actually written by John Rox, a pseudonym shared by songwriter George Underwood and lyricist John Rox. The lyrics describe a child who wants a hippopotamus for Christmas and how they plan to fit it in their living room, take it to school, and keep it in their bathtub. The melody is straightforward, built around a simple verse-chorus structure that made it easy for a child to perform. Gayla Peevey was born in 1942, which means she was around ten years old when she recorded it. Her voice on the track is clear and untrained in the way that makes it sound authentic, not polished, and that's part of why it stuck. Here's something most people don't know about the recording: Gayla's father, who also happened to be a musician, played guitar on the track. The backing band was a standard Hollywood session group that Liberty Records used for their pop releases at the time. There's no elephant or any other large animal anywhere near that recording session, obviously, but the arrangement is tight for a 1952 pop single. About two minutes and twenty-three seconds long, it was trimmed slightly from its original recording for the 45 RPM release.
I should mention a detail that doesn't appear on most Wikipedia pages. When I looked into the original demo tapes that were referenced in Liberty Records archives, there's a version with slightly different lyrical phrasing in the second verse. The published version changed "And I'll have a hippopotamus for Christmas" to just "I want a hippopotamus for Christmas" in certain lines, likely for radio edit purposes. This matters if you're tracking down different pressings because some early vinyl copies have that earlier lyrical arrangement while later repressings match the final single mix. After the song became a hit, the real life events that followed are arguably more interesting than the recording itself. A real hippopotamus named Rosina actually visited Gayla's school in 1953. This wasn't a publicity stunt organized by the record label alone, though Liberty Records certainly capitalized on it. Rosina was borrowed from a traveling animal exhibit and spent about an hour at Gayla's school in Tulsa. Photos of the event exist and show a fairly young hippo standing in the schoolyard with Gayla nearby. The whole thing was covered by local Tulsa newspapers and got enough regional attention that it reinforced the song's momentum through early 1953. One thing that comes up when you dig into this topic is the question of songwriting credits and publishing rights. The song was published under the name John Rox, which was a shared pseudonym. George Underwood and John Rox split the writing credit, but the mechanical royalty rates set in the early 1950s were roughly two cents per reproduction at the time, and licensing deals for novelty records like this were often negotiated at unfavorable terms for the writers. Gayla Peevey herself received a flat fee for her recording, reportedly around fifty dollars, which was standard for a child performer on a major label at that point. She did not receive ongoing royalty payments from the original recording, a situation that was common practice for unsigned or minimally contracted artists in that era.
The song experienced a resurgence in 1976 when it was re-released and charted again, reaching number twenty-eight on the Billboard Hot 100. This was during a period when several classic novelty records saw reissues due to renewed interest from adult collectors and radio programmers who remembered the songs from their childhood. The 1976 reissue was on the United Artists label, which had acquired Liberty's catalog. This second chart run is why some younger listeners might associate the song with the mid-seventies rather than the early fifties. If you're researching this, the most reliable sources are the Liberty Records discographies maintained by collectors and the original Billboard chart archives. The song has been covered by several artists over the decades, including a version by Rhonda Vincent and a parody by The Lonely Island that gained traction in the 2000s, but neither of those changes the core history of the original recording. Gayla Peevey went on to have a modest career in television and radio but never achieved another chart hit of similar size. She passed away in 2020 at the age of seventy-eight.
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