Description:
Jim Clark, owner of B.C. Clark Jewelers in Oklahoma City, talks about this story behind the B.C. Clark Christmas Jingle.
Interviewer: Sheldon Beach
Interviewee: Jim Clark
JC: I don’t know of any other place that has something like this. It’s totally unique and there’s such a personal and emotional connection with the jingle on the part of the citizens of this part of the country, central Oklahoma. And it’s absolutely amazing, we had no idea that it would become what it has become. My wife likes to say the jingle has a life of its own. We don’t have much control over it anymore. And we’re fine with that, it is so well-known and has so much meaning so if we wanted to quit the jingle and quit running it there would be an outcry.
SB: Now I read on the website that there was an attempt to replace it at one point in the early 60’s.
JC: So the jingle was created in 1956; that makes it 62 years old now, which is phenomenal. Most jingles are kind of created and designed to replace after a few years. I think the average life of a jingle is about three to five years and then they may feel a need to change it. And we fell into that mode, I guess at that time. And in 1961, five years later, we decided we ought to create a new jingle. That one had gone well but we thought we ought to freshen it up and do something different. So we started and ran a new jingle in 1961 and the phones started ringing off the wall. And people complained and said that’s …you don’t mess with my jingle. They literally felt like they had ownership of the jingle and we didn’t have the right to change it. And that’s when we realized we had something special, something extra special. That didn’t take us two days to put the old jingle back on. And we haven’t entertained the idea of replacing it since. Customers, not just customers, you know, so many people connected to the jingle aren’t really customers of ours necessarily but hopefully some of them, and many of them will become customers. But we’ve created something that’s iconic and we had no idea we would accomplish what we’ve done. At this point we love seeing it played and used in so many different ways. I mean it’s absolutely amazing and the connection that people have with it; thousands of stories about how it plays an important role in their family life or their own personal life. You can go onto YouTube put in BC Clark jingle and literally hundreds of videos will pop up. Some of them we created, most of them we did not. People were creating their own jingles like the Christmas program at OBU. The story that we’ve heard is that it became a standard part of their Christmas program every year. I don’t know how many years they’ve done it; I don’t know if they’re still doing it now. Interestingly, I have a granddaughter that just started at OBU this year, she’s a freshman. So, I’ll be interested to see if it is a part of the Christmas program this year. There’re some very entertaining videos on YouTube that have to do with our jingle. And then we started doing something on our own and we started going to the mall right prior to Christmas and we would produce a TV spot with people singing the jingle. We would stop people in the mall and ask them if they knew the jingle and ask if they wanted to sing it. We got all these people to volunteer to sing parts of the jingle. So, what we did we created TV spots that let people sing a particular line of the jingle and we pieced them all together. And it’s been a very popular television spot of ours for a number of years. Now, you know of course originally it was newspaper and then it was television and radio. Television and radio, of course exposed the jingle and now we have YouTube, and we have our website, BC Clark of course has its website but, the jingle has its own website. The jingle even has its own Facebook page, I think it has about 12,000 followers on it. And then there’s Twitter and Instagram. It’s popping up everywhere now.
SB: So, it’s been performed on the Tonight show.
JC: Yes, it has.
SB: There’s been a story on NBC Nightly News.
JC: Yes, that was just two years ago.
SB: At what point did you all at the store realize it was a cultural phenomenon here in central Oklahoma?
JC: I would say as far back as thirty years ago, for sure; but it seems to get stronger rather than weaker. It’s almost 65 years old. We kind of facetiously talked in our advertising meeting the other day about maybe we ought to retire it at age 65 like a lot of people do. We kind of laughed because if we tried to do that again there would be an absolute outcry. We think it’s the oldest jingle in America that has been continuously run every single year. We’ve researched it and we did find one other jingle that claims that they are the longest running jingle in America. And it is one year older than our jingle and that’s Roto Rooter. I can’t think of their song. But at any rate, we’re either the oldest jingle or we’re the second oldest jingle in America.
SB: Do you know the name of the person who wrote the song?
JC: Sure. Oh yeah. There was a small advertising agency that had our account. They did all of our advertising for us, placed all of our media buys. And we decided we needed to come up with some kind of jingle, we thought it would be nice. And so that was called the Ray Ackerman advertising agency. Ray Ackerman was the principal and owner of the agency and he had a vice president named Al Fiegel and they created the jingle, they took it down to Dallas to have a production company produce the jingle. But between Ray and Al Fiegel they developed the lyrics and the tune as well. Interestingly, they are both deceased now and interestingly at both of their funerals the BC Clark jingle was mentioned. And both of their obituaries the BC Clark jingle was mentioned.
SB: What is your favorite story about the jingle? You know you said a lot of people have a personal connection.
JC: I have a stack of stories. It’s hard to come up with one. I got a file here that where every time I hear something or read something we put it in this file. So, we’ve got a lot of letters, and now we’re getting a lot of emails, of course. Now, we’re just seeing things posted, posted on Facebook, posted on our website or on YouTube. Again, I mentioned that the jingle has such an incredible connection with people. It’s very emotional in a lot of cases and in some ways it’s kind of whimsical too. You know you get a little bit of everything. So, as you mentioned the jingle has been performed by Megan Mullally on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno. It was performed by Vince Gill before in some of his concerts. This NBC Nightly News program that came on in 2016 they actually interviewed Blake Shelton, he sang the jingle on that as well. Kelly O’Hara, a local actress and singer has sung it before. Among stories, the one that comes back to us consistently is about people who move away from Oklahoma that have lived here a long time then they leave. They go to another state or another country or another part of the world. And the thing we hear consistently is about them telling their friends, telling their family that the thing they miss the most about Oklahoma is hearing the BC Clark Jingle. And, we have sent sheet music, way back we’ve sent cassettes, now CDs to service men and women overseas because they expressed that to their family that they wished they could hear the BC Clark jingle. Well, we’ve kind of solved that problem now because literally everybody can hear the jingle anytime they want to, all they have to do is go on to our website or onto the BC Clark Jingle website. They can get that jingle fix immediately. One of my favorite stories is about two service men that were overseas in the Middle East; they were both doing guard duty one night and they were both quite lonely. They didn’t even know each other, they were from different squads or platoons, so it was kind of boring and lonely and one of them started singing the BC Clark jingle and the other soldier said are you from Oklahoma and he said, yes, I am. It turned out they were both from Oklahoma even though they didn’t know each other but they became fast friends and all night long they sang the BC Clark jingle to keep each other company.
I can remember a story this goes quite a ways back that involved a service man that was stationed in Korea. His parents sent me this long letter that was quite emotional. Sometimes I get emotional just telling the story, but their son was in the military in Korea, and he loved the jingle and he told them he wished he had a copy of the jingle, but this was way back. And so, they finely got a copy of it by waiting for one of our jingles to come on the radio and recording it on a little tape recorder; they finally got a copy that they were able to send to him. Anyway, she goes on to tell the rest of the story that they just thank us for continuing to run the jingle because it means so much to them. Their son never came back from Korea, he died. He was in an accident and they said every time they hear the jingle they think of their son. It was just one of those stories that we hear over and over again where there’s so much emotional connection to the jingle. The jingle appears…and we hear these stories all the time. It appears in church pageants and church Christmas programs in the sanctuary. We hear stories about, and we witness ourselves, stories about the jingle being used in school plays and Christmas programs and when we say schools we’re talking about grade schools from first grade on up through college, OBU, high schools when they do different Christmas pageants and programs. Carolers going out caroling, it’s almost inevitable that at some point in time they’re going to sing the jingle along with other songs that they’re singing. A paper in town one year did a little survey and asked the readers to tell them their favorite Christmas song and guess what, the BC Clark jingle didn’t come in first, it came in second behind Jingle Bells and ahead of White Christmas, I think. So, there’s just story after story and when I’m out and about in November and December people stop me all the time and they all have a story to tell. Sometimes they think they’re the only ones that have had that experience. And I have to tell them, well you’re not alone. We hear these stories over and over and over again. So, it’s iconic it’s become a fabric of our society here and it’s just dumb luck that we fell into this because we had no idea that when we created it, that we would have what we have. The jingle is bigger than life; again, it has a life of its own. And we love it you know sometimes businesses will tell people they can’t use their advertising material without their permission. We give everybody permission to use our jingle any way they want to. Again, if you go onto YouTube, you see some very interesting uses of it. It gets handled in many different ways. I’m trying to think of… well oh yeah there is one other, one of the interesting things that we hear is that the jingle is the litmus test to prove whether you are from Oklahoma or not. So, we hear stories over and over again about people that are somewhere out of state or somewhere out of the country and they run in to somebody that they say they’re from Oklahoma, so the very frequent question is, ok prove you’re from Oklahoma sing the BC Clark jingle. And inevitably if they’re from central Oklahoma, now Tulsa market may be a little different but if they’re from Central Oklahoma that’s their proof that they have lived in Oklahoma if they can sing it.
SB: Does it almost feel to you like it just belongs to Central Oklahoma as much as it belongs to BC Clark?
JC: Oh sure, yeah I think maybe more so, definitely probably more so than I say, again people have taken ownership of it. And we love that of course. I’ll tell you one other little story that’s a little lighter than the stories I’ve told. It’s a little more, in some ways, very interesting. We had somebody that we were at a function and somehow this was at Christmastime and the jingle came up. It was a group of people, maybe 10 or 15 people, almost every one of them had some kind of story to tell about the jingle. And the story I remember the most was the one where they said they were doing volunteer work at the state mental hospital down in Norman and they were trying to get the patients to sing Christmas carols and they were having the hardest time getting them all together to be able to sing the songs, some knew the songs, some were able to sing them and some weren’t. And finally they said what about the BC Clark Jingle. They said all of a sudden everybody was able to sing that song, everybody knew it.
SB: I have to ask one more question. Do you as Jim Clark, third generation jeweler at BC Clark do you ever get tired of hearing it?
JC: No but I’ll tell you, yes and no. And I think it’s true with all of its fans and I think that’s true with all of our customers. One of the reasons that we’ve been able to play this jingle for 62 years without wearing it out, the secret is it doesn’t run year around it only runs for about 6, 5 to 6 weeks out of the year and just about the time we’re all sick and tired of hearing It, it disappears, disappears for another almost 11 months. And then during those last couple of months people are beginning to think, anticipate the jingle is coming back. You know what, and one of the things we hear a lot too, one reason the jingle resonates so much with people it’s one of the few things in this world you can count on that’s going to be there. You know our world is so fractured right now and there’s so much uncertainty in everybody’s lives and the one certainty that we all have is that one day in November, Thanksgiving Day the BC Clark Jingle is going to come back and there’s a lot of value in that.
SB: Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me, I really appreciate it.
JC: All right. Thank you.
BC Clark Jingle [plays]