This Time Of The Year

This Time Of The Year: Brook Benton and the Voice That Knew Its Season

There is a particular quality to late December radio, a warmth that feels both earned and borrowed, and Brook Benton understood it instinctively. In the final weeks of 1959, his recording of This Time Of The Year arrived just as the calendar was preparing to turn, a piece of seasonal sentiment delivered in that unmistakable baritone voice that had been one of the most reliable instruments in American pop all year. It was a brief visit to the charts, but it arrived in good company and left a graceful impression.

Benton at the Height of His Powers

By late 1959, Brook Benton was one of the most commercially successful Black artists in American popular music. His voice, a rich baritone with a natural warmth that bordered on conversational ease, had proved equally suited to driving R&B rhythm tracks and to the kind of lush, polished pop balladry that Mercury Records was producing with real sophistication. He had scored major hits earlier in 1959 with It's Just a Matter of Time and Endlessly, both of which reached the top five on the Hot 100. By December he was operating from a position of genuine commercial strength, and the logic of adding a seasonal release to his output made clear commercial sense. Labels in the late 1950s understood that the holiday market was distinct from the year-round pop market, and an artist of Benton's caliber could service both without straining.

A Brief but Well-Timed Chart Visit

The record debuted on December 21, 1959 at number 96. The following week, on December 28, it climbed to its peak of number 77. The chart run lasted just two weeks, which given the timing is entirely understandable: a Christmas-adjacent record has a built-in shelf life determined by the calendar rather than the music. What matters more than the peak position is the context, a new entry on the Hot 100 for an artist already dominating the upper echelons that year, adding another dimension to a remarkable twelve-month run. The brevity of the chart stay was not a failure; it was the nature of the format.

The Mercury Sound

Mercury Records in 1959 was building a particular kind of polished R&B-inflected pop around Benton, investing in orchestral arrangements that gave his voice room to settle into its natural comfort zone. The production philosophy favored lushness and elegance over rawness, creating records that could move comfortably between rhythm and blues radio stations and the mainstream pop charts. This Time Of The Year fits neatly within that framework: a seasonal song wrapped in the kind of arrangement that made late-1950s pop feel like something genuinely crafted rather than simply assembled. Every element of the production served Benton's voice rather than competing with it, which was the Mercury formula at its most effective.

Seasonal Songs and Their Strange Permanence

Holiday and seasonal recordings occupy a peculiar place in pop history. Their commercial lifespan is limited by definition, yet they often outlast the more obviously ambitious singles from the same period because they get pulled back into rotation year after year by the calendar itself. Benton's seasonal recordings found audiences through this mechanism, and This Time Of The Year carries the 534,000 YouTube views to prove that the audience did not disappear when 1959 became 1960. Seasonal sentiment has its own form of permanence. A record that resonates in December will find December audiences for decades, which no amount of chart performance can guarantee.

One Note in a Major Year

To understand This Time Of The Year properly you have to place it within the full arc of what Brook Benton accomplished in 1959 and 1960, a period in which he established himself as one of the defining voices of his moment. This particular record was not the summit of that achievement; it was a grace note, a seasonal addition to a catalog that was building genuine depth. Benton had the quality of a voice that carries even minor material with a conviction that makes it worth hearing, and that quality does not diminish on the smaller recordings. If you want to understand the particular warmth of late-1950s pop production, and what a genuinely great voice did with it, press play.

“This Time Of The Year” — Brook Benton's singular moment on the 1950s charts.