(Slightly edited.)
Although it’s still November on the calendar, I’ve been propelled deep into Christmas today. A reader sent me an aircheck of the WLS Holiday Festival of Music—eight glorious hours’ worth from 1980—and I’ve spent the late afternoon and evening digitizing it so I can post some of it here between now and Christmas Day. The show was enchanting back in the day, and it’s just as enchanting now. At this distance in time, what WLS did on Christmas was nothing short of extraordinary—a mass-appeal Top 40 station canning the format for more than 24 hours to play wall-to-wall Christmas tunes commercial free, many more songs by Andy Williams, Robert Goulet, and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir than by the artists the station would play the other 364 days of the year.
But there will be time enough to talk about that before Christmas arrives. I have been diggin’ the Christmas tunes at AM, Then FM, and before Jeff posts all of the good ones, I want to get some of my favorites on. Forty or so years ago, Stax Records songwriter-turned-singer William Bell collaborated with Booker T. Jones on “Every Day Will Be Like a Holiday,” which became a modest seasonal hit for Bell. It’s been covered by lots of good people since: the Sweet Inspirations, Delbert McClinton, Marcia Ball, Curtis Salgado, and even Hall and Oates on last year’s Home for Christmas. My favorite version is by the Mighty Blue Kings, a Chicago jump-blues band that was, in its turn-of-the-millennium heyday, a traveling party ready to break out. The song was on the band’s holiday album A Mighty Blue Christmas, released in 2000, which is the best of the five albums they made before going temporarily defunct in 2002. According to his MySpace page, lead singer Ross Bon has reformed the band, and they’re playing a one-shot holiday show at the House of Blues in Chicago on December 14. (Road trip!)
This is Christmas music for that point in the party when things really get to smokin’. And if the party’s not smokin’, this will get it to smokin’.
“Every Day Will Be Like a Holiday”/Mighty Blue Kings (buy it here—for a mere $5.99)
Filed under: Christmas | Tagged: When my baby comes home
I’d never heard this version of the song before – hot damn this has a nice sound to it (is it blasphemous for me to say that I may just like it more than Messr. Bell’s?)
In response to the first paragraph of your post, one of my earliest (and fondest) memories of WLS dates back to ‘73 or ‘74 on Christmas Eve, when my family would drive into the city from the suburbs to meet family for an evening celebration. I can remember driving in the late afternoon down the Eisenhower Expressway (5:00pmish), listening to WLS’ Festival of Music on the radio, and then again hearing it through sleepy ears around midnight as we drove back to the suburbs, all the time envisioning Santa Claus flying overhead delivering toys. As a 3 or 4 year old, it was truly a magical experience. I remember a wonderful variety of traditional and contempory Christmas tunes, interspersed with informative vignettes about various Christmas topics (e.g., the origin of Silent Night, the history of the Xmas tree, etc.). I for one would dearly love to hear again some snippets from this truly classic program.