It can be tough to get a handle on just how popular certain classic Christmas singles really were in their time, compared to all the other records on the radio in the same season. Billboard’s erratic policy of charting Christmas singles—sometimes on a separate chart and sometimes not—meant that certain perennials like “Happy Xmas (War Is Over), “Feliz Navidad,” and “Snoopy’s Christmas” never ran the big chart, even though they racked up sales and airplay numbers that certainly would have qualified them. Fortunately for geeks, Billboard’s competitor Cash Box maintained no such segregation. I explored the Cash Box charts for December and January from 1960 through 1986, and I could give you the whole laundry list of chart positions and dates, which would be interesting only to me (and maybe to our friend Yah Shure). Instead, here are the highlights.

What About Those Perennials? “Snoopy’s Christmas” by the Royal Guardsmen is, by the accounting of Cash Box, one of the top holiday singles of the rock era. It charted on December 9, 1967, and rose as high as Number 10 on the chart dated December 30, but plunged entirely out of the top 100 after that. Some others:

• In 1970, “Feliz Navidad” by Jose Feliciano charted for just one week (December 26, 1970).
• John and Yoko’s “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” hit the Cash Box chart the week of December 18, 1971, at Number 63, peaked at Number 36 during the week of January 1, 1972, then dropped off.
• Elton John’s “Step Into Christmas” lasted but two weeks on the chart, entering on December 22, 1973, and peaking at Number 56 the next week.
• “I Believe in Father Christmas” by Greg Lake also spent two weeks on the Cash Box chart, peaking at Number 92 for the week of January 3, 1976.
• The Eagles’ “Please Come Home for Christmas” reached Number 29 for the week of January 13, 1979—a position lower than it achieved in Billboard, where it peaked at 18.
• Paul McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmastime” made Number 83 for the week of January 12, 1980.

What Songs Charted Highest? Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas” reached Number 7 during the week of January 19, 1985. The next highest after “Snoopy’s Christmas” is Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Paper,” which peaked at Number 16 on the chart dated January 4, 1964.  A couple of holiday songs post-1963 just nicked the Cash Box Top 40: “Merry Christmas Darling” by the Carpenters (41, 12/21/70)  and “When a Child Is Born” by Michael Holm (39, 1/18/75). Nilsson’s “Remember (Christmas)” did too, hitting Number 40 on 1/27/73), although it’s not particularly Christmassy apart from the parenthetical title. (The early 60s are anomalous compared to the rest of the period I’m discussing, so we’ll leave the rest of the songs from that period for later on.)

Notice Anything Weird? For three straight years—1983, 1984, and 1985—”Kid Santa Claus” by Patsy scraped into the top 100, never doing better than 92. It’s about Santa’s daughter, Holly Nicole, and how she rescues her father from smog-shrouded Los Angeles in time to make his Christmas rounds. The song’s creator apparently signed a full round of licensing deals for 1984, and she filed at least one lawsuit claiming her copyright was infringed by somebody else’s merchandise. Another song I’d never heard, the rather tasty “25th of Last December” by Roberta Flack, spent five weeks on the chart at Christmas 1977, although it never got above Number 92. In 1965, “There Won’t Be Any Snow (Christmas in the Jungle)” by Derrik Roberts peaked at Number 77 on Christmas Day; it’s a spoken-word recording from a soldier in Vietnam, sending holiday greetings home.

So What About the Early 60s? As I dug deeper in time from 1986, I found just one or two holiday records on the chart each year. Then I hit 1963 and the number ballooned. That year, no less than eight holiday singles charted in December and January.

• Orbison’s “Pretty Paper” was the biggest, followed by “The Marvelous Toy” by the Chad Mitchell Trio.
• Two other songs that haven’t been off the radio since also charted that year: “Do You Hear What I Hear” by Bing Crosby, which got to Number 66, and “Little Saint Nick” by the Beach Boys, which got to Number 69. (Unless I’m mistaken—always a possibility—”Do You Hear What I Hear?” was the final chart record of Crosby’s magnificent career.)
• Also charting in 1963: “You’re All I Want for Christmas” by Brook Benton, Allan Sherman’s “The Twelve Gifts of Christmas,” and a version of “White Christmas” by Andy Williams.
• The Harry Simeone Chorale’s original recording of “The Little Drummer Boy” was back on the chart that year for a single week; it had charted every year since its original release in 1957.

Re-entries were common in the early 60s. Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” first hit in 1960 and reached Number 22; it returned to the Cash Box chart in 1961 and 1962. Charles Brown’s “Please Come Home for Christmas” scraped on in 1960 and again in 1961. David Seville’s “The Chipmunk Song,” which had done four weeks at Number One in 1958 and early ‘59, re-entered in 1959, 1961 and 1962.  A new version of “Jingle Bell Rock” by Chubby Checker and Bobby Rydell charted in 1961 and came back for 1962; in 1962, the Bobby Helms original recharted as well. And even Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas,” which had first appeared in 1942, got back on the Cash Box chart in both 1961 and 1962.

And maybe earlier, but I stopped with 1960 because the whole project was starting to make my head hurt.

I guess I gave you a laundry list of chart positions and dates after all. Accept it in the Christmas spirit, then, and have a nice day.

“25th of Last December”/Roberta Flack (buy Roberta’s Christmas album here; I’m not sure if the version of this song on that album is the same one that hit the radio in 1977, which is from the splendidly titled Blue Lights in the Basement; get that here)

(edited since first posted)

Christmas music on the radio: some stations will play anything this time of year, as long as it’s plausibly Christmassy. Some of them try to fit it to their format, but others don’t care. I’ll never forget hearing, on Christmas Eve a few years back, the staggeringly inappropriate ”Funky New Year” by the Eagles, in the same quarter hour with Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole on a wobegone station in Michigan. I once worked at a station whose Christmas Eve and Christmas Day programming came from a pile of randomly selected holiday CDs, from which the jocks played whatever they wanted. (Free-form radio, baby!)

At my current radio station, we’re a lot more careful. You won’t hear “Funky New Year,” and here are five other things you probably won’t hear, in no particular order.

“Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer”/Elmo and Patsy. The tale that “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” came to light on an anonymous cassette sent to WLS in Chicago, as I’ve been told, isn’t true—it was discovered by a DJ in San Francisco in1979 after being recorded on a Bay Area label as a joke by a former veterinarian named Elmo Shropshire. It remained on tiny, regional labels for the next several years, although it got something approximating national distribution. CBS/Epic signed Elmo in 1984 and recut the song, whereupon it became ubiquitous.

“Jingle Bells”/Singing Dogs. They aren’t really singing together, they’re on tape. The barks were slowed down or speeded up to reach the proper pitch, then the whole thing was edited together. Originally released in 1955 as part of a medley with two other non-seasonal songs, “Jingle Bells” was excerpted as a single in 1971 and rose to the top of Billboard’s Christmas singles chart that year. (Cat people have their own version, by the Jingle Cats, released in 1991.) By some methods of accounting, this is the top Christmas single of the 1970s, which is somehow entirely appropriate.

“I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas”/Gayla Peevey. Although “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas” was cut as just another novelty in 1953, Gayla actually got a hippo in response to it. Zoo officials in Oklahoma City hit upon the idea of asking children to send in money to get Gayla (who was from Ponca City, Oklahoma) a hippo, and when they did, she donated it to the zoo.

“The Twelve Days of Christmas”/Bob and Doug McKenzie. Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas of SCTV created these Canadian dimwits after the show moved to Canada’s CBC-TV from a regional network, to give it some identifiably Canadian content. A  resulting record album, Great White North, sounds almost completely improvised, which means moments of pants-wetting hilarity interspersed with stretches of stupidity—and that’s half the point, in a meta sort of way. “The Twelve Days of Christmas” is the best thing on it.

“Ho Ho Ho (Who’d Be a Turkey at Christmas)”/Elton John. The flipside of “Step Into Christmas,” “Who’d Be a Turkey at Christmas” seems to have gotten some airplay in the UK, but never received much over here. (Yah Shure suggests a reason why below.) Scores extra points for its first two lines, “Sitting here on Christmas Eve with a brandy in my hand/I’ve had a few too many and it’s getting hard to stand,” and then loses them for the rest of the song.

I just noticed that four of these songs have something to do with animals. Coincidence? I think not, but I’m not clever enough to figure out why.

It’s just another day in our hall-decked-but-still-essentially-random universe, wherein I pull out my whole laptop Christmas library, throw it in the air, and see what comes down first. Look out below.

“A Warm Little Home on a Hill”/Stevie Wonder. A charming holiday scene in waltz time. Like many of the original Christmas songs concocted by Motown songwriters, it flirts with terminal sappiness, but there’s something about Wonder’s delivery that keeps it from the edge of the ledge.

“The Mistletoe and Me”/Isaac Hayes. From a Stax compilation dated 1982, which features two versions of the great “Santa Claus Wants Some Lovin’,” by Mack Rice and Albert King, plus the Staple Singers’ “Who Took the Merry out of Christmas?,” all three of which have more going on than this holiday bedroom ballad.

“Kitty Cats Christmas”/Leon Redbone. Before the world was baffled by Bob Dylan’s Christmas album, I was baffled by Leon Redbone’s. (It occurs to me, however, that bafflement is part of the reaction Redbone means to provoke. Dylan, too.) Christmas Island was released in 1987 and reissued in 2003 with “Kitty Cats Christmas” as a bonus track. Despite the presence of a children’s chorus, it’s not awful.

“The Christmas Song”/Vince Guaraldi Trio. If this song is heard anywhere in A Charlie Brown Christmas, I’ve missed it the first 44 times I’ve watched the show, but I promise to pay extra-close attention the 45th time, which may be as soon as tonight.

“My Christmas Card to You”/Partridge Family. I must have known about the album A Partridge Family Christmas Card at its release in 1971, given that I was a fan of all things Partridge that year, yet I have no recollection of it. I would almost certainly have bought it if my brother didn’t, but he didn’t, and I didn’t. I recall being surprised to learn of it, which wasn’t until I saw it in a used bin at some point during the 1980s. (Did I buy it then? Hell and yes.) Partridge Family records were always heaped with sugar, but their Christmas album is especially sugary. If you’ve got a high tolerance for that sort of thing, “My Christmas Card to You” probably won’t hurt you.

“Swingin’ Silent Night”/Asleep at the Wheel. Lots of artists become paralyzed in the face of certain Christmas songs—afraid to mess with them and therefore, incapable of bringing anything new to them. The thing about “Silent Night” is that it’s both simple enough and beautiful enough to withstand new approaches, like the Western swing take of Asleep at the Wheel, recorded in 1997.

“Christmas Blues”/Canned Heat. Cut as a single sometime in the late 60s, “Christmas Blues” has appeared as a bonus track on a couple of different Canned Heat re-releases, and it’s been anthologized quite a bit. What hasn’t been anthologized quite so much is “Christmas Boogie,” which features a guest appearance by Alvin and the Chipmunks. I shit you not.

“O Holy Night”/Green Pajamas. The Green Pajamas are the living embodiment of indie: 20-some albums in 25 years and never a major-label deal. They cut their gorgeous version of “O Holy Night” in 2006, and it’s become a Christmas essential around my house.

“Christmas Time”/Jimmy McCracklin. Like Charles Brown, Jimmy McCracklin left the South (St. Louis, actually) for California after World War II and found his place in the blues scene out there. The only release date I can find for “Christmas Time” is 1961, but it sounds older than that.

“Little Drummer Boy”/Duke Pearson. From Merry Ole Soul, another of the classic Blue Note albums produced and engineered by Rudy Van Gelder, whose studio was actually in his house. The album is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, and it would be a fine candidate for Blue Note’s ongoing series of remastered reissues. It’s a keeper.

“Swingin’ Silent Night”/Asleep at the Wheel (buy it here)
“O Holy Night”/Green Pajamas (I don’t know if you can get this or not; the band’s website is here)

(This is the 1000th post in the history of this blog. A thousand posts seems like both a great accomplishment and a frightening waste of time. The following is adapted from a post I wrote at my first blog, the Daily Aneurysm, in 2005.)

Whenever we visit the in-laws over Christmas, we always go to church on Christmas Eve. On the list of my life’s annoyances, this is a minor one. Christmas Eve service was a significant part of the family ritual when I was a kid, and spending time with my niece and nephews, no matter where it is, is rarely wasted. So despite my irreligious opinions, I go along without making an issue of it. A choir and congregation cranking up the classic seasonal hits in a decorated church on Christmas Eve can be enjoyed for purely aesthetic reasons having nothing to do with religion.

But there’s another kind of music that’s largely absent from church services anymore—the music of language. That music began growing fainter 40 years ago, when I was a kid, as the Revised Standard Version and other translations of the Bible began to replace the old-school King James Version. But the church I grew up in still used King James on special occasions, such as Christmas, and I used to be able to recite the KJV Christmas story from memory. (It may have helped to hear Linus do it every year on A Charlie Brown Christmas.)

And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger. And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

It’s probably not true that Shakespeare was one of the translators who worked on the KJV, but that only means his way with language must have been in England’s air during the early 1600s. And not just devices like rhythm and meter—the word choices are poetic, too. The reference (in an earlier verse not quoted here) to Mary being “great with child” was a word-picture I could understand even before I knew where babies came from, because I could remember how my own mother looked before my youngest brother was born. I also remember being fascinated by the term “swaddling clothes,” and my kid’s mind translated it into a picture of a loving mother wrapping a baby in a big white blanket, as the translators surely intended us to do.

Compare that to the New Revised Standard Version’s telling of the same tale, the one used by the Lutherans with whom I’ve kept Christmas the last few years:

In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.” And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!”

In this translation, a supernatural visitation from heavenly messengers in the hills of Galilee becomes mere incident. “Shepherds living” might be a more accurate translation of the original than “shepherds abiding,” but “abiding” has an emotional impact “living” cannot match—it connotes endurance and duty, and patiently watching through the long night, night after night. It’s not just a job, shepherding, it’s a calling, and to say that they’re merely “living” is to make their shepherding into just one aspect of broader lives. For the sake of the story, they don’t need broader lives. And when the peace of that night—of the abiding shepherds’ entire existence up to that point—is shattered by the mindblowing appearance of singing angels, wouldn’t you expect the angels to have better material than “on earth peace among those whom he favors”? And as for the sentence, “You will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth,” well, “bands of cloth” would get red-penciled in a seventh-grade creative writing class. Compared to the KJV’s story, the NRSV version is a weather report. There’s no majesty, no mystery, and worst of all, during the most musical season of the year, not a note of music.

Although the KJV was supposed to bring the word of God down to a level the average person of the 17th century could understand, the time and place in which it was created, its stylistic influence on generations of English writers, and its 400-year-long endurance as the definitive word have made it a cornerstone of English literature. I’m no expert, but it seems to me that it better embodies the majesty and mystery the Christian God is supposed to have than any other text, and it inspires the awe that Christians are supposed to display before him. To me, this is where succeeding translations fail: Just as no man is a hero to his valet, perhaps God can’t really be God if he talks to you like everyone else does.

At Popdose Today: Another edition of One Day in Your Life.

“You Angel You”/Manfred Mann’s Earth Band (buy it here)

I have to spend my day writing stuff I get paid for today, so here’s some stuff other people have written that you might like to check out:

Jon over at the Vinyl District is 10 days out from Christmas and not feelin’ it.  This probably won’t help him any: My Hmphs has 10 Bad Versions of Christmas Songs, with some more suggestions from the readership. Not 10 bad songs—because any list like that would have to include “The Christmas Shoes,” which I heard again yesterday and which is the only song in the world capable of  making me wish I were deaf—but 10 bad versions of well-known songs. One of those 10 bad versions is from Bob Dylan’s Christmas album, which has puzzled almost everybody who’s listened to it this year. So The Nation went to Sean Wilentz, the Princeton historian who’s also chief historian at BobDylan.com, for enlightenment. Maybe I’m giving myself too much credit, but Wilentz’ take doesn’t seem vastly different from my own a couple of weeks ago: the album is true to a particular vision, even if the nature of that vision is not readily apparent to us.

Chief historian at BobDylan.con sounds like a pretty cool job. It occurs to me that I’m the chief historian at WNEW.com, although I’ve described the job previously as the old geezer who drops in to remind the kids how great things used to be and to stay the hell off my lawn. I’m writing about another famous rock ‘n’ roll Christmas song over there today—“Please Come Home for Christmas.” Please go read it, and leave a comment, if you’re so inclined. (Unless you’re a spambot. WNEW.com already gets too many comments from them.)

Here’s the full list of linkage to my Christmas song posts so far:
“Step Into Christmas”
“Happy Xmas (War Is Over)”
“Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town”
“Do They Know It’s Christmas”

I played “Do They Know It’s Christmas” on the radio yesterday. I’ve never been particularly fond of it—strictly as music, it’s terribly unappealing, from the ugly, tuneless way it begins through the unappetizing verse, which is capped with Bono’s “Tonight thank God it’s them instead of you.” Only after that—on the chorus—does the thing take flight at all.

Bono’s line, by the way, has always seemed callous to me. I posted that thought as my Facebook status yesterday, and a few of my friends weighed in. A couple suggested that it’s another way of saying “”there but for the grace of God go I.” Perhaps, but the more I think about the line, the more it bugs me. As another of my Facebook friends observed, “Thank goodness those poor brown people can count on some noble Western pop stars to make sure they ‘know it’s Christmastime.’” I wonder if maybe some of the critics of Band Aid had it right—that the effort was as much about celebrity self-aggrandizement as it was helping the starving. It’s certainly possible to hear Bono’s impassioned delivery of his questionable line as precisely that.

OK, if I don’t want to end up among the starving myself, I gotta get back to work. Coming tomorrow: The 1000th post in the history of this blog.

Willie Nelson had enjoyed one of the biggest hits of his career in 1978 and 1979 with Stardust, his collaboration with producer Booker T. Jones. It went to Number One on the country album chart and Number 30 pop, and contained three monster hit singles. But all that success did not buy Willie any time off. I was just starting out in country radio at the time, and I was struck by how quickly country artists churned out product in those days. Artists would go three singles deep on an album and wham, release another one almost immediately, two or even three a year. (This frequently resulted in precisely the quality-control problem you might expect.)

And so in early 1979, Willie released a collaboration with Leon Russell called One for the Road. His former label, RCA, released a cash-in compilation called Sweet Memories. And on November 18, Nelson released two albums simultaneously: Willie Nelson Sings Kris Kristofferson, which features nearly all of the songs for which Kristofferson is best known, and Pretty Paper, a Christmas album. Roy Orbison had hit with “Pretty Paper” in 1963, but Willie had written it, so it was a natural choice for the album’s title song. It was also a natural choice for Willie and his band to collaborate once again with Jones, who brought the Stardust vibe to the new project.

It’s a measure of the combined artistry of Willie and Booker T that even the most hackneyed of holiday warhorses, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and “Jingle Bells,” have their own unique flavor. “Silent Night” begins with a ghostly organ that’s the sound of starlight (stardust, maybe?) shining over a snowy landscape—for years, I used it as background music for Christmas legal IDs at my radio stations. And the medley of “O Little Town of Bethlehem” and “Christmas Blues” is the most perfect album-closing track this side of “A Day in the Life.” The album runs less than 30 minutes, but they’re 30 good minutes.

Pretty Paper isn’t an album to whip out when the Christmas party starts to smokin’. The title song is, after all, about a homeless man on a sidewalk—not exactly typical holiday fare—and the whole album has a somber feel. If you’re plugged into Willie and Booker T.’s vision, that’s not a problem, because Christmas itself never comes without a ration of somber moments. I’m not talking about the years when everything’s shot to hell, the first Christmas after Dad lost his job or Mom ran off with the mailman. I’m talking about those somber moments that happen even in the midst of plenty and joy, when we’re reminded of loved ones who are gone, or we note the swift passage of time in our own lives, or we recall particularly memorable Christmases that we’d like to live in forever. (Maybe that’s just me, but I don’t think so.) There’s no holiday album that does better at capturing the quiet moments of reflection amidst the tinsel and glitter of Christmas than Pretty Paper.

“Silent Night”/Willie Nelson (buy it here)

We got the storm we were expecting up here in Wisconsin. Yesterday afternoon, during the lull, I removed nine inches of snow from The Mrs.’ car; one of the suburbs south of Madison reported 18 inches. Bitter cold came behind it last night; today we’re not supposed to get out of the single digits and we’ll be lucky if the wind chill creeps above zero. All of the schools in the area were closed yesterday, state offices too, and even UW-Madison, which cancelled classes for only the third time in the last 40 years.

Down the road at my alma mater, UW-Platteville, classes were cancelled as well. This is something we dreamed of as undergrads, but we were also given to understand that it would never ever happen, due to what had happened the last time. The story was told that after classes were cancelled, students trooped to the various liquor stores with such enthusiasm that not a single keg of beer was left available for purchase in town after 10:00 that morning. The drinking age was 18 then, and the dorms were said to have been scenes of all-day debauchery, like backstage at a Rolling Stones concert as painted by Hieronymus Bosch. At some point, a number of third-floor dorm residents decided it would be a good idea to jump out of their windows into the enormous wind-whipped snowbanks below.

Whether any of this actually happened, I do not know. We believed it that had, and we believed that it meant no matter how bad the weather got—no matter how snowy, no matter how cold, no matter how undeniably dangerous to life and limb—that we’d be dragging ourselves to class in it. And we did.

It was about this time that the university hit upon the great idea of clearing snow from sidewalks by using small tractors equipped with giant rotating brushes. It was fast and efficient, but it also polished any underlying ice to a deadly sheen, and many asses were fallen upon as a result. I had made a pact with myself, in my then-customary self-dramatizing way, that if I ever slipped and fell and launched my books over a wide expanse of the sidewalk, I would pick myself up, dust myself off, walk calmly to the registrar’s office, and quit school.

It worked. In four winters, I never fell.

Recommended Reading: From The Telegraph in the UK, here’s a photo gallery of the 25 worst Christmas album covers. It’s sobering to realize that each of them seemed like a good idea to somebody at the time.

And Also: The 1963 album The Spirit of Christmas With the Living Strings, one of my favorite Christmas albums, is back in print. It’s on the Dulcima label from the UK, which is dedicated to releasing the works of conductor/arranger Johnny Douglas. Now credited to Johnny Douglas and His Orchestra and Singers, the re-release is a two-disc set that compiles three albums: The Spirit of Christmas, White Christmas, and A Christmas Songbook.  The first disc is the complete Spirit of Christmas; the second features the other two, which recycle some of the same instrumental tracks but “with voices, warmly blended as instruments of the orchestra.” As I wrote two years ago, it’s an “artifact of a bygone time, but one with a powerful time-traveling mojo in a season that is all about bygone times.” Get a taste here.

(Slightly edited since first posting.)

Does anybody read Longfellow anymore? I suspect he’s been replaced in school curricula by others considered more “relevant,” even though dozens of elementary and middle schools were named for him in an era when he was still one of America’s greatest authors. In 1863, a couple of years after his wife died in a fire and a year after his son was wounded in battle during the Civil War, the inveterate journalizer picked up a pen once again.

I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old familiar carols play
And wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good will to men!

And thought how, as the day had come
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along
The unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good will to men!

The poem Longfellow wrote that day, “Christmas Bells,” was turned into a carol during the 1870s, set to a tune by John Baptiste Calkin known as “Waltham.” (If you’ve heard Elvis Presley’s version of the song, you’ve heard the tune.) In the 1950s, the poem was set to a different tune by Johnny Marks, best known for “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” While the Marks tune isn’t exactly jaunty, “Waltham” is far more somber, and befits the lines of Longfellow’s that never make it into song anymore.

Till ringing, singing on its way
The world revolved from night to day
A voice, a chime,
A chant sublime,
Of peace on earth, good will to men!

Then from each black, accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South
And with the sound
The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good will to men!

As Longfellow wrote, America was confronting its third wartime Christmas, not counting the secession Christmas of 1860 when the Civil War was imminent. Today, we’re confronting our seventh, the most since the Vietnam Era, and if news reports over the weekend are credible, we are most likely looking at several more, as we attempt to do in Afghanistan what we haven’t yet been able to do in Iraq and couldn’t do in Vietnam. And at the behest of a president who promised to get us the hell out of Iraq and Afghanistan, not draw us in deeper.

It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent
And made forlorn
The households born
Of peace on earth, good will to men!

I voted for Barack Obama in 2008. While I never believed that he was the new messiah, I figured that he saw the world as it really is, unlike others who see it through a glass fogged with their own ideological prejudices. But if he does, it hasn’t changed things much. He’s failed to stand up for the most important stuff he promised, even with a majority of the voters and the Congress to back him. It’s pretty clear that he’s not smarter than everybody else, that he’s not playing some brand of three-dimensional political chess mere mortals can’t understand—he’s just another Democrat trying to get people who hate his living guts to like him just a little, which they wouldn’t do even if he cured cancer.

And in despair I bowed my head
“There is no peace on earth,” I said
For hate is strong
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good will to men!

It isn’t just that. It’s hard not to want to give up on this country, given the stupidity of our politics, the emptiness of our culture, and the apathy of our citizens. It’s not unreasonable to consider our 233-year experiment in popular self-government a failure and near collapse.

But wait.

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep
“God is not dead, nor doth he sleep;
The wrong shall fail
The right prevail
With peace on earth, good-will to men!

I’m not religious. No use for it at all. But I’m human, and that makes me hopeful that the wrong might yet fail and the right prevail, even when there’s no evidence that it’s going to happen, and no evidence that any evidence will be forthcoming. So this day, when the house is strung with colored lights and we’re polishing up the shovels for the first big snowstorm, I’ll resolve to hold on just a little bit longer.

It’s time again for a feature begun two years ago, in which I put my Christmas music stash on shuffle and we see what comes out. The list begins in an entirely predictable fashion.

“What Child Is This”/Vince Guaraldi Trio/A Charlie Brown Christmas. Fun fact about the special, which aired Tuesday night on ABC and will run again next week: two product placements for the show’s original sponsor, Coca-Cola, were edited out of the show in time for its fourth airing in 1968. In the opening, Linus goes flying while ice skating, but viewers never see him land because he crashes into a Coke sign. Later, he knocks a can off a fence with his blanket. In the original version, it was a Coca-Cola can. A short announcement at the end, wishing viewers “Merry Christmas from your local Coca-Cola bottler” was also removed.

“Please Come Home for Christmas”/Charles Brown/Blue Yule: Christmas Blues and R&B Classics. Don’t call him Charlie. Charles Brown recorded this first, in 1960, and it was famously covered by the Eagles. Other artists who’ve tackled it include Pat Benatar, James Brown, Dion, Fats Domino, the Drifters, Etta James, Aaron Neville, the Platters, various country singers, Southside Johnny (on the Home Alone soundtrack), the Three Degrees, and both Johnny and Edgar Winter.

“Silent Night”/Charlie Musselwhite/Alligator Records Christmas Collection. Theme of the post so far: all Charles all the time, apparently. This “Silent Night” is nicely done on harmonica.

“I Believe in Father Christmas”/Emerson Lake & Palmer/Works Volume 2. An atheist’s Christmas carol.

“I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day”/Harry Belafonte/Time-Life Treasury of Christmas Volume 2. I’m planning to write a whole post about this song, surprisingly dark yet at the same time undeniably hopeful. So stay tuned already.

“It Came Upon a Midnight Clear” and “Deck the Halls”/Moog Machine/Christmas Becomes Electric. Almost exactly the same vintage as Plastic Cow (1969), Christmas Becomes Electric got most of its fascination from being a Moog album at a time when the Moog synthesizer was the hottest technology going. Forty years later, it’s still a fairly pleasant listen, if you’re a particular kind of geek.

“Greensleeves”/Jimmy Smith/Organ Grinder Swing. B3 master Jimmy Smith recorded a Christmas album (Christmas Cookin’) in 1964, but the MP3 tag on this track says it’s from Organ Grinder Swing, which was released in 1965. I should probably compare the two to see if they’re the same recording, but this blog sucks, so I ain’t gonna.

“Medley” (various carols)/Living Strings/The Spirit of Christmas. Here’s an album that never gets out of the player at our house around the holidays. Two years ago I called it the greatest Christmas album of all time, and I haven’t changed my mind. This carol medley ends with a single string player (a viola, I think) playing “Silent Night,” and it’s one of the prettiest moments on the record.

“Lonely This Christmas”/Mud. This song spent a month at Number One in the UK starting just after Christmas in 1974 without charting in the States. (I wrote about it and some other British hits of 1974 here.) It’s where glam-rock meets doo-wop, but nobody wins, really.

Also: Today’s the 30th anniversary of the stampede at the Who concert in Cincinnati, in which 11 fans were killed. I’ll be writing about it at WNEW.com this weekend. It’s also the 41st anniversary of Elvis Presley’s 1968 comeback special. I wrote about that last year, and the post contains an error that’s bugged me ever since. I said that the special, which Col. Tom Parker had wanted to consist exclusively of Christmas tunes, didn’t contain a single one—but it did. A performance of “Blue Christmas,” which had been edited out originally, was restored at Parker’s insistence.

In the spirit of error, rather than posting the Elvis version, I’ll put up a different one that features some of  the whitest people in the world trying to get their doo-wop on.

“Blue Christmas”/Partridge Family (buy it here)

Usually I ease into the Christmas music every year, letting holiday songs pop up at random on the laptop in the days after Thanksgiving. Not this year—I jumped into the pool fully clothed, doing four solid hours of Christmas tunes on the radio the day after Thanksgiving, which felt like an awful lot awfully fast. But today’s December 1, so nobody can say it’s too early anymore.

There is, as usual, a variety of new holiday releases this year, although “new” is a relative term, as we’ll see in a moment. The most talked-about is Bob Dylan’s Christmas in the Heart. It’s been greeted with general head-scratching, and no wonder. In another lifetime, a Dylan Christmas album might have been sparely acoustic and as somber as a copse of bare trees, but Christmas in the Heart is neither. Most of the instrumental tracks are straight MOR that would fit the vocal stylings of everyone from Engelbert Humperdinck to Michael Bublé. Some of them include cheesy choral accompaniment. Dylan’s voice is no more than a croak. It’s an easy record to make fun of and/or hate, but I’m unwilling to do either one, and here’s why: Unlikely holiday albums succeed when the music fits the artist’s particular worldview—I’m thinking here of recent albums by Aimee Mann and Mary Chapin Carpenter—or when the music conforms to a particular artistic vision, like Willie Nelson’s classic Pretty Paper. Even though it might not seem like it, Dylan could be ticking both boxes—he’s past having to satisfy critics or explain himself, and Christmas in the Heart is an eloquent way of telling us so. Key track: “Must Be Santa,” which is utterly demented and completely fabulous.

So Dylan wins the award for Most Unlikely Artist to Do Christmas Tunes, but the first runner-up could be REO Speedwagon. Their Not So Silent Night is not going to impress anybody who’s not already a fan of REO, although it’s not always recognizable as REO since Kevin Cronin’s voice is shot. A cover of the Kingston Trio’s “White Snows of Winter” and a power-ballad version of “Angels We Have Heard on High” are decent, but the rest of it runs the gamut from unnecessary to awful. Unlike the Dylan album, it’s hard to discern REO’s point in making it, beyond a holiday cash-in.

Like ‘em or not, at least the Dylan and REO records are all new material. Many others require you to pay for stuff you may already own. Take for one example the Beach Boys’ Christmas Harmonies, which consists mostly of mono tracks from their 1964 Christmas album. It does include four additional tracks that can be considered rare, including the elusive 1974 recording “Child of Winter,” but it also includes the execrable “Santa’s Beard,” formerly the worst Christmas record in the world.

Neil Diamond’s A Cherry Cherry Christmas is largely recycled from Diamond’s early 90s Christmas albums. The title track is new, however, and awkwardly name-checks several Diamond tunes: “Wish you a very merry Cherry Cherry Christmas/And a Holly Holy holiday too/Underneath your tree may there always be/Sounds of harmony not a Song Sung Blue.” Diamond gains points for covering Adam Sandler’s “Chanukah Song,” but loses them again for changing Sandler’s “smoke your marijuana-kah” to “don’t smoke your marijuana-kah.” Michael McDonald’s up to the same thing. (Reissuing, not smoking.) This Christmas features four tracks from McD’s 2001 album but adds some new material as well. (For what it’s worth, Allmusic.com likes the new stuff.)

Straight reissues, no new material: Mannheim Steamroller is celebrating 25 years since their first Christmas album. In case you don’t already own their staggeringly popular holiday series (but how is that possible?), there’s a two-CD best of that covers the bases. And there’s a remastered version of A Christmas Gift for You, produced by Phil Spector and featuring the Crystals, the Ronettes, Darlene Love, and Bobb B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans. It’s the first issue in a series: All of Spector’s work produced for his Philles label is set to be remastered and reissued in both physical and downloadable form with replica artwork. Interesting fact about A Christmas Gift for You: It was originally released on November 22, 1963. The album didn’t become a hit during that first holiday season, perhaps because it landed in a season filled with grief.

Much More Merriment: At WNEW.com, I’ve started writing the history of some famous rock and pop Christmas songs. Last weekend it was Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas”; today it’s John Lennon’s “Happy Xmas (War Is Over).” (If you like ‘em, comment on ‘em.) At Popdose, Jason and Jeff are preparing to confront all things Christmas-musical with their annual Mellowmas series. The first installment is up today. Any Major Dude With Half a Heart goes old-school with the Christmas music;  AM, Then FM goes not quite so old.

“Angels We Have Heard on High”/REO Speedwagon (buy it here, cheap)