1965- "A Child's Prayer"

.....Briefly, I want to mention a candidate for the list of Motown Christmas originals that I have ultimately decided to exclude. Just as the Motown group was a set of labels with a common owner, Golden World was also a Detroit-based group of labels, albeit on a smaller scale. Motown would eventually acquire the group, but for a while some of the Funk Brothers would moonlight doing sessions on one of the Golden World labels, Ric-Tic Records, with members of The Detroit Symphony Orchestra under the pseudonym San Remo Strings. When a single did surprisingly well in the summer of 1965 they recorded a full album, LP HUNGRY FOR LOVE Ric-Tic Records MLP901 (US) 12/65, produced by Robert D'Orleans and arranged and conducted by Gil Askey. It was the only full album Ric-Tic issued and it contained the instrumental:

• 02:32 "A CHILD'S PRAYER" (Van McCoy)

.....In the summer of 1967 Motown reissued the album as Gordy GS923 (US) 08/67 and a year later obtained the entire Golden World group. As with Gwen Gordy's labels from earlier in the decade, the best acts from Ric-Tic such as Edwin Starr and Fantastic Four continued as Motown artists. Van McCoy, of course, became famous himself a little later for a dance craze called "The Hustle". In 1975 Hot Chocolate would record and release the song with the lyrics. While similar in tone to some of the songs included on James Brown's late 1960's Christmas albums, lamenting the state of the world and concerned for the future of its children, "A CHILD'S PRAYER" doesn't specifically mention Christmas. It is more like Marvin Gaye's "WHAT'S GOING ON" in that sense. I mention it here more for purposes of disambiguation, because there are a number of unrelated songs with the same title.