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.

1965- Supremes sessions 2

.....In the previous post the first half of the Supremes' recordings for their 1965 Christmas album were covered. Of the nine songs known to have been completed by September 14th, only the last one, "LITTLE BRIGHT STAR", was a Motown original. The next nine include a few more. As before, the instrumentals were recorded in Los Angeles in August and the vocals in Detroit in September (see previous post). The sessions were produced by Harvey Fuqua with Hal Davis and Marc Gordon. The dates used below were found on the website Don't Forget The Motor City. Research on the origins of the songs was done using a variety of books and sites, including Allmusic, Wikipedia (US and UK), Discogs, BMI, ASCAP and imdb.

.....From LP MERRY CHRISTMAS Motown MT(mono) or MS(stereo) 638 (US) 11/01/65

• 02:48 "BORN OF MARY" (Don Gustafson) Recorded 09/15/65. For the life of me, I can't find a single other song written by Gustafson, nor an earlier recording of this one. The name might be a pseudonym. Or it could be the work of someone motivated by the subject who doesn't ordinarily write music. In any event, it's not a bad song but very obviously a pastiche of Christmas-evoking musical sounds (finger-cymbals for the Middle East, chimes for Dickensian England, a too-loud string section for soaring spirits) used as a backdrop for the story of Christ's birth. The music and lyrics coincide but it doesn't feel like either one is naturally growing out of the other. Pretty but not hummable. And I'm not sure if there are any other recordings of the song. The only compilation I've seen it on is the redundant CD CHRISTMAS TIME WITH MOTOWN (1995).
• 03:02 "TWINKLE TWINKLE LITTLE ME" (Ronald Miller, William O'Malley) Recorded 09/15/65 and certainly a Motown original. Miller was a staffer and will show up a few more times in this month's posts. This became the B-side of the single accompanying the album. In contrast to the previous song, this is a perfect example of how a song can be slight or weaker on paper but hold up much better in the execution. "BORN OF MARY" might have been better served without the string section and instead allowing the Supremes' vocals to stand out as they do here. They take lyrics that should be cloying and manage to make them warmer and sweet. Although often licensed out to other companies, I could only find it on the second volume of the 20th Century Masters Motown Christmas compilations.
• 02:51 "CHILDREN'S CHRISTMAS SONG" (Isabelle Freeman, Harvey Fuqua) Recorded 09/16/65 and another Motown original. This became the A-side of the single mentioned above. The liner notes of the album's 1999 remastered edition identifies the children Diana Ross instructs in the spoken parts as her own brother Chico and Berry Gordy's children Joy, Berry, Jr. and Terry (for whom his publishing company, JoBeTe, is named). Picking a children's sing-along as an A-side is an odd marketing strategy and I'd put this down to the senior Gordy giving his kids (or himself) an expensive gift.
• 03:07 "THE LITTLE DRUMMER BOY" (Katherine Davis, Henry Onorati, Harry Simeone) Recorded 09/16/65 and a cover of the Harry Simeone Chorale's one time hit that almost every holiday album dutifully and mechanically acknowledges. I don't know why; the success of the original was, I thought, obviously tied to its multi-voiced delivery and whatever combination of elements were in place at its release, unlikely to ever be duplicated. Of all the songs on the album, it's the only one that nearly fifty years later has never been used on a company compilation. It's not because of the quality of the recording; there's just no point in hearing three women in chiffon dresses and bouffant hairdos sing "I am a poor boy, too".
• 03:10 "MY CHRISTMAS TREE" (Jimmy Webb) You should probably sit down for this if you're not reading at a PC. Webb was a country boy from Oklahoma studying music in Southern California in 1964. Early in 1965 his mother died and his father was unable to pay for his studies. Rather than return home he dropped out to turn professional as a songwriter. He signs with Gordy as a publisher and this song becomes his first to be released commercially. As was common in pop music, the song's genders were transposed so that Ross (in the lead vocal) refers to herself as "a girl" and the song seems to be about a meager looking Christmas tree representing her life after her boyfriend left. But the line "there's no little angel on top where it used to be", in fact most of the lines, echo Webb's loss of his mother: "the best little present a [boy] could have has gone away from me", "I have been so lonely since you left me all alone". There's nothing specific to the lyrics that state that the missing person was a romantic partner or even that they left willingly. It is an archetypal image of a young person living on their own for the first time in their lives in a strange city in an almost empty room and realizing that the feeling of being alone in the world isn't just a feeling. They really are alone. The one note of hope is a line about "one lonely present" early in the song, one tenuous connection to some other person, still there unopened after "the New Year's already gone". If the song really is a way of dealing with his grief and the unopened present is in some way a last piece of his mother it could be that the song and the present are one and the same. By inspiring the song that months later launched a prolific career as a songwriter, she may have left him a gift he had yet to open. The song was recorded 09/16/65, a month and a day after his 19th birthday. It must be the most historically significant original song on the album, but after being used on the 1968 Motown compilation I've only found it on a 1973 UK LP and no other domestic label sets.

.....From CD NEVER-BEFORE-RELEASED MASTERS Motown/MCA MCD09075MD (Japan/US) 07/87

• 01:08 "SILENT NIGHT" (Joseph Mohr, Franz Gruber) Recorded 09/16/65 with Florence Ballard as the lead vocal. This edit has only the first verse.

.....From VACD CHRISTMAS IN THE CITY Motown Master Series 37463-6326-2 (Germany) 10/19/93

• 02:40 "SILENT NIGHT" (Joseph Mohr, Franz Gruber) Recorded 09/16/65 with Florence Ballard as the lead vocal. The oldest recording I have of this song is from 1911, but it's sung in German. I'm aware of contemporary English recordings but I haven't acquired one yet. "SILENT NIGHT" has been translated into over 200 languages and there are numerous conflicting English translations. What many people don't realize is that the original German poem by Mohr has six verses and none of them mention the Virgin Mary. She was added for the English and many subsequent translations. Considering how many variant translations exist, it is likely that many have never had a "first recorded version" and I'm not sure if any recordings predate 1900. Comparing and even locating recordings of different verses is a major headache. There's an entire website devoted to this one song and even they don't bother documenting the different recordings. Even so, I'm betting that I'm safe assuming that this is not the first recording of this version.
• 02:23 "JUST A LONELY CHRISTMAS" (Harvey Fuqua, [Alan] Freed) Recorded 09/16/65 and previously recorded by the Moonglows in 1953. Alan Freed's first name isn't used either for this 1993 debut or as a bonus track for the 1999 remastered album. For an explanation of Freed's involvement, refer to the post of January 18, 2011 about the Moonglows' version.

.....From VACD A MOTOWN CHRISTMAS CAROL Motown Master Series 73145-30433-29 (US) 10/24/95

• 02:31 "OH LITTLE TOWN OF BETHLEHEM" (Phillips Brooks, Lewis Redner) Recorded 09/16/65 and credited to 'Traditional', but I found the actual composers' credits in Ian Bradley's "The Penguin Book Of Carols" (Penguin, 1999). When The Supremes' Christmas album was remastered for 1999 only three tracks of the nineteen I'm examining were not included: "O HOLY NIGHT", which wouldn't be released until 2001; the one-verse edit of "SILENT NIGHT", which was replaced by a longer edit; and this song, which was the only unreleased song on VACD A MOTOWN CHRISTMAS CAROL, although it did include some of the rarely heard 'Season's Greetings' from old promotional singles. A better source for this song would be VACD A MOTOWN CHRISTMAS VOLUME 2, the compilation that debuted their recording of "O HOLY NIGHT" (see previous post).

.....From LP MERRY CHRISTMAS Motown MT(mono) or MS(stereo) 638 (US) 11/01/65

• 02:58 "SILVER BELLS" (Jay Livingston, Ray Evans) Recorded 09/21/65 and previously recorded by The Miracles. There should be no trouble finding this recording, as it ties with "WHITE CHRISTMAS" for the Supremes Christmas song most frequently on the company compilations.

.....The different pressings of the album are:

• LP MERRY CHRISTMAS Motown MT638 (US) 11/01/65 [mono]
• LP MERRY CHRISTMAS Motown MS638 (US) 11/01/65 [stereo]
• LP MERRY CHRISTMAS Natural Resources NR4010 (US) 10/78
• LP MERRY CHRISTMAS Tamla Motown STMS 5084 (UK) 1982
• CD MERRY CHRISTMAS/SOMEDAY AT CHRISTMAS Motown/MCA MCD08041MD (US) 1986 (combined with Stevie Wonder album)
• LP MERRY CHRISTMAS Motown 5252ML (US) 1988
• CD MERRY CHRISTMAS Motown/MCA MCD09085MD (Japan/US) n.d.
• CD MERRY CHRISTMAS Motown/Universal 012 153 355-2 (US) 10/12/99 (four bonus tracks)
• CD 20TH CENTURY MASTERS/THE CHRISTMAS COLLECTION: THE BEST OF THE SUPREMES Motown/Universal 602498-60343-7 (US) 09/23/03 (same as 1999 with new art)
• CD MERRY CHRISTMAS Spectrum 600753224397 (UK) 2009 (without bonus tracks)

1965- Supremes sessions 1

.....At Motown, The Supremes were sort of the queens of covers. In the assembly line business model of the label's early days there were people whose specialty was songwriting, others who produced, others who performed, etc., and so every artist at some time drew on material written by someone else, even when the result would be considered an entirely in-house product to the audience. The difference with The Supremes is that they released not only a record number of themed albums, but what must have been a record number of themes: Broadway, country, The Beatles, Sam Cooke, more Broadway and also continuously recording Holland-Dozier-Holland originals. Don Waller's "The Motown Story" (Scribner's, 1985) lists six albums in 1965 alone. The last one was for Christmas.

.....Unlike many Motown recordings, the instrumentals were recorded in L. A., rather than in the basement in Detroit. According to the liner notes for the remastered edition (1999) of LP MERRY CHRISTMAS, "Band tracks recorded in Los Angeles, CA, August, 1965. Vocals recorded in Detroit, MI, September, 1965." On the original jackets (located last year on Discogs), the mono edition credited Harvey Fuqua alone as the producer. The stereo edition credited Harvey Fuqua and Davis & Gordon. That would be Hal Davis and Marc Gordon, their full names given in arrangement credits and elsewhere. The dates of completion (presumably the final vocal takes or any last minute overdubbed instrumental work) were found on the excellent Don't Forget The Motor City website and are the ones I used as the basis for the following chronology of the sessions.

.....There is one song for which I have not been able to find a producer's credit for the original source tapes nor a date for the vocal take. It was first released on CD MERRY CHRISTMAS Motown/Universal 012 153 355-2 (US) 10/12/99, the remaster of the 1965 album. All songs in this post can be found on it, unless otherwise noted.

• 01:59 "NÖEL" (Traditional) This song was previously recorded and released by The Miracles, as were most of the first few Christmas songs The Supremes attempted. Their version used only the first of nine verses plus the chorus. The Supremes add the second verse.

.....From CD THE NEVER-BEFORE-RELEASED MASTERS Motown/MCA MCD09075MD (Japan/US) 07/87

• 02:11 "THE CHRISTMAS SONG" (Mel Tormé, Robert Wells) This song was also on the 1963 Miracles album. Recorded 08/26/65.

.....From CD A MOTOWN CHRISTMAS VOLUME 2 Motown/Universal 440 016 364-2 (US) 11/06/01

• 02:55 "OH HOLY NIGHT" (Adolphe C. Adam) Florence Ballard sings lead here, one of four songs recorded 09/09/65. Again, this song was previously recorded by the Miracles, but it was the last of those to be shelved. Three others made it onto the Supremes' album.

.....From LP MERRY CHRISTMAS Motown MT(mono) or MS(stereo) 638 (US) 11/01/65

• 02:40 "RUDOLPH THE RED-NOSED REINDEER" (Johnny Marks) Recorded 09/09/65, the most famous version must be the Gene Autry single. Although this is the first version released by a Motown act, it would be eclipsed by the single from The Temptations a few years later. The Supremes' version rarely shows up on Motown compilations, appearing once on a UK-only LP in 1973 and again on a Flintstones tie-in in 1996.
• 02:40 "SANTA CLAUS IS COMING TO TOWN" (Haven Gillespie, J. Fred Coots) Recorded 09/09/65 and previously recorded by The Miracles. After this version was included on the 1968 label compilation it became overshadowed in 1970 when it was covered again as a Jackson 5 A-side. It didn't return to domestic compilations until the Flintstones tie-in mentioned above.
• 02:50 "MY FAVORITE THINGS" (Richard Rogers, Oscar Hammerstein II) Recorded 09/09/65. Aside from a line about "silver white winters" and another about "packages tied up with strings" there's really nothing in this song to suggest Christmas, but the tenuous connections to the season must have been justification enough to include it. It originates in the stage musical "The Sound Of Music" which had been adapted into a movie released in the spring of 1965. The stage play was wildly successful but the movie would become a commercial juggernaut, breaking box office records and yielding a soundtrack album that became the best selling album of the 1960's, dwarfing even the Beatles. However, once The Supremes placed this song in a Christmas context, the MOR world followed suit. Barbara Streisand included it on her LP A CHRISTMAS ALBUM Columbia CS9557 (US) 10/67 and it was soon accepted as a holiday standard.
• 03:52 "WHITE CHRISTMAS" (Irving Berlin) Recorded 09/14/65 and the second selection also covered by The Miracles to make the cut. This was the lead track, in fact. It is a paradox of Christmas music that the most ubiquitous songs are the most rerecorded. The whole point of recording a song is so that you don't have to perform it repeatedly; you can simply play back the recording. Of all the songs on LP MERRY CHRISTMAS, this and "SILVER BELLS" resurface on the most compilations.
• 02:09 "JOY TO THE WORLD" (Traditional, arranged and adapted by Hal Davis, Marc Gordon and Harvey Fuqua) Recorded 09/14/65 and along with "MY FAVORITE THINGS" it ranks closely after "WHITE CHRISTMAS" and "SILVER BELLS" as the most frequently reissued tracks Motown's Christmas collections. The song itself has had a convoluted history, briefly summarized by Ian Bradley in "The Penguin Book of Carols" (Penguin 1999). From its origins as an interpretation of Psalm 98 by Isaac Watts in 1719 it underwent nearly continuous revision, lyrical and musical, until as late as 1955. The music most likely began as a tune called "COMFORT" arranged or possibly composed in 1833 by Thomas Hawkes, who intended it to be the musical accompaniment for the poems/prayers of Charles Wesley. Later publishers attributed the music to the then dead (and not collecting royalties) Handel, incorporating bits from Handel's "Messiah" oratario to make the claim convincing. One such publisher was Lowell Mason, who renamed the song "ANTIOCH" in 1836. Like most performers, The Supremes sing only the first, second and fourth verses, skipping the darker third verse about "sin's curse".
• 02:25 "LITTLE BRIGHT STAR" (Allan Capps, Mary Dean) Recorded 09/14/65. This was the same songwriting team responsible for the hit Cher song "HALF BREED" in the early 1970's. At about this time producers Davis & Gordon also worked on the Chris Clark recording of the Capps/Dean song "SOFT TOUCH". Clark was briefly on Motown's V.I.P. label, then Motown, then Weed, none of which released the song. I tried finding an earlier recording, or even a date for filing the song, but I couldn't find much about either writer prior to this except that Capps had also worked for Hanna-Barbera in 1965. Unless someone can leave a comment with evidence to the contrary, I'm going to assume this is the first appearance of an original Christmas song.

.....That's as good a place as any to wrap up this post. The second half of the sessions will be covered tomorrow.

1965- "New Year's" (spoken)

.....While most people are aware that Motown artists in the 1960's not only played individual headlining shows but travelled as a collective identity as the Motor Town Revue, many are not aware that later incarnations of that revue were MC'ed by Willie Tyler, best known for his ventriloquist act Willie Tyler and Lester. Tyler has had a varied carrier (with and without Lester) acting in movies and television and also writing and singing original songs. On his website is an audio clip for "CHRISTMAS RAP" and a video clip for "DECEMBER AGAIN". If I can confirm that they were recorded before 2000 I may post on them in the future. This post is about a routine from one of his comedy albums. Bits from the album have turned up on Youtube but I have yet to hear this. I'm mentioning it here on faith that it's relevant to the season but can't really review it without hearing it.

• 00:00 "NEW YEAR'S" (Willie Tyler) (spoken word)
• performed by Willie Tyler and Lester
• original source: LP HELLO DUMMY! Tamla T265 (US) 11/65
• and my source: (still waiting)

1965- "Santa's Got A Brand New Bag"

.....Five years ago this Christmas, the world lost James Brown. I couldn't let the first year of this blog go by without giving some mention to the man who released three Christmas albums (plus singles) in a five year period. "Hardest Working Man In Show Business" wasn't just some kind of press release hype. In the next post I'll begin covering the wealth of original holiday music he left us, but before I can do that I need to set up a little chronology to introduce it. Because the first James Brown Christmas single wasn't by James Brown.

.....At this time sixty years ago Brown was completing a prison sentence. He left determined to change his life and began performing with Bobby Byrd's Gospel Starlighters. Brown's personal charisma and powerful confessional style soon drew the lion's share of attention and Byrd's outfit increasingly gravitated towards secular gigs, renaming themselves The Famous Flames. They began recording as the Flames at about the same time as a gulf area band of young white musicians calling themselves the Boogie Kings made a notch for themselves in history by deciding to devote themselves to playing music recorded by black artists. Being a cover band normally isn't remarkable, but in 1955 that was thought to be a first. In 1958 they racked up another first by appearing on the first release by Louisiana based Jin Records, a single on which they backed Doug Ardoin.

.....A decade later, James Brown releases "PAPA'S GOT A BRAND NEW BAG" (backed with Part 2) on King Records 5999 (US) 07/65. Brown had long been a star on the R&B charts, but had only once previously entered the Top 20 on Billboard's Pop charts (with "PRISONER OF LOVE" in 1963 at #18). The success of "PAPA'S... " was palpable; it reached #8 on Billboard's Hot 100. In England, it's reported that the Who had completed recording their first album, including covers of Brown's "PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE", "I DON'T MIND" and "SHOUT AND SHIMMY". Daltrey had been a Brown fan for a while and his songs had been a part of the Who's live set since the beginning. In fact, the total number of covers concerned their management, who delayed the release of the album until December (April 1966 in the U.S.) while they recorded more originals to replace some of the covers. In October, "SHOUT AND SHIMMY" became a B-side and the other two made it to the final cut of the album. Meanwhile, back in the states both sides of Brown's "PAPA'S... " single opened a new album of the same name in September 1965 on King 938 (US) 09/65. He also used an instrumental version as the B-side of the instrumental version of "TRY ME" (an earlier hit) on Smash 2008 (US) 12/65. None of this was lost gulf area soul singer Gary Walker. That fall he went to Jin Records with a holiday song based on Brown's recent hit.

• -N/A- "LOSING MY MIND OVER YOU" (-N/A-)
• 03:08 b/w "SANTA'S GOT A BRAND NEW BAG" (James Brown)
• performed by Gary Walker
• original source: 7" Jin Records 45-195 (US) 1965
• and my source: VACD THE BEST OF COOL YULE Rhino Records R2 75767 (US?) 1988

.....'Answer' records were very common in the 1950's and still kicking around in the 1960's. In fact, one of the earlier posts on this blog was for "X-MAS TWIST". However, those songs are usually original songs with new lyrics and music about the same subject matter as an existing hit. What Walker did was set new lyrics to Brown's song and went one step further by doing a straight faced imitation of Brown while singing it. There was no attempt to sell the record as a James Brown recording-- Walker's name clearly appears in larger, bolder type as the performer than Brown's name does, parenthetically as the composer. But complicating matters is the fact that there was no separate credit for the new lyrics, however minimally they were changed. Also, listening to the song today on a properly mastered and balanced compact disc with headphones, it may be difficult to imagine anyone being fooled into believing that this was James Brown. But in 1965, listening to a vinyl copy played on AM radio over your car's speakers? Welll... we're not all audiophiles. As I mentioned above, Walker copped Brown's style of delivery if not his exact voice. It starts with a 'single-finger-on-piano' quote from "JINGLE BELLS" and a chorus singing the title before launching into the familiar horn blast. Then Walker delivers a credible take on "PAPA'S GOT A BRAND NEW BAG" with a few strategic lyric changes. He didn't go for a broad, farcical imitation (probably for reasons of good taste; at that time the often mercenary Brown was instead passing up paying engagements to do benefit concerts for civil rights interests and the SCLC). To this day it turns up on Christmas compilations routinely. It sounds like something Brown might have recorded, except that despite his gospel origins he had never marketed any explicitly holiday-oriented material. Yet.

.....James Brown began recording his own Christmas songs the following year and continued through 1970, after which that material continued to be occasionally pressed and sold every year to date. He did one more album in 1999, but never recorded (or at least never released) a version of "SANTA'S GOT A BRAND NEW BAG", contrary to the popularly held misconception. Despite this, when Rhino records got the go ahead to license his old King recordings from PolyGram Special Products, they called their compilation "SANTA'S GOT A BRAND NEW BAG", hopelessly confusing people still looking for that song. I hope to clear up a bit of that confusion with a James Brown Christmas discography over the next few days. While preparing this post I began getting error messages when I tried to save it. Unlike past experiences in which several paragraphs of original writing disappeared into the ether, I didn't lose anything except the time it took to copy the upper half of this post by hand, fearing it would also be lost. Cross your fingers and we'll all see it by the weekend if not sooner.

.....Oh, and one last note about Gary Walker. You may find it difficult to find much more by searching online. Too many websites take a research-by-robot approach instead of employing musicologists. They don't seem to realize or care that this is not the same Gary Walker as Gary Leeds, the Seattle area musician who joined some fellow expatriate Americans who were working in England under the name The Walker Brothers. About a year before the gulf area Gary released his Christmas single, the northwest Gary joined The Walker Brothers and changed his name to Gary Walker. When they hit big they eventually all released solo material under their Walker pseudonyms. From what I've been able to disambiguate, Gulf Gary had already released three singles for MGM Records in the late 1950's. In 1966 he released one more single for Jin. I haven't been able to track down all of Jin's various artists albums, but I was able to confirm that he joined the Boogie Kings in 1967, explaining the lack of visible material under his own name from that point on. There were two more Jin singles circa 1980, but I don't know how old the recordings were. According to the Boogie Kings' website, he has since passed away but they don't offer any details. If anyone living in that area (especially anyone involved in organizing musicians and other artists in the wake of Katrina) has verifiable knowledge, it would be greatly appreciated in the comments section. Thank you.

1965? Winter Wonderland (instrumental remake)

.....From 1960 to 1990 Motown released seven single-artist albums and three various artists albums of Christmas music, not counting singles, repackagings and overseas editions. Of these, only the first, 1963's CHRISTMAS WITH THE MIRACLES, contained the song "WINTER WONDERLAND". I mention this because there are two collections that have come out since then containing previously unreleased material from that period and each have an outtake of that song-- the same outtake in two different mixes, actually-- attributing it to two different producers in two different years. Here's what I know...

.....first the mono mix:

• 02:02 "WINTER WONDERLAND" (Felix Bernard)
• performed by The Funk Brothers
• produced by Ronald White
• recorded 1965
• original source: VACD CHRISTMAS IN THE CITY Motown Master Series 37463-6326-2 (G) 1993
• and my source: the same

.....and next, the stereo mix:

• 02:00 "WINTER WONDERLAND" (Felix Bernard, Dick Smith)
• performed by The Funk Brothers
• produced by Norman Whitfield
• recorded September-October 1968, as an instrumental only during the sessions for the Temptations' album CHRISTMAS CARD
• "First issued with a different mix on the Various Artists album CHRISTMAS IN THE CITY, Motown 6326, October 1993." [per liner notes of 2001 CD]
• original source: VACD A MOTOWN CHRISTMAS VOLUME 2 Motown/Universal 440 016 364-2(US) 2001
• and my source: the same

.....Ronald White produced the only other version from the 1960's, on the aforementioned Miracles' album. It's not the same music, even though it's probably some of the same session men playing the same song. It's not a radically different arrangement but different enough to distinguish between them. The only Christmas project at Motown in 1965 was the Supremes album, produced by Harvey Fuqua. My guess is that someone compiling notes for the 1993 CD got confused at some point.

.....The most noticeable difference between the mono and stereo mixes is that the stereo mix has a string section. Both versions feature what sounds like a toy xylophone, which sounds sharper in the stereo mix. Because the song isn't an original (see the 1963 posts until I can get around to posting about the 1934 versions), I'm going to hold off doing any more commentary on it until I cover the Temptations' 1968 single.