A Christmas note for you

Happy holidays to any who've enjoyed the blog this year. I haven't completely abandoned it and don't intend for two years to fly by without completing a few more posts. I'm still re-listening to a massive collection of CD's after discovering that a few had been damaged by the portable player I had been using. Fortunately most received only superficial scratches that don't effect the sound at all.

I'm somewhat disappointed that the fiftieth anniversary of the Phil Spector produced "A Christmas Gift For You" album seemed completely ignored. Last year there was a 2-disc reissue that weirdly included a second disc of otherwise unrelated non-Christmas songs that happened to be produced by Spector, most by artists not on the original album. I would have thought it more appropriate to see a package including alternate takes or mixes, contemporary radio spots, a booklet containing all of the different sleeve art used by the various labels who've reissued it over the years (and they are legion, if you didn't know)-- something, anything. Since the album was released on the day that Kennedy was shot, I could have predicted that the exact day would have been preoccupied with memorial coverage to the exclusion of nearly anything else. I'm more disturbed about the month since then. No TV documentary? No all-star tribute/remake album? Quel dommage.

Next year is the fiftieth anniversary of the Beach Boys' Christmas album, admittedly Brian Wilson response to Spector's efforts. If I can rehabilitate this rather dusty blog, a good place to start would be a track by track review. See you here after the New Year. Leave any suggestions for songs whose history you'd like to see detailed in the comments section. No matter how old this post gets, I read all the comments.

Thanks for your interest,
pblfsda

Annual link check

The links to external sights have all been checked as of this date. Should readers experience any problems, any comment will be brought to my notice within (probably) 24 hours despite the fact that new posts are sometimes months apart.

Motown History Redux

.....Last year I began covering the history of Motown Christmas recordings as a nod to Black History Month here in the United States. Unexpected delays unrelated to the blog cut that short half-way through the 1960's. I considered peppering them amongst the other months and perhaps turning to the Atlantic labels on the following February (meaning now). The reason I decided against that is that Motown has a history of aggressively repackaging its hits and has done the same with its Christmas music. They have always had a much stronger sense of brand identity than other successfully charting labels, including labels who were also large visible independents in the 1960's and 1970's such as A&M or Island. (All three are now owned by what is currently Universal.) Also, I've been able to use the intervening time to research the few seasonally-related recordings I don't own to fill in the holes in the chronology. This year I'll start at the beginning and mention the material covered last year, possibly linking to those posts rather than retyping them, to create a month long version of the sort of posts I did for James Brown in December. Cross your fingers.

Christmas In July

.....Sorry for the delay. I discovered in February that while I owned copies of all of Motown's Christmas pop music, there were in fact some subsidiary titles (now long out of print) of which I was unaware, including some instrumental jazz and a ventriloquist's album. (I know, I know: how can you tell if he's moving his lips on a record?) It looks like the delay will extend the blog's life into next year anyway, so I'll complete the Motown listings next February. Tomorrow, when it's not so late, I'll give a full entry. At the moment I want to explain something about the criteria for selections. I touched on this somewhat in the second post, "Label Glossary", but I've avoided making hard and fast rules about what I'll discuss because, after all, this is a hobby done for fun. One objective is to maximize verifiable information, citing sources when necessary. Another is to keep an open mind and include the widest variety of original twentieth century music related to Christmas. What gets excluded? Usually covers, for the sake of brevity. Anything else? Well, when I finally dragged myself back to this poor neglected blog the Elton John song "COLD AS CHRISTMAS" occurred to me. The chorus has the line "It's July, but it's cold as Christmas in the middle of the year." It's the lead track on his 1983 MTV-era comeback album, LP TOO LOW FOR ZERO, so even though I don't remember it being a 7" single (was it?) I've heard it enough that it keeps cropping up in my memory when I try to recall pop songs about Christmas. Of course, one huge advantage that my memory has over an online term search is that I know that the song takes place in July and it's about a divorce or break up. It's a simile, not a Christmas song. A decent song, but this blog isn't the right place for it. So, while I hadn't seen it as necessary to mention before, I may as well go on record that the songs here need to be about the holiday or season in some sense. And I hope to see more of them soon.

Motown Introduction

.....Spelunking has unearthed a cache of CD's I packed away over eight years ago, just in time for the new month beginning today. I will now be able to post a song every other day (although not as long as the previous one) just by rifling through a box. Oh, and reading all that tiny print.

.....To start, I can select a theme for the first month to help me organize. Since Christmas songs by or about presidents are few and thin on the ground, and Valentine's Day is an entirely separate holiday, I've decided that Black History Month would provide an easily satisfied framework. In fact, I had already expected to be documenting songs by black artists off and on all year. Thus, to make this project within a project special, I'm going to do a chronological look at the Motown family of labels. With 27 days left, I should be able to cover everything they released with regards to Christmas music up to about 1980. Because that would include standards as well as original songs I'm going to try and mention the original artists for those songs being covered. Eventually, they too will each get a full post. Cross your fingers.

Label Glossary

.....Transcribing my handwritten notes on Christmas music into blog form my be a fun hobby, but without labels it would just be turning a paper mess into an electronic mess. For my other blogs I've attempted to minimize the number of labels/tags so that the full list of labels isn't too intimidating to browse. For this blog, part of ascertaining which recording of a song is the original involves citing the date of recording and/or release. Therefore there'll be a label for each year. (Although, thinking practically, pre-WWI could be one category and the 20's and 30's could be grouped as five-year blocks. That would turn 100 labels into about 65.)

.....For readers (or myself) searching for a particular style of music, we'll have to ignore for a moment that in commercial circles at least all Christmas music is marketed as a distinct style of music all its own. Also, performers known for a given style in their own music will often approach holiday music differently. Given that it's only on sale for about 10% of the year, they may have chosen to record holiday music as a change of pace or even as a personal or professional challenge, a test of their craft. Still, by limiting myself to original 20th century compositions I can (in most cases) affiliate a given song with the closest approximate popular form. This is just the sort of thing I normally try to avoid when organizing my own records or CD's. It's easier to find things, especially in a large collection, if you simply refuse to parse everything into increasingly specific subcategories. Alphabetize; spell out numbers so that you don't have to remember whether you put numbers before or after letters. There are two kinds of music: classical and popular. Alphabetize popular by artist and classical by composer; organize each artist and composer by date. Organize anthologies by label and cast/soundtrack albums by title, then shelve both outside of the main body (or bodies). Done.

.....The reason my choice of organizational systems is so simplified (if not exactly Spartan) is because I used to work in a music chain store, many years ago when they were such things. Ask anyone old enough to have some experience in music chain retail and they'll confirm it: the more you love music, the more you will grow to hate the chains. And not just the one you have the misfortune of working for; you'll notice things in the competitors that would have previously struck you as brainless but innocent that will begin to take on sinister dimensions in light of what you have learned. I understand that there are entire websites devoted to unloading about such things, so I'll limit myself here to a few things I noticed relevant to labels and music categories. There were separate categories for rock and R&B in the chain where I worked. Generally, the determinations made sense: Led Zeppelin in rock, the Temptations in R&B. Yet, there were some that puzzled me. Jimi Hendrix, for instance, was in R&B. That's not really so crazy, since some of his posthumous releases were much bluesier than his standard albums. But then I noticed Hall & Oates were in rock, although they often charted as R&B. And the more I thought about it, Pink Floyd were much more consistently blues inflected than Hendrix was, yet they were shelved in rock while Living Colour were in R&B. Although it was never stated company policy, a close inspection made their reasoning obvious. "Rock" meant white to them, and "R&B" meant black. It was that simple and that ugly. There were a number of other questionable judgements but that one had a higher skin-crawl factor than the others and while I can't foresee myself making that particular lapse in common sense it made me wary of that thin line between subjectivity and prejudice. I decided that the human factor was something best indulged when listening to music and that we should defer to library science when filing it.

.....All of which makes it feel very strange now to introduce musical categories to a blog I'm writing. The only saving grace I can think of is that these are meant for individual songs and therefore avoids the odious practice of pretending that albums never blend musical styles. Here are the terms I anticipate needing to use:

• Avant-garde - Because I am restricting myself to the 20th Century there will be few instances of commissioned classical compositions of holiday music, as would have been more common during Handel's lifetime. If any come up I will lump them in here along with the neo-classical and (intentionally) atonal on top of anything experimental or exceptionally innovative, so much so that it doesn't meet the other categories.
• Children's - This category is less about style than about marketing.
• Humor - I had originally considered using the broader term 'novelty' until I realized that would describe everything in a Christmas music blog. Like Children's and Stage & Screen this would likely be combined with a more specific description of the music.
• Jazz/Swing - Depending on artists or arrangements, this may occasionally be used in combination with R&B-Blues .
• Punk/New Wave - The fact of this category will probably prompt some ruminations on deconstruction. There have also been those who contend that 'New Wave' doesn't exist except as a marketing term. It may ultimately prove more useful in identifying time periods than musical qualities.
• R&B-Blues - (see Jazz/Swing) Some selections may overlap with the various Roots designations.
• R&B-Motown - Oh, yes, the volume of Christmas music from the Motown family of labels (which includes the 'Motown' label proper as well as Gordy, Jobete, Tamla, etc.,etc....) more than justifies it's own sub-category.
• R&B-Other Soul - Musically not terribly different from Motown but often less polished. Sometimes that's an improvement, sometimes not. Think Atlantic, Atco, Stax/Volt, Buddha, etc.
• Rock-UK - Not really a style distinct from the US but a concession to nostalgia for readers and myself. Also, there's a mountain of material from the seventies.
• Rock-US - (see Rock-UK)
• Roots-Country - Covers both Nashville and Bakersfield as well as any 'alt-Country'/No Depression artists who aren't actually rock.
• Roots-Folk - Both the real stuff and the barbershop-type arrangements from the early sixties.
• Roots-Gospel - It might be tricky distinguishing the Christmas songs about Jesus from the other 364 days of songs about Jesus. Technically, "GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN" is lyrically a Christmas song. Musically it doesn't exactly remind me of pine and peppermint, but that's what this blog is intended to detail.
• Spoken Word - Stories, speeches, radio dramas and some interesting public service announcements. Trust me, they'll keep things more interesting than their descriptions imply.
• Stage & Screen - Cast albums and soundtracks, which may incorporate any or none of the above categories.

.....Of course, this doesn't preclude categories being added later.

Don't Rest Ye Just Yet

.....This year, 2011, is the 350th anniversary of a book. 1661 saw the publication of "New Carolls For This Merry Time Of Christmas-- To sundry pleasant tunes. With new additions never before printed, to be sung to the delight of the hearers." A recent search for a public domain online copy found nothing at Project Gutenberg and restricted access to copies at Hong Kong University and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. There is purportedly a microform copy in the National Library of Australia at Canberra, assuming that Canberra is not in that part of Australia currently under water at the moment.

.....The book followed closely after the Restoration of 1660, which lifted prohibitions against Christmas carols. Carols had their origins not as songs but as pagan dances that accompanied the change of seasons or fertility rites. The rhythms of the dances then became the basis for songs. Although early Christian leaders condemned the practice of carol singing, later attempts to convert pagan adherents to their faith included the practice (in Europe at least) of trying to convince the pagans that the trappings of their culture actually had Christian origins. This is why pine trees, holly and other decidedly non-Middle Eastern accoutrements have become associated with the birth of Jesus. But while the ruse succeeded in bringing on converts, church authorities continued to object to the assimilation of pagan practices. Christians, however, did not. Although not integrated into church ceremony, many pagan rituals and even day-to-day customs became a part of domestic life in Christian homes long after their true origins were forgotten. (Forget Christmas; Easter has become so saturated in pagan fertility symbols it should have an 'R' rating.) Bans against singing carols were alternately enforced and liberalized until the Restoration, after which only Puritans and various zealots continued to rail against them, to decreasing effect. Still, so soon after official reprieve the printer of "New Carolls..." identified themselves only by initials: "printed by H.B. for Andrew Kemb, and are to be sold at his shop near Saint Margarets Hill in Southwark". Why take chances?

.....New printings of the book appeared in 1670, 1681 and 1725. There was a relative flurry of new books collecting old carols in the 1800's, but in the intervening time many of the old favorites were kept alive by oral tradition with its inevitable tendency toward reinvention. The best single source for disambiguation of these variant versions I have found is "The Penguin Book Of Carols" edited by Ian Bradley(1999).[Bradley himself recommends the revised "New Oxford Book OF Carols" (1992) in his introduction.] I found the Penguin collection while trying to pin down the song-writing credits of Christmas carols in my rock music collection. Countless pop music performers have recorded Christmas music, some recording entire albums. Unfortunately, most of those albums have a token original number and are then fleshed out with 'the usual suspects'-- pre-1900 standards whose authorship, while established, is often ignored owing to their public domain status. No one will sue over zero royalties, so why bother to identify them? At some point I began putting together cassettes of as many holiday songs as I could to provide a counterpoint to the homogenized mall-music versions and faced the same predicament as anyone who makes this same innocent mistake: "Good Lord, how many versions of 'Silent Night' are there?" I resolved to limit myself to acquiring only those songs that debuted as recordings, ensuring that there at least could be an arguably definitive version. Then, realizing that with new songs being written every year that I would never live to see the end of this project, I chose the arbitrary cut-off point of the year 2000 for my search. That gives me roughly a century since the invention of the Edison cylinder in which to explore. I made that decision twenty years ago and have not come close to tracking down all the recordings I want. It's enough of a struggle just to organize what I've found. If you care to join me here, that's just what I intend to do.

.....This blog is the latest in a series of the Layman's Guide to Criticism, whose Mission Statement and other blogs are to be found on the list of links to the left. Tomorrow I will detail the tag categories that will be used here.