About Christmas Music

A couple of weeks ago, a sales representative in the Johnson City, TN, Books-a-Million told me that I should have asked permission before taking a shot with my camera phone of one of the displays. I was photographing a Christmas display that had gone up in the middle of October. Already, like many of the other stores in my area (I suppose around the country), the retailers are getting in another early shot at the holidays, fearful that we consumers may forget that the holidays are on the way and that they will not be able to make sales quotas yet again. I am not going to go all nostalgic about the days when people hardly mentioned Christmas until we had begun eating the Thanksgiving meals, but something shook me this morning in a way I did not expect to feel. I was in a local supermarket, and I thought I heard Christmas music playing in the background. I nearly bolted.

Some of you may not know that I was a disc jockey at a small country station in my hometown, and, since I was a part-timer, I had a lot of the impossible holiday shifts. One year, the management thought it would be a good idea to run Christmas music for the entire programming day. I had exposure to Christmas music that hardly anyone would want to hear, and I had a lot of exposure to it.

Basically, there are two main problems with Christmas music. There is not a lot of good Christmas music, and the good Christmas music there is rarely gets the performance it deserves. These problems are particularly related in the music industry, so some explanation is in order.

Remember that performers earn money on Christmas recordings in two ways. The first has to do with performance rights, in that sometimes a performer offers such a definitive recording of a song that it become the version that just about everyone wants to hear. The other way is to write a Christmas song and to earn royalties from it. The second method offers a surer way to earn money from a song, because it is, bluntly, easier to sell folks a song than to make a lot of people love a recording so much that they want to buy it and hear it a great deal (when one factors in that a fan is going to buy practically every album an act releases, then one can see how easy it can be for a Christmas album to serve as a quickly produced product--hardly any new songs need to be written, it requires less marketing, and the company has a rough assurance of how many units will sell--there's a Lynyrd Skynyrd Christmas album still available). If all one is concerned about is turning a quick profit, Christmas songs have only to contend with other Christmas songs that will make for immediate competition.

For example, one of my favorite modern Christmas songs is Mel Torme's and Robert Wells' "The Christmas Song," the one that starts with "Chesnuts roasting on an open fire." The Nat "King" Cole recording of that song has become the standard. I imagine that Torme probably earned more money from that song than anything else he ever wrote or recorded himself, and, while Nat "King" Cole likely made some money from it, I doubt that his earnings came anywhere near Torme's and Wells'. Generally, performers make more money from their live performances than from their recordings, unless they are fortunate enough to have hits with songs they have written themselves.

Now, with Christmas music, we face the situation where people want to hear the traditional songs, but there is no real money for the performers in recording songs written by someone else. For that reason, most Christmas albums will feature an original song or two, usually written by the recording artist, so that when the albums sell, the artists will derive some extra income from the songs that they have written. Sometimes, these songs can be awfully good. Patty Loveless co-wrote three of the songs, "Santa Train," "Christmas Day at My House," and "Bluegrass, White Snow" on her Bluegrass & White Snow: A Mountain Christmas, and the songs convey a genuine sweetness contemporary songs rarely achieve. I also have to mention Tim O'Brien's "Making Plans" as a heartbreakingly good song about looking forward to coming home for the holidays. At the same time, Alan Jackson's "Merry Christmas to Me," on his Honky Tonk Christmas, is about as derivative a regretful break-up song as you can expect, only with Christmas trappings. Unfortunately, many of the new songs fall into this category of profitable album filler. I have to give Jackson credit, though, because another song on that album, "The Angels Cried" by Harley Allen and Deborah Nims, offers a perspective on the Nativity story one does not always encounter, the poignancy of the angels' knowledge of what the Christ Child would have to endure. Like few other contemporary Christmas songs, such as "There's a New Kid in Town" (written by Curly Putnam, Keith Whitley, and Don Cook). Joni Mitchell's "River," and Robert Earl Keen's "Merry Christmas from the Family" (a genuine O'Connoresque short story), these songs avoid the overt attempts at novelty hits and wearying retreads of "Twelve Days of Christmas."

I also face the problem during the holidays of hearing so-so versions of legendary songs so that we wonder how anyone could have considered them good ideas. To be fair, every once in a while, someone will record a familiar song in such a way that it comes to rival a classic performance. For example, Bruce Springsteen's take of the Crystals' version of "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town" (John Frederick Coots and Haven Gillespie) has an expression of joy in it that trumps the preciousness of the more traditional arrangements. As derided as Bob Dylan's Christmas in the Heart has been in recent critiques, his version of "Must Be Santa" (William Fredericks and Hal Moore) makes the traditional arrangements of all the other songs on the album seem anemic by comparison. Unfortunately, given the sales imperatives of making new seasonal profit, all too often the newer versions of songs seem ill-judged at best (Stevie Nicks released a version of "Silent Night" that attempts a solemnity but manages somnolence--I am sorry, Ms. Nicks, I have followed your career since "Frozen Love," but I have to be honest), and malicious at worst (Winger's "funky" acoustic version of "Silent Night," which begins with a fine traditional approach but turns into the sonic equivalent to getting a beautifully wrapped Tupperware pasta steamer in a "dirty Santa" exchange). What promises to be "heavenly peace" does not always turn out to be so.

Honestly, I understand that there will be a wide variety of taste and experience in selecting Christmas music. Madonna's "Santa Baby" (Joan Javits and Philip Springer) is an amusing "material girl" take on Eartha Kitt's version, but I like them both because I know them both. My younger children like the novelty songs, even the one where a drunken grandmother dies by reindeer hooves. And, frankly, there are times when I could hear Sarah McLachlan sing just about anything, so when she offers variations of "What Child Is This?" I go along. Still, I find some solace in selecting recordings and playing them rather than risking whatever might show up on the radio, and I dread what I might encounter in the store public address systems.

I am still looking, though, and finding treasures. Just recently, Sting released If on a Winter's Night . . . and I found on it versions of "Gabriel's Message" and "Cherry Tree Carol" that illuminate the lyrics. When Emmylou Harris released an expanded version of Light of the Stable, I was pleased to find yet another version of "Cherry Tree Carol" there. And, a couple of years ago, I found on James Taylor's A Christmas Album "Some Children See Him" (Wihla Hutson and Alred Burt), a song I remembered from my boyhood. But it seems, at least to me, that some of these songs have been performed for the joy of recording them. No one sings "The Cherry Carol," particularly in our political/social climate, expecting a hit.