Bing Crosby - Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas is probably one of the best Christmas albums ever.

This is a weird one to date, but the version I found in the bin is DECCA DL-8128 and is a mono recording, likely released in 1955.

Christmas and Bing are pretty intertwined at my house. Invariably I'll make the family watch Holiday Inn or White Christmas, often both. Then we'll make a point of pulling out the Father Chuck O'Malley movies.

As a kid I remember watching the TV special where old Bing and young Mister Bowie sang their "Little Drummer Boy" duet. I remember distinctly plugging my ears when it was on. I thought it was horrible.

It would take decades for this opinion to soften - which it did, and now it is a favourite.

The vinyl may be labelled Microgroove unbreakable, but it wasn't immune to the ravages of time and poor care. It cleaned up reasonably well, but there's enough crackle here and there to pretend there's a nice fire in the hearth making the room feel cozy and warm.

Considering how big "White Christmas" was, it's no wonder everyone who decides to release a holiday record has to take a crack at it too.

Back in 1955, Guinness Book of Records referenced "White Christmas" as the best-selling single of all time. The Crosby version alone would sell over $50 million copies. Considering there are another 50 million covers out there, that's a lot of snow.

The album, though, is wisely called Merry Christmas, and over the course of the two sides Bing serenades and croons his way through the sacred and the contemporary. (I know it's all old now, but it was "new" once.)

Side two features The Andrews Sisters on three of the six tracks, and they're fantastic songs. "Jingle Bells" with its clever vocal delivery makes this version one of my favourite interpretations. It also never gets past the first verse.

It was years and years later I realized there was more to the song. Strange how a song about a horse in the snow has become synonymous with Christmas.

Mele Kalikimaka

Comments

Styx - Paradise Theater

Styx was hands down one of my favourite bands as a kid. They were a strange band, even back then. They were a hard rock band, almost progressive at times, who had a penchant for sucky ballads. I know there's a tendency for people to zero in on "Babe" as the song that killed the band's credibility. The roots go way back to almost the beginning when Styx released "Lady" on their second album. It showed a side to the band that needed to be kept in check, and for the most part the band kept things on a pretty tight leash. The band had been setting a gruelling pace, releasing an album a year (two in 1972) and by the time they released Paradise Theater (if I end up writing theatre later it's because that's how we spell it here) in 1981 they'd dropped ten albums in less than a decade. I snapped this up as soon as I saw it, and it became a fixture on my turntable. Like the band had announced on "Borrowed Time" from 1979's Cornerstone , ...

Billy Rankin - Growin' Up Too Fast

Growin' Up Too Fast was never widely released on CD (if at all), and it was one of the albums I really wanted to get back after a basement flood wiped out my vinyl collection in the '90s (when no one really gave a shit about records, and my insurance gave me a couple hundred bucks for an appraised $10,000 collection). Way back in 1984, my (dearly departed and greatly missed) buddy Dave let me borrow his cassette copy, which included a bonus track of "Get It On (Bang A Gong)." When I eventually bought the album, I didn't know it was a bonus track, or even what a bonus track was. If that sentence was hard to read, just go back and skim it. I'm sure you'll get the gist. I'd find out later Billy was an off-and-on-again member of Nazareth and wrote some absolutely killer songs for them. At the time, though, all I knew was this guy laid it out cold with the opening cut, "Baby Come Back," then proceeded to lay down one killer tune after another bef...

Garfield - Strange Streets

I'd seen this before in the bin, but kept flipping through the stacks. I'd see it a few more times, each time stopping to look at it a little more. There was something kind of cool about the cover where the stylized Celtic knot had the dotted yellow line - it was a strange street for sure. I pulled the record out of the jacket and I was struck by the centre image. There was the familiar Mercury label, the same one I'd seen a thousand times on BTO's Head On album. Well, I'd bought things based on odd associations before - like when I had to buy anything that Solid Rock Records released (this was generally a good thing) - so who knows, maybe this was a hidden gem. There weren't any real scratches or rash, just a lot of dirt and dust. It seemed to clean up okay, but we'll see how it goes. The album opens with the title track, and this wasn't straight-ahead pop or rock. It was leaning toward the progressive, but with a pop bent. Oddly enough, the vocals rem...

Old Enough to Forget

Search This Blog