Skip to main content

Eddy Arnold / Henry Mancini – Christmas With Eddy Arnold / Christmas With Henry Mancini

Happy New year, but Christmas isn't over yet. Although it's that weird space where you know the end is coming, and you hold on a little tighter, but it's a losing effort and the tree is starting to cover the floor in needles - it's almost time to get the boxes up from the basement - but not yet.

I figured getting two artists on one platter was reaching a little in terms of a marketing ploy, but I figured at least there was truth in advertising from the folks at RCA. I didn't have a lot of Eddie Arnold in my library other than a couple of his Christmas songs, which aren't on this collection so I'm coming in cold here so this will be journey of discovery. I love hearing new to me stuff.

While Henry Mancini is a known name to me, I don't know him for his Christmas music. He's known for some beautiful classics, but to me the "Peter Gunn" is worth all the marbles, and the cherry on top isn't "Moon River" - it's the Pink Panther theme. I know you're humming it in your head as you read this.

So here we have this 1974 compilation mashing up two artists into a surprisingly cohesive effort. I had initially thought this was going to be one side Eddie, one side Henry, and the powers that be wisely decided to mix the two together. Not quite alternating, but close enough to give this a sense of continuity.

"Jolly Old St. Nicholas" by Eddie Arnold opens the album, and calls to mind Perry Como (guess who I was listening to earlier?) and his songs on the first side are pretty nice. A few of his selections presented as Hymns, completed with the soap opera church organ. His version of "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day" with just the organ and backing choir is quite good. It shouldn't work, as I often get the giggles when I hear a church organ (it just calls to mind Monty Python and the naked organist portrayed by one of the two Terry's) At first I wasn't sure how I felt about the stripped down delivery, but I have to admit in contrast to the orchestration and choral songs presented by Henry Mancini they work as a counterpoint. It was more enjoyable than I expected it to be.

It's hard to put some of these bygone artists into perspective as they just seem like ghosts of Christmas past - but there was a time Eddie Arnold was a bona-fide big deal. Reading up on his career he sold over 85 million records during his career. Yeah, that's a lot. Mister Mancini was no slough either - he composed over 100 film scores, he won 20 Grammy Awards, and was nominated 72 times.

This may have been a marketing cash grab, but it was a thoughtful collection of good Christmas songs, and weaving Henry Mancini's orchestra and choir played really well off of Eddie Arnold's contributions - be they a full band arrangement, or simply accompanied by an organ and choir. 

All in all, this was a nice find and a solid addition to my Christmas collection.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Billy Rankin - Growin' Up Too Fast

Growin' Up Too Fast was never widely released on CD (if at all), and 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 that had a bonus track of " Get It On (Bang A Gong)" that when I bought the album 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. However, at the time all I knew was this guy laid it out cold with the first cut "Baby Come Back" and proceeded to lay down one killer tune after another and closed out the album (sans any...
Post a Comment
Read more

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, 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 , "Don...
Post a Comment
Read more

Gary Numan - The Pleasure Principle

"Cars" was really the only song I knew by Gary Numan. I knew the name of the album the song came from. Over the years bits and pieces of trivia are accumulated, but in terms of his music it was still distilled down to one song ...  It would be too easy to write Mr. Numan off as a one hit wonder, and I suppose in terms of actual chart hits this was his defining moment as a solo artist. Of course this really means nothing, as Gary Numan would drop an album a year pretty much through to the end of the '80s. He'd then slow down a little but continues to make music. While The Pleasure Principle was Gary Numan's debut solo release in '79, he actually cut his teeth on a couple of albums in a band called Tubeway Army, first with the band's self titled release in 1978, and then on Replicas that came out in April of '79. By the end of Tubeway Army's run most of the band would follow Gary into his solo career. Paul Gardiner who had been with Gary from the beg...
Post a Comment
Read more