It’s hard to believe that with my Christmas Song of the Day for December 31, not only has another month of these come to an end, but so has nine years’ worth on the Tim Neely Stuff blog (10 years if you include the one year I only did these on my Facebook page). I want to thank everyone who liked, commented, and shared these. If they have in any way enhanced your Christmas season, I am grateful. These continue to be a labor of love for me, and perhaps that love showed in some way.
For my Christmas Song of the Day for December 31, I present the 30th and last rewritten choice from 2014, thus bringing the total on Tim Neely Stuff to 279. Today, I present the last new Christmas song by one of the legends of holiday music – Perry Como. And it’s far more fascinating than I realized when I wrote about it in 2014.
At one time, I thought that “Mr. C,” as he was often called, was the first pop artist to release a Christmas album consisting entirely of new recordings. That album, Perry Como Sings Merry Christmas Music, was a four-record, eight-song set of 78s that was issued in 1946. Variations of this album remained in print for more than 40 years. I’ve continued to investigate my claim, and I now know that the four-record album ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas by Fred Waring and His Pennsylvanians, from 1942, was all-new. (The entire album was recorded over four days that July.) I do not know if there were any earlier Christmas albums that were not compilations of at least some prior recordings.
Como (1912-2001) also recorded three other full albums of Christmas music – in 1953, 1959 and 1968 – and numerous stand-alone seasonal singles. His biggest holiday hit was “(There’s No Place Like) Home for the Holidays,” which was a Top 10 single in the Christmas season of 1954 and is even more popular today in its re-recorded 1959 LP version with a slower arrangement and a different interlude.
By the 1970s, Como’s recorded output was slowing down; his last significant hit single was his version of Don McLean’s “And I Love You So” in 1973. Before he stopped recording entirely, he issued several more Christmas songs, the last of which came out in 1982 – “I Wish It Could Be Christmas Forever.” The song was popular enough at the time that his long-time label, RCA, put together an album of previously released seasonal songs to surround the one new track.
The song was written specifically for Como’s annual Christmas TV special in 1981, Perry Como’s French Canadian Christmas, which was filmed in the province of Quebec and aired in the U.S. by ABC on December 22 of that year. The 45, released about nine months later, was a completely different recording than in the special; Como would lip-sync to this version in his 1982 special Perry Como’s Christmas in Paris.
The music of “I Wish It Could Be Christmas Forever” was written by Nick Perito (1924-2005), who had been Como’s musical director since the mid-1960s. He also did work for many other artists, including Eydie Gorme, Peter Nero, Ray Charles (of the Ray Charles Singers, not Brother Ray), and the Carpenters. Perito was responsible in part for Como’s late-1960s to early-1970s renaissance, as he was arranger and conductor for the 1968 The Perry Como Christmas Album and the 1970 Top 10 hit “It’s Impossible,” among others.
The surprise is who wrote the lyrics – Richard Matheson (1926-2013). Yes, that Richard Matheson, most famous as a science fiction and fantasy writer. His works are legion; just a few are I Am Legend, which was adapted into three films with three different titles; What Dreams May Come; Duel; and 16 episodes of The Twilight Zone, including “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.” He occasionally dabbled in songwriting; “I Wish It Could Be Christmas Forever” is his best known.
Once every couple of Christmas seasons, a radio station will dig this one out of the archives, and a smile will come to my face. So it is indeed appropriate that I end my Christmas Song of the Day series for 2023 with that 1982 recording, “I Wish It Could Be Christmas Forever.” Because I do.
Here’s the version as released on the 45 and LP in 1982:
I could not find the original 1981 recording other than as part of the full-length Perry Como’s French Canadian Christmas, so here’s the entire show. “I Wish It Could Be Christmas Forever” starts around the 15-minute mark and lasts about two and a half minutes.
(A version of this entry was my Facebook-only Christmas Song of the Day for December 31, 2014.)
Neil Diamond (born 1941) was a relative latecomer to Christmas music. During his biggest hitmaking days, which ranged from 1966 to 1982, he stayed away from the subject of the holidays.
Very early in his career, when he was still mostly a songwriter, he composed a Christmas song, “Santa Santa,” which was recorded by The Rocky Fellers in time for the holiday season of 1962, but it was not a hit. That group eventually became known for their one hit, “Killer Joe,” which made the top 20 in 1963. Diamond, meanwhile, did not revisit Christmas until 1984. That newer song, which used to be on the radio all the time but has largely disappeared from the air, is my Christmas Song of the Day for December 30.
Coincidentally, Diamond’s career as a fixture on the pop charts was about to end. His 1982 hit “Heartlight” became his last Top 10 single (#4 Radio & Records, #5 Billboard, #10 Cash Box). But with the flowering of MTV and the resulting end of adult-contemporary dominance on Top 40 radio, Diamond stopped having hits except on lighter radio. His 1984 album Primitive only got to #35 on the Billboard LP chart, and none of its singles even made the top 40.
The third single from the album was “You Make It Feel Like Christmas.” In the song, which Diamond wrote and produced, he sings about how he and his love have made it despite everything. If the lyrics didn’t mention Christmas, it would thematically resemble Shania Twain’s later hit song “You’re Still the One,” but in this song, Diamond sings, “Let’s light up the tree, it’s Christmas Day.”
“You Make It Feel Like Christmas” didn’t make the pop charts, which was not unusual for a holiday song in 1984, but it did make the Adult Contemporary chart, peaking at #28 in Billboard and just missing the numbered part of the 25-position chart in Radio & Records.
Diamond’s slide on the charts would continue until 1992, when he would, for the first time in his career, record a Christmas album. The album made the top 10, his first to do so in 10 years. Since then, Diamond has made a total of four Christmas albums, plus two compilations and a live holiday disc. For his 1992 album, he re-recorded “You Make It Feel Like Christmas,” but the new version is 20 seconds shorter and has backing singers, which to me detract from the simplicity and beauty of the original.
I heard this song back before Christmas radio became a thing. As I didn’t know the song had been on a 45, I found a used copy of the Primitive LP just for this one song. I finally found a 45 in the early 2010s.
“You Make It Feel Like Christmas” used to be on holiday radio frequently. These days, I’m lucky to hear it at all. Part of me always hoped that there’d be someone in my life who made me feel like this, but that dream ended years ago.
Here is the 1984 original version.
For conparison’s sake, here’s the 1992 version, as (over)produced by Peter Asher.
When I lived in Wisconsin, I went to the Minneapolis-St. Paul area for Christmas almost every year from 1997 through 2010. I usually arrived on or just before Christmas Eve and left a few days later, before I could wear out my welcome. On one of my drives to the metropolis, I searched for Christmas music on the radio and found “The 24 Hours of Christmas” on a station called Cities 97 FM.
At the time, though it was owned by Clear Channel (later iHeart Radio), it was one of the least generic commercial stations in the U.S. The station did some very non-corporate things, including championing local artists, hosting exclusive in-studio live performances, and releasing an annual CD sampler for charity that, in most years, sold out within hours. (The last Cities 97 Sampler was released in 2018.)
The “24 Hours of Christmas” show, which ran from 6 p.m. December 24 to 6 p.m. December 25, was, in keeping with Cities 97’s diverse programming, the most wide-ranging assortment of both well-known and obscure holiday music one could hear in a day’s time. During some of my later visits to the Twin Cities, I went to bed with the radio on and a notebook by my side, just in case something really interesting came on. I’d jot down enough lyrics so I could Google them later, and some of these discoveries are now cherished favorites. Numerous Christmas Songs of the Day have come from those groggy listening sessions.
But one I heard for the first time in 2006 resisted my attempts to find it. I heard it twice during that 24-hour period, and the second time, I was able to grab a few more lines than I did the first time, but it was so obscure that the lyrics were nowhere on the Internet.
I finally decided to contact the station to see if they could help me, and about a month later, long after Christmas was forgotten, their program director contacted me with the answer. It took less than a week to confirm the PD’s finding, hunt down a copy, and add it to my Christmas music collection.
So what is this wonderfully obscure song, which is my Christmas Song of the Day for December 29?
It’s called “Family Christmas,” and the story of the artist who recorded this wistful, yet complex, song is now more complicated than the song itself.
First, the lyrics of “Family Christmas” seem to serve as a chronicle of a family gathering for the holiday, but there’s more going on. One of the ongoing themes is talk of “the family fate”; it’s not exactly clear what that is, but the singer’s sister somehow managed to change it. Mixed in with that are some salient observations: “Mother liked it better when the house was loud” is certainly something to which some empty-nesters can relate. There also are lines about kids getting up early when their parents would rather not. There’s so much more to the four-minute-long song, and amazingly, the lyrics still aren’t online.
Maybe it’s because I first heard it at Christmas in 2006, a time when I was still recovering from the breakup of my first serious relationship nine months earlier, but “Family Christmas” often will make me tear up, even now.
The song was released in 2002 on a four-song EP called West by up-and-coming talent Lizzie West (born 1973). She got some early attention from alt-rock and college radio, which is likely how Cities 97 remembered her four-song EP and programmed its Christmas song.
Born Elizabeth Westergaard, she dabbled in acting, writing, and poetry before getting her first guitar. After some years of paying dues, West was signed to the mammoth Warner Bros. record label. As so often happens when a label can’t pigeonhole someone, Warners had no idea what to do with her. After the EP and one full-length album, West got off the major-label treadmill.
She married a performer named Matt Bua, who used the stage name “Baba Buffalo.” They had two daughters, and today, they live in the Catskills of New York. Here’s where things get strange: Some years ago, she retired the “Lizzie West” persona and created a new one that she calls “Cassidy A. Maze.” At least on the “Cassidy” website, she has a section dedicated to what she calls “the legend of Lizzie West,” so she hasn’t completely disavowed those years. As one of her many activities, she helps people create their own realities rather than having one imposed upon them.
The former West’s wonderful Christmas song is so little known (sadly) that, as I post this, it has maybe 1,000 views even though it’s been online for almost nine years. Introducing, as my Christmas Song of the Day for December 29, “Family Christmas” by Lizzie West.
(A version of this entry was my Facebook-only Christmas Song of the Day for December 27, 2014.)
My Christmas Song of the Day for December 28 is a favorite of mine, not merely because I like it. But I also played a role in getting a 45 rpm single of this song released in the United States – the only single of his to make such an appearance after 1988 – and so I have a softer spot for it than usual.
Before I get to that story, first let me introduce you to the song and its artist – “Mistletoe and Wine” by Cliff Richard.
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Richard (born 1940) is one of the most successful artists in the history of the United Kingdom, said to be third in all-time sales behind only the Beatles and Elvis Presley. Putting him a step above both of them is his sheer longevity; he had #1 hits with new recordings in five straight decades, and he had a top-10 hit in the UK as recently as 2008.
In the United States, it’s a very different story. Though Richard had Top 40 hits in four different decades, he had only one period of sustained success, from roughly 1979 to 1982.
In the UK, for most of his career, Richard was on a label affiliated with EMI – UK Columbia from 1958-1972, then EMI from 1973 forward. In the States, EMI’s American label, Capitol, released two early Richard singles and, after they sold very poorly, chose not to release any more. From there, Richard was on a cornucopia of labels in the States, some for a reasonable length of time (ABC-Paramount, Epic) and others for one or two singles (Dot, Big Top, Monument). In the process, more than half his UK hits were never released in the U.S.
After a three-year hiatus from having anything released Stateside, Elton John came to the rescue. He obtained Richard’s American rights for his own Rocket Records label in 1976; the second single released under this arrangement, “Devil Woman,” became Cliff’s first U.S. Top 10 hit, 18 years after his first single. Curiously, it’s the only one of his singles released in both places to peak higher in the United States (#6 in Billboard) than in the United Kingdom (#9 on the Official Chart)!
No more immediate hits followed, and Richard fell into a slump even in the UK for a couple years. Then “We Don’t Talk Anymore” came out in late 1979. It became his biggest worldwide hit, making the top 10 in numerous countries, including in the U.S., where Capitol decided to get back his rights and put him on the EMI America label. For the next five years, Richard’s music came out fairly consistently in the States, but the hits became smaller, and EMI America stopped releasing his music after 1984. Except for one 45 on Polydor in 1986 and two on the tiny Striped Horse label in 1988, that was basically it for Cliff in America.
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Richard was no stranger to Christmas music when he recorded “Mistletoe and Wine.” Back in 1967, he had a five-song EP of hymns entitled Carol Singers; at the same time, he made a version of “Sweet Little Jesus Boy,” which actually came out as a B-side in the United States on the Uni label in 1968.
In 1987, Richard released the self-penned “Another Christmas Day,” which was relegated to a B-side in England (and not released at all in the United States). Little could he know at the time that one of his biggest hits ever would be the next Christmas song he recorded.
“Mistletoe and Wine” had a fairly long gestation period. Its composers, Jeremy Paul (1939-2011), Leslie Stewart (born 1949), and Keith Strachan (born 1944), wrote it in 1976 for a musical called Scraps, which was based on the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale The Little Match Girl and was first performed that year at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, London. In a 2008 interview with the BBC, Paul said that the song was originally meant differently than how it came out: “We wanted a satirical Christmas carol when the little match girl is being kicked away into the snow by the unfeeling middle classes in a Dickensian setting.”
Everything changed when HTV, a former UK television network, decided to produce the play for television in 1987. The name of Scraps was changed to its inspiration, The Little Match Girl; among its stars were Roger Daltrey and Twiggy. In this version of the play, “Mistletoe and Wine,” as sung by Twiggy, who played the town prostitute, became a lusty pub sing-along.
Meanwhile, Paul said in his 2008 interview that the show’s director, Michael Custance, moved into a new home that happened to be next door to a former roadie for Richard. The roadie heard the song and thought it would be a good fit for Sir Cliff.
After some lyrical changes that the songwriters approved, Richard recorded it over a four-day period in June and July 1988. When released that November, “Mistletoe and Wine” became the coveted Christmas #1 single; it spent four weeks at the top and sold more than 750,000 copies.
“The moral is, never throw out your old songs.” Paul said in 2008. “We were absolutely overwhelmed by it. We didn’t particularly, the three of us co-writers, at that point, understand the power of Cliff’s world.”
Though it charted only one more time in the UK, “Mistletoe and Wine” has become a holiday standard, and royalties from the song provided, or still provide, the composers a nice supplementary income.
At the time, the song was not released in the United States. Striped Horse, which had released the two Richard singles immediately before it, was not interested, and neither was anyone else.
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I’m pretty sure it was in 1993, either the week before or the week after Thanksgiving, that I was visiting a sister who lived in Grand Rapids, Michigan. While I was there, I found myself in a music store with used CDs, and I bought a UK import on the EMI label entitled It’s Christmas Time. This was my first exposure to the world of British holiday classics, almost all of which were unknown in the United States. One of the tracks on this CD was “Mistletoe and Wine.”
Fast forward four years, to 1997.
First, some background. Capitol and its other U.S. labels had infamously discontinued routinely releasing singles as 45s in the second half of 1989. Even though the market for vinyl singles was shrinking, it was not yet nonexistent, and this was not a popular decision, especially among jukebox operators and distributors.
After a successful test in 1991, CEMA (later EMI-Capitol) Special Markets in March 1992 began releasing periodic sets of 45s, mostly current, but sometimes oldies. All of these, for legal reasons, stated in bold print at 9 o’clock on the labels, “FOR JUKEBOXES ONLY!” Anyone who had access to stores or mail-order providers could buy them, not merely the jukebox trade, though that was the largest part of the buying audience. When 45 rpm jukeboxes were mostly replaced by CD boxes, the market began to dwindle, and Capitol discontinued the jukebox series in early 2002. But before then, the special-markets division had released hundreds and hundreds of hits, and misses, on 45s.
As part of the jukebox series, CEMA issued a set of Christmas singles every November starting in 1992. Many times, they were from new releases, but older songs were also included. Sometimes, they were issued on red or green vinyl instead of the usual black. But by 1997, they were running out of obvious back catalog.
In 1997, I had been working with Goldmine magazine for two years, and the first edition of the Goldmine Standard Catalog of American Records was still a year away from completion. In the interim, I put together some smaller books that built upon each other and made the mammoth Standard Catalog less imposing when it came time to unleash it upon an unsuspecting world.
One of the projects was 1997’s Goldmine Christmas Record Price Guide. In putting that book together, I did extensive research into record labels’ back catalogs of 45s to see what Christmas singles they had released over the years. By that time, through one of my friends in the shrinking world of new 45 rpm record dealers, I was put in contact with EMI-Capitol Special Markets. In one of my conversations with the A&R person responsible for the “for jukeboxes only” 45 rpm series, the subject of back-catalog Christmas music came up. I promptly told him of the rich heritage of Capitol’s Christmas 45 catalog. Many of the titles I suggested to him were re-released on 7-inch that holiday season, some of them for the first time since their original release.
As part of my conversation with EMI-Capitol, I dropped the names of two songs on the aforementioned It’s Christmas Time to which I presumed that the label owned U.S. rights, just to see if they could clear them for U.S. release. They were “December Will Be Magic Again” by Kate Bush and “Mistletoe and Wine.” I was told, “The answer will probably be no, but I’ll ask.” On a related note, Special Markets had been having problems all of 1997 clearing any UK titles, which is why only one Spice Girls 45 (“Wannabe”) was issued here, as well as none of Paul McCartney’s singles from Flaming Pie, which made both the A&R man and me even more skeptical.
The next time I spoke with him, I inquired about those two songs. He said that, as expected, he got an immediate thumbs-down on the Kate Bush. But to his total surprise, he received instant approval on the Cliff Richard.
And that’s how “Mistletoe and Wine” (and, by extension, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” a 1991 album cut, which was used as the B-side and made its only appearance on a single anywhere in the world) were released in the States.
The U.S. 45 of “Mistletoe and Wine,” which I suggested for release in 1997, and EMI-Capitol Special Markets obliged
If I’d known more about Richard’s Christmas-music heritage at the time, I’d have suggested “Saviour’s Day,” another #1 in the UK, as the B-side. But this was just fine the way it came out.
If you made it this far, I ought to at least let you hear “Mistletoe and Wine.” I think it’s pretty good.
In recent years, for the first time since, well, the first music charts were published, Americans actually care about what songs get to #1 during the weeks leading to, and shortly after, Christmas. Almost all that attention is because, since the mid to late 2010s, the Billboard Hot 100 has allowed older holiday songs to re-enter the charts every year as long as they earn enough chart points to make the top 50 of the Hot 100. It was a big deal when Brenda Lee’s 1958 version of “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” 65 years after it was released, finally hit #1 for two weeks in early December 2023.
Though almost nothing else about the chart is like it was in the good old days, until 1963 Billboard allowed Christmas hits from past years to return to the charts if sales and/or airplay warranted. Yet another measure of its enduring popularity is that “White Christmas” by Bing Crosby made a Billboard pop chart 19 of the 21 years from 1942 through 1962, and it still returns to the Hot 100 to this day.
Starting in 1963, Billboard shunted almost every Christmas song to its own chart separate from the Hot 100. And even when it finally allowed holiday music back on the Hot 100 in 1973, older hits were still prohibited. Though there were other reasons as well, including airplay’s dominance as sales of singles began a long, steady decline, the Christmas season became the least important chart period of the year. There was so little action that Billboard, from 1976 through 1991, “froze” its charts during the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day. During that time, radio airplay was dominated by holiday music and year-end retrospectives, and no one outside the industry really cared what was #1.
Meanwhile, in England, the Christmas #1 Single became one of the nation’s great obsessions. Every year, it’s a competition to see which hit, new or old, seasonal or otherwise, manages to snag the top spot during Christmas week. One of the plotlines in the 2003 film Love Actually involves an aging rocker’s cynical attempt to create a UK Christmas #1 song to eclipse the latest boy-band phenomenon; this scenario would have meant little to Americans, but the filmmakers made U.S. audiences care anyway.
Though the UK has had charts since 1952, the 1973 success of my Christmas Song of the Day for December 27 is said to have started Britain’s fascination with the annual Christmas #1.
At the time, the group Slade was little-known in the U.S. They were one of the most popular purveyors of what became known as “glam,” which was, at best, a minor chart presence in the States. During the band’s biggest years in the UK (1972-73), Slade’s biggest American hit, such as it was, depended on which music paper you trusted most. “Mama Weer All Crazee Now” peaked at #60 in Cash Box; “Cum On Feel the Noize” got to #63 in Record World; and “Gudbuy T’Jane” was their best peaking hit in Billboard at #68. (This was the only Slade song I heard on the radio in the Philadelphia area.) But in England, no one was hotter. In 1973, two of their singles, the aforementioned “Noize” and “Skweeze Me Pleeze Me,” debuted at #1 on the charts – the first to accomplish that feat since the Beatles.
As a way to cap their milestone year, their manager, Chas Chandler, suggested that the band write and record a Christmas song, when this still wasn’t much of a thing among British artists. The chorus’s melody came from an incomplete song that band member Noddy Holder wrote in 1967, “Buy Me a Rocking Chair.” Jim Lea, who co-wrote most of Slade’s hits, came up with the first lyric while taking a shower; Holder completed the words later. The song was recorded at the Record Plant in New York, and the band used a stairwell to get the ambience it wanted on the vocals.
The result was “Merry Xmas Everybody,” which became a huge hit; it spent five weeks at #1 in England and was still on the charts in February 1974. Coincidentally, two other major British artists of the era, Wizzard (“I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday”) and Elton John (“Step Into Christmas”), decided to release Christmas singles in 1973, and the chart battle among the three garnered so much attention that, ever since, the UK has cared intensely about the Christmas #1 Single.
Demand for “Merry Xmas Everybody” was so high that pressing plants in the UK couldn’t fulfill it. Tens of thousands of copies were pressed in the United States and exported.
A copy of “Merry Xmas Everybody” pressed in the United States for export (note the “Made in U.S.A.” under the word “Polydor”). (Credit: 45cat)
In the time since, it has re-entered the British singles chart in 28 different years, including every year since 2006, and it’s considered one of the country’s modern classics.
Meanwhile, Slade’s U.S. record label, Warner Bros., assigned a catalog number to “Merry Xmas Everybody,” (Warner Bros. 7759), but there is no evidence to suggest that the single was released in 1973. I’m not sure when the song was finally issued for the first time in the U.S.; it might not have been until the 2004 best-of CD called Get Yer Boots On!
I first heard the song on the UK CD It’s Christmas Time, a compilation I picked up used around 1993 in a store in the Grand Rapids, Michigan area. I loved it immediately. In all the years since, I’ve rarely encountered it in my listening. This goes back some years now, but I remember walking through an outlet mall during the holiday season, and over whatever music system was coming through the speakers, I heard “Merry Xmas Everybody.” It caught me so much by surprise that I had to stop my window shopping long enough to soak it in.
So here it is, “Merry Xmas Everybody” by Slade. Rock on!
(A version of this entry was my Facebook-only Christmas Song of the Day for December 28, 2014.)
Odds are that your local all-holiday all-the-time station, which has been playing Christmas music since sometime between Halloween and Veterans Day, ditched the format like ripped-up wrapping paper as soon as the clock struck 12:01 a.m. today. As far as I’m concerned, I think Christmas music should still be on the air until at least New Year’s Eve, if not until the Feast of the Epiphany (January 6). You’ll still see Christmas Songs of the Day until the end of the year, my usual compromise between modern sensibilities and traditional ones.
So what have I dug up as my Christmas Song of the Day for December 26? Believe it or not, it’s by a group that gets as much airplay for its Christmas music as just about anyone else. But this is a truly beautiful original that rarely gets played and ought to get more attention.
Mannheim Steamroller was the brainchild of two men, Louis F. “Chip” Davis (born 1947) and Jackson Berkey (born 1942). Both accomplished musicians, they met when they were members of an early-1970s touring version of the Norman Luboff Choir. They became fast friends, and when Davis got a position with Omaha, Nebraska-based advertising agency Bozell & Jacobs as a jingle writer, Berkey followed along.
In 1973, Bozell & Jacobs got the account for Old Home Bread, which was baked by Metz Bakery of Sioux City, Iowa. An art director for the agency, Bill Fries, came up with a concept for the ad campaign, which involved deliveries to a fictional restaurant called the Old Home Filler-Up and Keep On a-Truckin’ Cafe. Most of the ads involved a waitress, Mavis, who was played by Jean McBride Capps, and a trucker played by Jim Finlayson who went by the name C.W. McCall (the McCall came from McCall’s magazine, and the C.W. stood for Country-Western). Davis wrote a jingle, which had the same name as the fictional eatery, for the campaign, which was sung by Fries. The ad series was so compelling that it won a Clio Award, advertising’s equivalent to the Oscars or Grammys.
Meanwhile, Davis moonlighted with Berkey on a musical concept they called “18th century rock.” The piano parts that Davis was writing for the project were far beyond his capabilities as a keyboardist, which is where Berkey came in. The duo put together a demo tape of their early results, but no established label seemed interested. So, in 1974, Davis founded his own label he called American Gramaphone, an intentionally misspelled take-off on the German classical label Deutsche Grammaphon. He planned to use it for his and Berkey’s music, which by 1974 was given the name Mannheim Steamroller, a take-off on the “Mannheim Roller,” a style of ascending arpeggio named for the Mannheim school, a style of music popular in the 18th century.
Though American Gramaphone made its name through LPs, its first five releases were all seven-inch singles. The lowest-numbered 45, AG 351, was Davis’ jingle, lengthened to a full song and sung by Fries using the C.W. McCall name. It started to get attention in the Midwest, and knowing he didn’t have the ability, or money, to finance a big hit song at that time, Davis sold the master to MGM Records. “Old Home Filler-Up an’ Keep On a-Truckin’ Cafe” became a reasonably sized national hit, peaking at #52 in Cash Box, #53 in Record World, and #54 in Billboard. It also was a substantial country hit, peaking at #14 in Cash Box, #17 in Record World, and #19 in Billboard.
The infusion of cash from the sale of the master, and the songwriting and publishing royalties he retained, allowed Davis to release the first Mannheim Steamroller album, Fresh Aire, in 1975. (It had been preceded by a single, “Pass the Keg,” in 1974.) Meanwhile, Fries, as McCall, signed with MGM, and Davis co-wrote his music. In late 1975, they hit the jackpot: The second single from the album Black Bear Road, a trucking novelty called “Convoy,” became a massive #1 hit on both the pop and country charts. Davis’ combined windfall meant he never again had to worry about the long-term viability of American Gramaphone, even after the McCall novelty wore off.
Six Fresh Aire albums came out between 1975 and 1983. None sold well enough to chart, but they became favorites among audiophiles and hi-fi shops. Everything changed, though, when Mannheim Steamroller released Mannheim Steamroller Christmas in 1984. Its modern, often innovative, arrangements of holiday classics, including the single “Deck the Halls,” helped to revitalize the U.S. Christmas-music market, which had been moribund for years.
A second holiday album, A Fresh Aire Christmas, followed in 1988, and then a third, Christmas in the Aire, in 1995. It is that third album where the Christmas Song of the Day for December 26 can be found.
“Christmas Lullaby” is a gorgeous instrumental, a rare Mannheim Steamroller original, though influenced by Johannes Brahms’ famous lullaby. Upon the release of the retrospective album 30/40 in 2014, Davis told of the inspiration for the song:
“My oldest daughter, Kelly Lynn Davis … when she was little, I wrote a song for her called ‘The Christmas Lullaby.’ And I remembered when she was about four years old how she’d look on Christmas night after we’d opened the presents, and that sweet, happy little look on their faces, you know, the little ones, and what they think, what’s going through their minds, you know, what are they dreaming about? So I wrote a lullaby just for Kelly.”
In the liner notes of Christmas in the Aire, Davis, in his musings on “Christmas Lullaby,” wrote a four-line poem that ended with the words “Santa Claus, has gone home / But your presents are here.”
Though he didn’t use that couplet, longtime American Gramaphone engineer Ed Wilson wrote a more complete lyric for “Christmas Lullaby,” and Davis got Olivia Newton-John (1948-2022) to sing it on the 2007 album Christmas Song. But I still prefer the 1995 instrumental.
Here’s “Christmas Lullaby,” wordless:
And here’s the vocal version with Olivia Newton-John:
Merry Christmas! I hope Santa was good to you and that, if it’s what you do, you found meaning in a church service celebrating the birth of Christ. I also hope that these Christmas Songs of the Day have added to your holiday season. (Don’t forget that they continue through the end of the year.)
For December 25, the Christmas Song of the Day is from the early part of the 20th century. It has beautiful lyrics; I’ve heard it sung solo by sopranos, tenors, and basses; I’ve heard it done by choruses. But the first time I heard the song – and frankly, the most familiar version to me – is an instrumental; in addition to its wonderful words, it has a gorgeous melody with some interesting chord changes.
And because of its title, it’s assumed to be an Italian song, as the original composition has Italian lyrics, but it was actually written in the United States, as best as I can determine.
Pietro Yon (1886-1943) was born in Settimo Vitone, near the city of Turin, Italy. Already at the age of six, he was studying organ; when he graduated from the Academy of St. Cecilia in Rome, he became assistant organist at St. Peter’s in the Vatican, a position he held from 1905 to 1907. He was not yet 21.
In 1907, Father John B. Young, the pastor at St. Francis Xavier Church in Manhattan, was in the Vatican on a business trip when he heard Yon play. Impressed, the priest offered the organist a three-year contract to relocate to New York. The three years stretched to almost two decades; Yon more or less permanently remained in the United States and became an American citizen in 1921.
Yon’s activities and influence spread far beyond SFX. He would serve as organist at legendary tenor Enrico Caruso’s funeral in 1921; he made appearances on both NBC and CBS radio in that medium’s early years; he helped design the organ at Carnegie Hall; and he was named “Titular Organist of the Vatican,” a move largely seen as Rome’s way of trying to get Yon into a more prestigious church. It worked, as he eventually became organist and director of music at famed St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, a position he held until his death. He and his brother Constantino, who had preceded him in coming to the United States, started a conservatory in the city; among the many who trained under one or the other of the Yons was Cole Porter.
But Yon also was a composer. He wrote 21 settings for the Ordinary of the Mass (Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Benedictus, Agnus Dei) when it was still always in Latin; numerous other sacred works; and many other songs and concertos, mostly for organ, but also for piano, orchestra, and voice.
His best-known piece, however, is “Gesu Bambino” (Baby Jesus), which he wrote in 1917, most likely for the postlude of a Midnight Mass at St. Francis Xavier, but that’s more an educated guess rather than based on documentary evidence. An early piece of piano sheet music, published in 1923, calls the melody a “pastorale” (music meant to evoke a rural setting, usually moderate to slow in tempo, and often written in 6/8, 9/8, or 12/8 time; “Gesu Bambino” is in 12/8) and contains the dedication “Most respectfully inscribed to the Academy and College of Mount St. Vincent on the Hudson,” which is where Pietro’s brother Constantino taught. The words were in Italian, and each verse concluded with the chorus of “Adeste Fideles” sung in Latin (Venite adoremus, Dominum).
Frederick Martens (1874-1932) put English lyrics to Yon’s melody in the early 1920s. The copyright date is 1924, but he may have written them earlier. Martens was an author, journalist, translator, and occasional composer from New Jersey who must have heard “Gesu Bambino” and decided it needed an English transliteration. In other words, his lyrics are not an exact translation, but fit the meter of the song and keep the spirit of the original. Martens’ work helped to popularize the song throughout the United States.
The recording history of “Gesu Bambino” isn’t clear. Possibly the first to record it was Italian tenor Giovanni Martinelli (1885-1969), a regular at the Metropolitan Opera, who waxed it for Victor in 1920, but this version is not known to survive (we know about it from session ledgers). He returned to it in 1926; this version, in English and Latin, was released and has appeared on some compilations of vintage Christmas recordings. Another early version was recorded by a group called Collegiate Choir for the Brunswick label in 1923 and again in 1927; the former is interesting because it uses the English title “The Infant Jesus” and gives co-credit to Martens a year before the copyright date on the English version. Some other known early recordings were by Lillian Hunsicker in 1927 for Victor, Amy Elkerman in 1927 for Edison, and Francesca Cuci in 1928 for Okeh. Because of the length of the song and the limitations of recording technology at the time, these versions all were edited in some way.
In all the years since, it has been recorded well over 100 times, in Italian, English, and other languages (I’ve seen it in French and in all Latin), by popular and classical singers, by a cappella choirs, by accompanied choirs, and as an instrumental. Here are several versions of “Gesu Bambino” to, I hope, add to your Christmas Day.
First, the released 1926 recording by Giovanni Martinelli with a female chorus (the verses are in heavily accented English):
Next, the Italian version with Latin chorus, sung by Luciano Pavarotti (1935-2007) with the Wandsworth School Boys Choir on his 1976 album O Holy Night:
Here’s the English version, by American soprano Jessye Norman (1945-2019) with the Ambrosian Singers, from her 1981 album Sacred Songs:
Finally, the first version I remember hearing many years ago, the Percy Faith (1908-1976) instrumental with wordless vocals, from his 1958 album Hallelujah! (reissued in 1965 as Music of Christmas, Volume 2):
By the way, there is a different, even more obscure, song called “Caro Gesu Bambino” (“Dear Baby Jesus”), which is a more recent composition (copyright 1960). I’ve been known to confuse the two in the past.
“Christmas Eve (Sarajevo 12/24)” is one of the most frequently played Christmas songs on radio and on streaming services. By that standard, you’d think it would not be a candidate as a Christmas Song of the Day. But it has a fascinating, convoluted, and at times tragic story, thus I’ve selected it for December 24.
Oh yes, millions of people have heard it and don’t even know it has a formal title. They just know it as that instrumental hard-rock / metal medley of “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” and what most Americans call “Carol of the Bells” (the Ukrainian melody “Shchedryk”). You are likely now thinking, “Ahh! I know that after all!”
Notice that I haven’t stated who recorded “Christmas Eve (Sarajevo 12/24)” yet. That is part of the story, too, as the identical recording was credited to two different bands a year apart. So let’s dive in, shall we?
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In the years 1989-90, the world changed in ways unseen since the aftermath of World War II. Almost as if an unseen force had started dominoes falling, the Soviet Union and the rest of Eastern Europe suddenly began to loosen the shackles of authoritarianism and Communism. The Berlin Wall fell; the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania declared their independence from the USSR; Romania overthrew a tyrant; Czechoslovakia peaceably broke into two separate republics. And that’s just the Reader’s Digest version.
But not all the tumult was peaceful. The former Republic of Yugoslavia found itself racked by war in the early 1990s, the final result of which was its breakup into at least six separate new countries. Former neighbors were battling each other, with untold death and destruction. One of the harder hit cities was Sarajevo, now the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina; less than a decade earlier, it had shown itself off to the world as the host of the 1984 Winter Olympics, but now, much of the city’s splendor was either in ruins or under siege, or both.
These horrific events inspired the American metal band Savatage to release a concept album entitled Dead Winter Dead, which came out in 1995. The hype sticker on the CD jewel case called it “a heart wrenching rock opera inspired by real-life events in Sarajevo.”
Dead Winter Dead follows two residents, Serjian and Katrina, who are on opposite sides of the fighting. At first suckered in by the so-called glory of war, they eventually becone disillusioned as they see the results of what they have wrought. Meanwhile, an old man who left Yugoslavia years before has returned to his homeland, only to see his city in ruins. He says a prayer as the first sign of winter arrives, but rather than retreat to shelter when bombs start falling, he stands on the rubble of an old fountain, pulls out his cello, and starts playing Mozart music. This goes on for days, and both Serjian and Katrina separately are moved by the music from their different outposts.
From the synopsis of Dead Winter Dead included in the CD liner notes:
“Sitting in his bunker on December 24th, [Serjian] listens to the sounds of Christmas carols from the old cello player mingling with the sounds of war. Katrina, on the other side of the battlefield, is also listening. It had just stopped snowing and the clouds had given way to reveal a beautiful star-filled sky, when suddenly the cello player’s music abruptly ceases. Fearing the worst, Serjian and Katrina both do something quite foolish and from their respective sides, start to make their way across no man’s land toward the town square. Arriving at the exact same moment, they see one another. Instinctively realizing they are both there for the same reason, they do not start to fight but instead, together walk slowly to the fountain. There they find the old man lying dead in the snow, his face covered with blood, his cello lying smashed and broken by his side.”
Read this while listening to “Christmas Eve (Sarajevo 12/24),” and it gives a whole new poignancy to the familiar recording, which is almost always heard apart from its original context.
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The “old man playing his cello amidst the destruction of war” was not a total figment of the imagination. He was based on a real Sarajevo musician, Vedran Smailovic, who was not elderly, but in his 30s at the time. After a mortar round had killed 22 people waiting for food in a downtown Sarajevo marketplace, Smailovic took his cello to the ruined location and played classical music for 22 straight days, most notably Albinoni’s “Adagio in G Minor.”
Western journalists covering the war found out about this beauty in the midst of chaos and gave him his 15 minutes of fame. Fortunately, unlike the fictionalized cellist in Dead Winter Dead, Smailovic (born 1956) was able to escape Sarajevo and, at last report, was living in Northern Ireland, still playing and composing.
On the actual “Christmas Eve (Sarajevo 12/24)” recording, the cello is played by Mary Wooten, a classical string musician who has played on dozens of pop albums.
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At the time Dead Winter Dead was recorded, Savatage was in the midst of its own chaos – certainly not on the level of the war-torn Balkans, but tumultuous nonetheless.
Brothers Criss (1963-1993) and Jon (born 1959) Oliva formed a band they called Avatar in 1979. Discovering that another band with the same name was threatening legal action, they changed the name of the band to Savatage shortly before their first album was released in 1983. (I always liked the name Savatage, because it’s similar to “sabotage,” which sounds like a great name for a metal band.)
In the late 1980s, three consecutive Savatage albums made the lower reaches of the Billboard charts, with the 1987 album Hall of the Mountain King peaking highest at #116. This was also important because it was the first Savatage album produced by Paul O’Neill (1956-2017), who would shape the future of the band in profound ways. But sales started to fall off as the 1990s began, and their label, Atlantic, started to think about dropping the band. Jon Oliva left Savatage to concentrate on side projects, including a never-produced Broadway play, though he planned to continue writing for the band.
Then tragedy struck: Criss Oliva was killed by a drunk driver on October 17, 1993. Jon wanted to end Savatage after that, but as a tribute to his younger brother, he kept the band going. Meanwhile, the group’s membership was in a near constant state of flux. By the time Dead Winter Dead was recorded in 1995, Jon was back in the band as keyboardist and occasional vocalist; none of the other musicians on the album were original Savatage members.
Except for “Christmas Eve (Sarajevo 12/24),” all the songs on the album were composed by Jon Oliva and O’Neill. On that song, keyboardist Robert Kinkel also received a composing credit. Technically, none of the three wrote the public-domain melodies that form its basis, but they did arrange them into something unique.
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Dead Winter Dead became the fourth consecutive Savatage studio album not to make the main Billboard Top 200 album chart. Atlantic released three singles to radio stations, none of which made the mainstream rock charts.
On the first of these, the title song “Dead Winter Dead,” Atlantic included “Christmas Eve (Sarajevo 12/24)” as a bonus track, and something most peculiar for a metal band happened. The holiday song began to get airplay, not on rock stations, but on Top 40 and adult-contemporary stations. As 1995 turned into 1996, this instrumental that sounded nothing like anything on the radio at the time got to #65 on the Billboard Hot 100 Airplay chart and #34 on the Billboard AC chart.
Inspired by both this and by the uninspiring sales of Dead Winter Dead, O’Neill, Oliva, Kinkel, and guitarist Al Pitrelli formed a side project to make more concept albums, three of which were to be Christmas tales. Inspired by a trip he made to the Soviet Union in the 1980s and by the railway that linked the interior of the nation, O’Neill named the new group Trans-Siberian Orchestra.
When the “new” group released its first album, Christmas Eve and Other Stories, in 1996, it included the exact same recording of “Christmas Eve (Sarajevo 12/24)” as had appeared on the Savatage Dead Winter Dead album. This time, the song was issued to radio as if it were brand-new; the Lava label, the Atlantic subsidiary that was home to TSO, even issued it as a promotional 12-inch single in addition to a CD single. This time, the slightly retitled “Christmas Eve / Sarajevo 12/24” got to #49 on the Billboard Hot 100 Airplay chart in both the 1996 and 1997 holiday seasons, and it finally made the Mainstream Rock chart in 1997-98, peaking at #29.
A favorite story about this song after it was re-assigned to the TSO catalog: In the Wild West era of file sharing, circa 1999, the group wasn’t well known, so some unscrupulous uploaders claimed it was a Christmas song by Metallica!
Today, Trans-Siberian Orchestra is a phenomenon, with two different touring groups on the road every holiday season and periodic new albums, even without their co-founder O’Neill, who died in 2017. And it all started with a cello player who refused to surrender his beautiful music to the ugliness of war.
Today, when one thinks of a song called “Christmas Time Is Here,” one usually thinks of the charming, yet melancholy, song fron A Charlie Brown Christmas. It’s regularly played on the radio today and is frequently covered. It has basically become a holiday standard.
But this wasn’t always the case. Until 1988, when Vince Guaraldi’s soundtrack to A Chatlie Brown Christmas permanently returned to print and finally became the popular album it always deserved to be, the Guaraldi melody with Lee Mendelson’s lyrics was usually heard once a year, when the Charlie Brown special aired on television. For most of the years between 1965, when the album was first released, and 1988, the album was either out of print or really hard to find.
Thus the other “Christmas Time Is Here,” which used to be the better known one, is my Christmas Song of the Day for December 23.
Ray Parker Jr. (born 1954) already was making a name for himself as a session guitarist when he was still in high school. He gained steady work for Holland-Dozier-Holland’s post-Motown labels, Hot Wax and Invictus, and was the rhythm guitarist on “Want Ads” by Honey Cone, a #1 hit in 1971. Parker also made acquaintance with Stevie Wonder and was the guitarist when Wonder opened for the Rolling Stones in 1972. That association made him an even more in-demand session player.
In 1974, he had his first hit as a songwriter, “You Got the Love” for Rufus Featuring Chaka Khan. He later claimed that he wrote “You Make Me Feel Like Dancing,” one of Leo Sayer’s biggest hits, but was cheated out of songwriting credit; it made him feel even worse when the song won a Grammy.
One he kept for himself was “Jack and Jill,” which became the first single when Parker formed a group called Raydio in 1977. The song made the top 10 on the pop charts in the spring of 1978. Raydio had another hit in 1979 with “You Can’t Change That.” In 1980, Parker changed the group’s name to “Ray Parker Jr. and Raydio”; that version had a Top 10 hit with “A Woman Needs Love (Just Like You Do)” in 1981.
With members of the group wanting to pursue other interests, Parker quietly broke up Raydio at the end of 1981 and started a solo career. His first single credited solely to himself, “The Other Woman,” became his biggest hit to that time, peaking at #2 in Cash Box and #4 in Billboard and Radio & Records. (It was #43 and climbing in the last issue of Record World, dated April 10, 1982.)
Near the end of 1982, Arista, Parker’s label, released his first Greatest Hits album. He recorded two new songs for that album; a third, recorded around the same time, was his holiday single, “Christmas Time Is Here.” This jaunty celebration of the season was barely released at the end of 1982 and didn’t chart, though I do remember hearing it on the radio a little bit at the time.
Two years later, in 1984, after Parker’s biggest and most enduring hit, “Ghostbusters,” Arista reissued “Christmas Time Is Here” as the B-side of the follow-up single, “Jamie,” which is where I had the song in my collection for a long time. Arista put both songs on the hastily compiled collection Chartbusters, issued in the fourth quarter of 1984 to capitalize on Parker’s big hit. It took me more than a decade to find the original 1982 edition of “Christmas Time Is Here.”
Thanks to the belated popularity of the Guaraldi song, this “Christmas Time Is Here” has largely vanished from the airwaves. But I’ll hear it every once in a great while.
One of England’s great traditions during the Christmas season is the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols. This service has been adapted worldwide, but the best known, and most heard, version comes from the Chapel at King’s College, Cambridge. First conducted there in 1918, the BBC began broadcasting this service in 1928 and has done so every year since except 1930, even during the height of World War II. Except in the COVID-19 year of 2020, when the service was pre-recorded with no congregation present, it still is heard worldwide on Christmas Eve live, often with a rerun on Christmas Day.
Every year since 1918, the opening carol of the King’s College version of Lessons and Carols has been Arthur Henry Mann’s arrangement of “Once in Royal David’s City.” This is the song with the opening lines: “Once in royal David’s city / Stood a lowly cattle shed.”
This leads into my Christmas Song of the Day for December 22.
Obviously, Ian Anderson (born 1947) of Jethro Tull was familiar with his country’s tradition. He took the first two lines of “Once in Royal David’s City,” made one word change in the third line (“where a mother held her baby” as opposed to the original “where a mother laid her baby”), and used it as a springboard for his commentary on what his fellow Brits had done to the Christmas season. Not that he himself wasn’t equally guilty; the very last, spoken, line, asks, “Hey, Santa, pass us that bottle, will ya?” (Contrary to popular belief, the original British and U.S. 45s do contain the spoken aside at the end.)
Originally titled “A Christmas Song,” this was the British B-side of the early Jethro Tull single “Love Story,” released in November 1968. The song wasn’t released in the U.S. until the Christmas season of 1972, when it appeared as one of many odds and sods on the two-record compilation album Living in the Past, for which the original mono single was mixed into stereo for the first time. With the slightly altered title of “Christmas Song,” it was, at the same time, issued as the B-side of the U.S. single of “Living in the Past.”
In the years since, Tull has done many songs relating to this time of the year, and in 2003, the group recorded an entire Christmas album that was generally well-received, including a re-recording of “Christmas Song.” But I always find myself going back to Ian Anderson’s first foray into seasonal music, which used to be a staple of FM rock stations, but my goodness, I can’t remember the last time I heard this on the radio. It also never appears on Christmas-themed various-artists sets, either. Here is the original version of “Christmas Song” by Jethro Tull.
(A version of this entry was my Facebook-only Christmas Song of the Day for December 21, 2014.)
Tim Neely Stuff 