Playlist:
* Make We Merry The Festival Singers of Canada :51
* Masters in this Hall Pete Seeger 1:30
* Golden Cradle Emmylou Harris and Nancy Ahern 2:10
* Santa Claus is Coming to Town The Sackville All Stars 3:13
* Deck the Halls Julie Andrews & the Andre Previn Orchestra 2:24
* Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer Ray Charles 3:55
Music notes:
Make We MerryThe Festival Singers of Canada (1954-1979) were a 32 voice professional choir based in Toronto led by music director Elmer Iseler. This short Christmas ditty was written sometime before 1536 by Richard Hill, Serjeant of the Cellar to King Henry VIII. We know that because Balliol College in Oxford still has Hill’s manuscript “commonplace book” – essentially a scrapbook and personal journal.
Its words describe the actual penalty that a gentry household’s Lord of Misrule could impose upon any lord or lady who did not contribute to the entertainment during the 12 day Christmastide season that began on Christmas day:
Make we mery, bothe more and lasseFor now ys the tyme of CrystymasLet no man come into this hall,Groom, page nor yet marshall,But that some sport he bring withall,For now is the time of Christëmas.
If that he say he cannot sing,Some other sport then let him bring,That it may please at this feasting,For now is the time of Christëmas.
If he say he can naught do,Then for my love ask him no mo’,But to the stocks then let him go,For now is the time of Christëmas.
Masters in this Hall is not as medieval as it sounds. It was written about 1860 by the textile and wallpaper designer, writer, medievalist and socialist activist William Morris. Morris, who is known mainly for his leadership of England’s Arts and Crafts movement, set his song to a 17th or 18th century folk melody from the Chartres area of Northern France.
He wrote this while he was still apprenticing to become an architect, at the urging of his fellow students. At that time the “keep Christmas” movement was in full force in England, and a major part of that movement was a yearning to return to the presumed good ol’ days of 16th century values (when everyone was thought to have lived a Christian life that included generosity to the poor.) Perhaps the most popular artistic work promoting that Victorian movement in our time is Charles Dickens’ ghost story A Christmas Carol which has been made into countless movies and TV shows. The atheist William Morris gave the nostalgic movement a socialist twist text by warning: “God has raiséd up the poor and castéd down the proud.”
The song is sung here by Pete Seeger who recorded it on his 1967 Folkways album Traditional Christmas Carols.
Golden Cradle This version of a traditional Irish lullaby is one of my favourite harmony songs from all of my collections – it doesn’t really fit into the flow of these selections from my 1997 Sampler, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave it out of this retrospective sampler of my samplers. Actually, it isn’t even a Christmas lullaby, but a lot of baby-smoothing songs slip onto Christmas albums unnoticed (just like general songs about wintertime also are often considered fair game for Christmas albums.) In this case it was on Emmylou Harris’ 1980 Light of the Stable album and she is accompanied in the duet by Nancy Ahern.
Santa Claus is Coming to Town This jazz selection is from Toronto-based Sackville Records’ 1986 album The Sackville All Star Christmas Record. I’m not really a jazz fan but when I first heard the album at a friend’s house I had to have it! But it was only available on CD, not vinyl. So I bit the bullet and bought a CD player and the album, and have never regretted it. The musicians are:
Ralph Earl Sutton – piano Jim Galloway – sax Milt Hinton – double bass Gus Johnson – drums
As for the song itself, it was written in 1932 by lyricist Haven Gillespie and musician John Frederick Coots. They were professional Tin Pan Alley songwriters who were definitely trying to write a commercial product. It was the first of a long string of hit Christmas songs written in the States by song-writing professionals. (There will be more about that in my Dec 13 posting.)
It took two years before Gillespie and Coots could get any major singer to perform it, but then (due to his wife Ida’s insistence) the very popular Eddie Cantor sang it on his radio show and it took off. But what really got this song embedded into our canon of “Christmas classics” were the post-war recordings by Bing Crosby & the Andrews Sisters, and Perry Como, and Frank Sinatra, and others. They all hit the pop charts with it when the baby boom generation (i.e., kids like me) became old enough to listen to the radio and learn how to use the family record player.
Deck the Halls This selection may surprise you because normally I totally avoid ones with the kind of overblown performance style that has become almost de rigueur for Christmas album recordings by big-name artists. But this is Julie Andrews! It comes from her 1967 album A Christmas Treasure. The arrangements and instrumental back-up are by Andre Previn and his orchestra, so the lush sound comes with the territory.
Christmas music scholars say that the the song is likely an authentic medieval song-dance, or at least descended from one. It was collected from Wales with welsh lyrics sometime before 1862 as a New Year’s song called Nos Galan. The late Christmas music historian William Studwell has this to say about Nos Galan’s origins:
“The dating of this song is difficult. The nonsense word repetition (Fa la la la la ..) is a popular device used in the Middle Ages. On the other hand, both words and music closely resemble songs of the English Renaissance (16th and early 17th centuries), particularly the madrigals that were so fashionable in sixteenth-century England. … We do know that by the eighteenth century the melody had traveled far enough to have been used by the great piano master Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in a duet for violin and piano. Overall, the few clues in the carol’s history and style suggest … sixteenth century.
The English words with which we are familiar are not a translation; they were written at that time by a Scottish musician named Thomas Oliphant. These English lyrics have likely been inadvertently frozen in time. Oliphant probably just included them to illustrate how the song could be used as a forfeiture game.
In Victorian times, when he wrote them, that style of song-game was very popular. The merrymakers danced in a ring. The first verse lines of the couplets (remembered or extemporized) would be sung out by dancers in turn. There was no storyline that verses were expected to follow, but the second line had to relate to the first and it had to rhyme. The "fa, la, la" refrain would be sung by all the other dancers or played by a musician, thus giving the next participant time to invent their line. When their turn came, those who failed to sing an acceptable line in time to the rhythm of the song had to withdraw. The final survivor won the game.
Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer Speaking of over-the-top production values, this selection is from Ray Charles’s 1985 album The Spirit of Christmas. Even though it was written by tunesmith Johnny Marks specifically for my early-boomer generation of youngsters I have have never really liked song. But in spite of that, and everything I say about how I feel about overblown mainstream Christmas music, I do like this interpretation of ne of the most famous children’s Christmas songs.
The story behind both Rudolph and the song is fairly complicated, and some aspects of the tale are quite sad so I won’t go into it now. You’ll be able to read about it in an essay called The True History of Santa Claus that I will include as a special treat at the end of my my December 6 notes.
Sampler-making recollections
1997 brought big changes to my Christmas music project. Some of my albums were getting to be rather picked over of Nativity-related songs but I had an abundance of good secular songs left to choose from. So I decided to make that the year’s focus.
Also, I was beginning recognize that I was enjoying this pre-Christmas task and wanted to make it an annual activity. But to do so I would have to to actively seek out more vinyl, tape and CD albums so that I would have more good tracks from which to choose. I began to check out Christmas albums at record stores, both before the holiday and at the half price sale afterwards, and I began to look through the albums I encountered at garage sales, used record stores and at the public library.
I found that I was becoming a Christmas music collector. However, since my purpose has always been to develop a resource library for creating these compilations I never evolved into a typical Christmas record collector. I was only interested in the audio and I have never cared if I had the original album. Over the years I have moved towards preferring the convenience and recording quality of CDs (unlike most record collectors who seek out the physical reality of the original vinyl, shellac or wax.)
I have to screen my new acquisitions for possible candidates – most of the songs on Christmas albums did not come close to meeting my selection standards. I have to go through to a lot of dreck in order to find the few gems. Thus, both the preparation and the process of compiling the samplers was becoming a more time-consuming operation since I was also getting more finicky about choosing the best selections for my samplers and then getting them in their best order.
This is when my Christmas music project began to require multiple drafts before I felt that I had gotten it right. Instead of being just a one or two day project in November it was beginning to take several days at various times during the year. Over time, nine or ten drafts became fairly typical.
As with all of my first five samplers, this one was a 60 minute cassette tape, and each still had vocal selections on the first side and instrumental songs on the second side. 1997 was the first year that I consciously organized the songs into musical movements. The vocals side of this cassette had three movements: early music and medieval songs, lullaby songs, and playful celebratory songs. The instrumental side was similar except that its middle movement was comprised of marches and wassail songs instead of lullabies.
This is jumping ahead a bit, but some years after I began selling my Samplers in CD format in 2002 I expanded and re-issued this one as this one as a test. On the one hand, I wanted it in CD format for myself to listen to more conveniently, but also I hoped that they would sell well enough to be worth the effort to reissuing all of the early ones.
I reorganized the songs and tunes (I still don’t know why I had stuck with all songs on one side and all instrumentals on the other for as long as I did!) I also found more “bonus track” songs that would complement the original ones to fill the 80 minute CD, wrote proper liner notes, had a rubber-stamp made to label the CDs, and found the above Thomas Nast image for its cover.
It was almost as much effort as creating a sampler from scratch. But the sales were so disappointing that I never bothered to do that for the other four cassettes. In fact, I came to regret having used up such a great cover image on what I thought of as a failed project.
But then, I must admit that I didn’t put much effort into selling that Sampler I had compiled over ten years earlier because I felt like I had been achieving my goal of making each Sampler better than the ones that had preceded them. By comparison to the ones that I was preparing later, which were drawn from hundreds of Christmas albums I had acquired and often were years in development, this 1997 one had good music but overall it seemed rather simple in concept and structure. Hopefully you will see why I felt that way as this year’s retrospective series continues.
