Our American friends have had a stressful year, but as this collection proves, they do good festive cheer, via the medium of the holiday song. The festive R rate is high here, so go put some wine on the stove.
This post started out on the idea of a transatlantic face-off between the USA and the UK as to who does the best Holiday/Christmas music, but it turns out to be something of a complicated issue. While the Americans have a rich depth in holiday tunes, from the heritage of Bing Crosby, Doris Day, Billie Holiday, The Carpenters, Andy Williams and Frank Sinatra, they also have the last bona fide global superstar Christmas original tune ever in Mariah Carey’s All I Want For Christmas (it has passed one billion streams). It was our American friends that brought the Christmas album back into vogue - we’ve traced this back to 2006 which saw both Aimee Mann’s One More Drifter In The Snow (2006) and Sufjan Stevens’ Songs For Christmas box set. After that, artists on both sides of the Atlantic and further afield have fancied a crack at the album as Christmas cracker.
On the other hand, the UK has The Pogues (featuring Kirsty MacColl) Fairytale of New York which is a lot of people’s favourite Christmas song. The Brits have Slade’s Merry Xmas Everybody, which is the UKs official family Christmas drunken lunch anthem. And we have Wham’s Last Christmas - the saddest seasonal break-up themed pop tune ever made. Brits Bob Geldof and Midge Ure also wrote the most important - if not the best - Christmas song ever, Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas. Bless him, the UK’s popical son Robbie Williams, had a stab at a Christmas staple in 2019 with Can’t Stop Christmas, but sadly Robbie could not reverse the trend of more & more less memorable Christmas tunes. He would have been better off re-releasing his proper anthem Angels perhaps.
I guess based on the above evidence, the US is looking most likely to claim the Christmas crown, but then once we dove further back into tradition of the Christmas carol, well, it made us think again. It’s the old folk tunes that ring the Christmas bells of England and bring to mind Yorkshire pub sing-a-longs that can’t be beaten, even by the rather schmaltzy American classics.
It’s a murky area and so, project abandoned - at least until perhaps someone can take it on as a PhD and become the world’s first Doctor of Christmas Tunes. However, the bi-product of the concept will please you no end. For one thing, we’ve already had our UK folksy knees up with English rose’s Kate Rusby and Shirley Collins and so it is time to pass the cracker to American once again.
If you search for ‘American Christmas songs’ on the streaming platforms you’ll get a real mishmash of old & new, whereas we wanted to focus mostly on some of the recent additions to the canon. Mostly, we wanted to come up with a collection that truly represents the American take on things - and perhaps brings some Christmas comfort after one of America’s most traumatic years in its recent history. 2020 was the year in which the rest of us were worried about America.
That’s why we had to start with Merry Christmas Darling, originally of course by The Carpenters but beautifully covered here (and that’s not easy) by Brandy Clark, with Charlie Worsham. It’s a sad little number. The lyrics were written in 1944 by an 18 year old Frank Pooler, who later became choral director at California State University, Long Beach. Some 22 years after he wrote them, two of his aspiring music students, Karen and Richard Carpenter, asked the Professor if he had any ideas for holiday songs. According to Pooler, they had become tired of the standard holiday songs. Pooler gave them the lyrics and so the story goes, Richard Carpenter wrote the accompanying tune in just 15 minutes. Four years later, in 1970, the Carpenters hit number one on the Billboard Christmas charts with the song, and did so again in 1971 and 1973. And so a new American standard holiday song was created.
It’s in that vein we continue with some truly fine examples of the genre by Josh Rouse, Kelly Finnigan, Los Lobos, Molly Burch, Nada Surf, Norah Jones, Bahamas, Fiona Apple and many more modern American greats.
In a nod to our special friendship (and may it continue as the political landscape changes at least on one side) there is even a cover of Wham’s Last Christmas (the only good one I know) by Jimmy Eat World. Sufjan is on this list of course as are one of TSS’s favourite American bands Calexico - who added their own collection to the growing canon of modern American holiday albums just this year, with their release ‘Seasonal Shift’ - well worth checking out for an alternative, Mexicana flavoured take. You’ll see Calexico on our artist pages early in 2021.
And despite this being a mostly modern collection well, we could not resist but go out with an All American bang, courtesy Clarence Carter’s rather cheeky Back Door Santa and Jose Feliciano’s joyous classic, Feliz Navidad. Mmm, perhaps the Americans have it after all.
In which case what shall we say but...happy holidays!