A warm and inviting Christmas with the Cartwright clan
Originally released in 1963 just as television’s Bonanza was climbing to #1 in the Nielsen’s, Christmas on the Ponderosa was one of several commercial tie-ins that accompanied the show’s success. Released by RCA, the thirteen tracks feature the golden throats of Bonanza’s four stars – Dan Blocker, Lorne Greene, Michael Landon and Pernell Roberts – performing in character, along with the backing vocals of the Ken Darby Singers. The album is structured as a story, with the Cartwright clan’s caroling neighbors invited into the Ponderosa’s ranch house for a Christmas party. The music includes both traditional and new Christmas songs, and they’re held together by continuity that includes toasts, elegies, dramatic conversations and humorous dialog.
Pernell Roberts proved himself the family’s standout singer on his lone track,“The Newborn King.†His solo album, Come All Ye Fair And Tender Ladies, was also released by RCA the same year, and here he sings in a similar folk style. Michael Landon is appealing on “Oh Fir Tree Dear†and the novelty “Santa Got Lost in Texas,†and though Dan Blocker gives it a go on “Deck the Halls,†his gifts are better applied to the recitation of “The First Christmas Tree.†Lorne Greene uses his sonorous voice to conjure both gravitas and humor in his performances, as he would later employ on the chart-topping single, “Ringo.†In addition to the Christmas album’s thirteen tracks, this reissue adds the first-ever CD release of Lorne Greene’s 1965 seasonal album, Have a Happy Holiday, and both sides of his 1966 single “Must Be Santa†b/w “One Solitary Life.â€
By the time that George Jones left Mercury and signed with United Artists in 1962 for his chart-topping “She Thinks I Still Care,†he’d been steadily minting hits since his 1955 debut, “Why Baby Why.†His two-and-a-half year run on UA produced sixteen singles, which the label managed to stretch over nearly five years of releases. All thirty-two sides – sixteen A’s and their flips – are included here in their original mono. Jones continued to be a steady hit maker (sometimes charting both sides of a single), but he also had his share of misses and obscure B-sides. This set includes favorites like “You Comb Her Hair†and “The Race is On,†but with so many singles over so many years, it’s easy to have lost track of superb A-sides like the rockabilly-tinged “Beacon in the Night,†the murder-suicide “Open Pit Mine,†the up-tempo “Your Heart Turned Left (And I Was on the Right)†and the fiddle-and-twang shuffle “What’s Money.â€
A musical battle between Hanukkah and Christmas is really no battle at all. As the popularity of recorded music grew through the twentieth century, so did the Christian-to-Jew population advantage. A 50:1 advantage in 1900 grew to a 150:1 advantage by 2000, and magnified by Western commercialization of Christmas, its celebrants produced an unparalleled abundance of popular holiday music. Hanukkah, in contrast, mostly made good with candles, dreidels, latkes and music that bore more resemblance to traditional Jewish melodies than the top of the pops. Sure, there’s the catchy “Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel,†but it’s more of a nursery rhyme than a hit single, and Adam Sandler’s “The Hanukkah Song†(covered by both Neil Diamond and the hardcore rockers Yidcore) was a heartfelt, but ultimately self-conscious response to the dearth of Hanukkah songs. Beck, They Might Be Giants and Ben Kweller, to name a few, have given it a shot, but don’t expect to be humming along to a Muzak™ version of Tom Lehrer’s “I’m Spending Hanukkah in Santa Monica†any time soon.
Even with the LeeVees’ Hanukkah Rocks on the shelves, Hanukkah fights the musical battle with both arms tied behind its back. If Christmas is the Beatles, Hanukkah is at best a lounge band covering the Four Seasons (cf: The International Battle of the Century). The relentless repetition of Top 40 hits, on the radio and in stores, has made dozens of Christmas songs icons of the season. And in keeping with the secularization of Christmas as aU.S. celebration, many of the best-loved Christmas songs were written or sung by Jews. The Idelsohn Society’s two-disc set traces the transformation of Christmas from a religious holiday to a popular bonanza, and further emphasizes the second-banana position into which the relatively minor holiday of Hanukkah was pressed. The songs on disc two demonstrate how Christmas cut across cultural lines to become as much a secular seasonal feeling as a religious celebration. As the set’s liner notes point out, American Jews celebrated Christmas “not because it was Christian, but because it was American.â€
At the same time, the designation of Christmas as a national holiday in 1870 set off a desire among some Jews for Hanukkah parity. And though Hanukkah songs were written and revived, none ever reached true popular acclaim. Disc one, “Happy Hanukkah,†includes historical odes, folk songs (including Woody Guthrie’s “Hanukkah Danceâ€), traditional melodies, klezmer, cantorial standards, children’s songs, chorals and humor. The disc’s one hit is Don McLean’s “Dreidel,†which just missed the Top 20 in 1972, and is really only Hanukkah-themed in its title. Disc two is filled with popularly familiar artists (The Ramones, Bob Dylan, Benny Goodman, Sammy Davis Jr., Herb Alpert, Mel Torme), all of whom are Jewish. The song list features many perennials, including Irving Berlin’s classic “White Christmas,†which author Phillip Roth characterized as subversively turning “Christmas into a holiday about snow.â€
2012 remaster of a Christmas classic with two Thanksgiving bonuses
Vince Guaraldi’s soundtrack to A Charlie Brown Christmas did as much to define the Peanuts gang as it did to capture what Charles Schulz wrote in his strip. In the same way that the television special literally animated the characters, Guaraldi’s music provided an emotional soundtrack to which they moved and danced, fleshing out a whole new dimension of the characters’ personalities. Every song on the soundtrack, even the traditional tunes adapted by Guaraldi, quickly become sense memories of the special, and a few, such as “Linus and Lucy,†“Skating†and “Christmas is Coming†were indelibly wed to their animated sequences. Like the television special, the soundtrack is a perennial. It’s been reissued on CD twice before, initially in 1988, and as recently as 2006, the latter being the subject of mastering mistakes, changes from the original album and much heated discussion.
A brightly wrapped gift of guitar-driven Christmas classics
