It’s not a Christmas song per se, but it’s a December song and a shopping song. Tom Adair’s verse paints as vivid a picture of winter in the big city as any holiday standard, and you can almost see the snowflakes falling with those opening piano notes. Frank reminds you what it feels like to be in love at this time of the year, even if you haven’t been—yet.
Drummer Buddy Harmon takes up where Sam Woodyard left off on Johnny Cash’s chart-hit version of this chestnut. You’re not always sure what you’re going to get from Johnny in this period (Thunderball?), but this is a thoughtful rearrangement that shakes some of the fake snow off the song. Found on a Columbia House collection that featured the usual record club loss-leader mish-mosh—Johnny shares side two with the Moog Machine and Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra. The best thing about it is that when you open up the gatefold, you get this:
As it appears we are in an Ellington season, we’ll go to Duke’s version of The Nutcracker by way of the Cotton Club—though as Terry Teachout’s new biography points out, the arrangements were the work of Billy Strayhorn.
Let us now praise advent calendars. In the run-up to Christmas, it was great to have something to open every day, even if was only a tiny window. More than the weekly advent candles, the minute or two spent with the calendar each day, mixing ritual and expectation, was magical. Maybe especially because it was private, mine alone. I’m too old for them now, and the magic of Christmas has mostly worn away, replaced by worries about shopping and shipping and seasonal affect disorder. But what magic remains clings to the music of the season. So maybe by combining them I—we—can recapture a glimmer of the season as I—we—remember it.
So for the next month consider this a musical advent calendar. Each day I’ll post a seasonal song (or video), the usual all-over-the-place mix. Some will sacred, some decidedly not, and some will be candy corns (NSFW!).Like the man says, They can’t all be winners.
With their close, pure, vibratoless harmony, Seeger sisters foreshadow the Roches on this spiritual. The song couldn’t seem simpler or more timeless until you hit that haunting, dislocating, oddly modern refrain, “People keep a-comin’ and the train done gone.”
