Customer Reviews

Let's Sing a Song of Christmas

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When I was a child this album would be the first Christmas album my father would play (usually on the day after Thanksgiving).It brings up alot of childhood memories. A basement flood warped this record and it took a long time for me to find it on tape and then on CD. My father had died by that time (I swear his spirit led me to a bin at a Path Mark where the tape was sitting on TOP!) but it still is the first Christmas music I play.
Why? Because it is a great album. Unusual songs like "The First Snowfall" "Christmas in America" "The Christmas Alphabet" and "Santa Claus' Son". Plus the "Silent Night" and "Winter Wonderland" are some of the best arrangements of those songs I have ever heard. What a tremendous Silent Night.! I can not think of any other album except for A Charlie Brown's Christmas that captures the reverence, the laughter, the wonder and a child"s delight of this holiday. This is to me an essential recording and I am not just waxing nostalgic.

Anyone who knows the zany music and antics of Spike Jones and His City Slickers might look at the cover of this album and the contents and say to him/herself "this ought to be interesting, if not a little irreverent." But then you need only read the paragraph on the reverse to know that this is not your typical offering from the clown king of bands.

It says: "Nobody took Spike Jones seriously. With his City Slickers (never instrumentally challenged, their orchestrated chaos took rare musicianship), he had best-selling records in the Forties. But he couldn't sell his "pretty, legitimate music." So in the Fifties Jones turned to Christmas, producing the profane "Jingle Bells", in pig Latin - but also recording the sacred "Silent Night", done a capella with close harmony by a legendary vocal arranger - conductor Judd Conlon. With true, serious Christmas fare, this package presents Jones's two-sided (at least) musical nature. Liner notes by Richard Carpenter of the pop duo The Carpenters."

The fold-out insert covering this original 1956 Verve vinyl album contains a listing of the contents showing the accompanying artists on each track, along with two pages of notes written in 1998 by Richard Carpenter telling us, among other things, how he and his father discovered the original album in 1956. There is also a brief paragraph on the history of the Verve label, and several more photos of Spike, including one with wife Helen and Spike, Jr.

This is just a wonderful collection of Christmas music which alternates between the happy and fun (Jingle Bells medley, My Birthday Comes On Christmas, Two Front Teeth, etc.) to the classic (Silent Night, and the various carols medlies).

Get this and it will be among your favourite Christmas CDs for years to come.