Music for Grownups: Ten Holiday Hits
By: Richard Gehr | Source: AARP.org | 2008-11-06
Richard Gehr is a veteran music critic based in New York City. His reviews for AARP.org appear every Tuesday; his columns on Thursdays.
It's beginning to sound a lot like Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa. As fine as they are, these 10 tunes could hardly reflect everything joyful—and those elements that make the season a tad melancholy—about our midwinter celebrations of peace, light, and last-minute shopping. What did we miss? Please tell us your favorites in the comments section below.
Darlene Love has been setting off musical fireworks nearly every December since 1986 with her explosive rendition of "Christmas (Baby, Please Come Home)" on "Late Night With David Letterman." Love's rendition of the tune Phil Spector wrote for his wife, Ronnie, seems to get better every year. But this 2005 clip remains a YouTube favorite.
Comedian Adam Sandler's "The Chanukah Song" famously name drops celebrity Jews ranging from David Lee Roth to baseball Hall-of-Famer Rod Carew ("he converted"). With three versions to date, his list could well be endless.
The sexiest holiday song in the canon may well be R&B singer Charles Brown's "Merry Christmas Baby," an elegant blues number that finds the singer waking up to a perfect day. How great does he feel? "Well, I haven't had a drink this morning/But I'm all lit up like a Christmas tree."
You can hear a three-hankie movie's worth of love, struggle, and defeat in the Pogues' 1987 "Fairytale of New York." Gravel-voiced Shane MacGowan and the late Kirsty MacColl sing of their doomed relationship in the Irish folk-rockers' beautiful and heartbreaking Christmas Eve fantasia. Watch the video here.
"White Christmas" is the biggest pop song ever. Even its writer, Irving Berlin, claimed it was "a publishing business in itself." And while no other song has sold more copies or been recorded as many times, Bing Crosby's version remains the most memorable. (But I prefer New Orleans singer John Boutté's.)
Beginning in 1992, New York composer Phil Kline enticed hundreds of boom box owners onto city streets for annual performances of "Unsilent Night." His ethereal, minimalist composition will be presented once again this year in dozens of cities around the world. Our family has made a tradition of participating, and I suspect yours would enjoy it, too.
Even though Ernest Tubb waxed it first in 1948, Elvis Presley's 1957 recording of "Blue Christmas" remains the gold standard for this maudlin country classic. Thanks to the miracle of studio technology, Presley solidifies his hold on the oft-recorded tune this holiday season by singing it "with" Martina McBride on his posthumous "Christmas Duets" album.
Who doesn't have "Linus and Lucy" burned into his or her seasonal DNA? In his signature song from Charles M. Schulz's 1965 TV special, "A Charlie Brown Christmas," pianist Vince Guaraldi conveyed the Peanuts gang's precocious joie de vivre with a spry melody and sophisticated rhythms.
Few songs warm up a long winter's night more efficiently than Frank Loesser's 1944 standard, "Baby, It's Cold Outside." Sung by a male "wolf" and a female "mouse," according to Loesser, the duet was heard first on-screen when Ricardo Montalban and Esther Williams crooned it together in the 1949 film "Neptune's Daughter." Everyone from Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Jordan to Will Ferrell and Zooey Deschanel has since recorded it.
Ten years ago, the Indiana University a cappella group performed a hilariously bungled version of "The 12 Days of Christmas" in the Bloomington, Ind., Musical Arts Center. Nearly 8 million YouTube hits later, the group has reformed and released a new album, "Holiday Spirits," with a new live version of their hit.
Who says there's no Santa Claus?
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