75 Post-Punk and Hardcore Concerts from the 1980s Have Been Digitized & Put Online: Fugazi, GWAR, Lemonheads, Dain Bramage (with Dave Grohl) & More

in Music | January 4th, 2022

Between 1985 and 1988, a teenag­er by the name of Sohrab Habibion was attend­ing punk and post-punk shows around the Wash­ing­ton, DC area. What set him apart was the bulky video cam­era he’d bring to the show and let roll, doc­u­ment­ing entire gigs in all their low-rez, lo-fi glo­ry. Just a kid try­ing to doc­u­ment a great night out. Habibion might not have known at the time what an impor­tant time cap­sule he was cre­at­ing, but these 60 or so tapes have now been dig­i­tized and uploaded to YouTube, thanks to Roswell Films and the DC Pub­lic Library’s Punk Archive.

“Please keep in mind that I was a teenag­er when I shot these shows,” Habibion writes, “and had zero pro­fi­cien­cy with the equip­ment. And, as you might imag­ine, nobody was doing any­thing with the lights or the sound to make things any bet­ter. What you get here is what was record­ed on my Beta­max and prob­a­bly best appre­ci­at­ed with a bit of gen­eros­i­ty as a view­er.”

High­lights include the above full con­cert by Fugazi on Decem­ber 28, 1987, a year before their first e.p. and play­ing songs that would turn up on their 1990’s clas­sic debut Repeater; Descen­dents in 1987 at the height of their career; The Lemon­heads when they were a punk band and not a pow­er pop group; the insane and hilar­i­ous GWAR from 1988, the year of their debut; and anoth­er home­town punk band, Dain Bra­m­age, which fea­tured Dave Grohl on drums, long before he played with Nir­vana and the Foo Fight­ers (see below).

Habibion went on to his own musi­cal career: first as the front­man for post-hard­core band Edsel, and cur­rent­ly as part of the band SAVAK.

Habibion’s tape archive makes one won­der: who else is out there sit­ting on a trove of his­toric record­ings? And where is that person’s equiv­a­lent of the DC Library? Who would help fund such a project? And who would see the worth of such record­ings? Not only are Habibion’s tapes about the bands them­selves, but they tell a sep­a­rate his­to­ry of music venues come and gone, of a time and place that will nev­er come again. Watch the shows here.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

When John Belushi Booked the Punk Band Fear on SNL, And They Got Banned from the Show: A Short Doc­u­men­tary

Down­load 834 Rad­i­cal Zines From a Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Online Archive: Glob­al­iza­tion, Punk Music, the Indus­tri­al Prison Com­plex & More

Down­load 50+ Issues of Leg­endary West Coast Punk Music Zines from the 1970–80s: Dam­age, Slash & No Mag

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

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400,000+ Sound Recordings Made Before 1923 Have Entered the Public Domain

in Archives, History, Internet Archive, Music | January 4th, 2022

A cen­tu­ry ago, the Unit­ed States was deep into the Jazz Age. No writer is more close­ly asso­ci­at­ed with that heady era than F. Scott Fitzger­ald, who (in addi­tion to coin­ing the verb to cock­tail) took it upon him­self to pop­u­lar­ize its name. In 1922 he even titled a short sto­ry col­lec­tion Tales from the Jazz Age, which entered the pub­lic domain not long ago. You may be more famil­iar with anoth­er work of Fitzger­ald’s that fol­lowed Tales from the Jazz Age into free­dom just last year: a nov­el called The Great Gats­by. But only this year have the actu­al sounds of the Jazz Age come into the pub­lic domain as well, thanks to the Music Mod­ern­iza­tion Act passed by U.S. Con­gress in 2018.

“Accord­ing to the act, all sound record­ings pri­or to 1923 will have their copy­rights expire in the US on Jan­u­ary 1, 2022,” says the Pub­lic Domain Review. This straight­ens out a tan­gled legal frame­work that pre­vi­ous­ly would­n’t have allowed the release of pre-1923 sound record­ings until the dis­tant year of 2067.

And so all of us now have free use of every sound record­ing from a more than 60-year peri­od  that “com­pris­es a rich and var­ied playlist: exper­i­men­tal first dab­blings, vaude­ville, Broad­way hits, rag­time, and the begin­nings of pop­u­lar jazz. Includ­ed will be the works of Scott Joplin, Thomas Edison’s exper­i­ments, the emo­tive war­blings of Adeli­na Pat­ti and the first record­ing of Swing Low, Sweet Char­i­ot.”

If you’d like to have a lis­ten to all this, the Pub­lic Domain Review rec­om­mends start­ing with its own audio col­lec­tion, a search for all pre-1923 record­ings on Inter­net Archive, and two projects from the Library of Con­gress: the Nation­al Juke­box and the Cit­i­zen DJ project, the lat­ter of which “has plans to do some­thing spe­cial with the pre-1923 record­ings once they enter the pub­lic domain.” You might also have a look at the Asso­ci­a­tion for Record­ed Sound Col­lec­tions’ list of ten notable pre-1923 record­ings, which high­lights such pro­to-jazz records as “Crazy Blues” and “Dix­ieland Jass Band One-Step” (along with the whol­ly non-jazz work of Enri­co Caru­so and Pablo Casals).

Accord­ing to Alex­is Rossi at the Inter­net Archive Blog, the sound record­ings just lib­er­at­ed by the Music Mod­ern­iza­tion act come to about 400,000 in total. Among them you’ll find “ear­ly jazz clas­sics like ‘Don’t Care Blues’ by Mamie Smith and her Jazz Hounds, ‘Ory’s Cre­ole Trom­bone’ by Kid Ory’s Sun­shine Orches­tra, and ‘Jazz­in’ Babies Blues’ by Ethel Waters.” Rossi also high­lights the nov­el­ty songs such as Bil­ly Mur­ray’s 1914 ren­di­tion of “Fido is a Hot Dog Now,” “which seems to be about a dog who is def­i­nite­ly going to hell.” The Jazz Age soon to come would exhib­it a more rau­cous but also more refined sen­si­bil­i­ty: as Fitzger­ald wrote in 1931, with the era he defined (and that defined him) already past, “It was an age of mir­a­cles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire.”

via Mefi

Relat­ed con­tent:

Free: The Great Gats­by & Oth­er Major Works by F. Scott Fitzger­ald

What’s Enter­ing the Pub­lic Domain in 2022: The Sun Also Ris­es, Win­nie-the-Pooh, Buster Keaton Come­dies & More

Hear the First Jazz Record, Which Launched the Jazz Age: “Liv­ery Sta­ble Blues” (1917)

The Clean­est Record­ings of 1920s Louis Arm­strong Songs You’ll Ever Hear

Great New Archive Lets You Hear the Sounds of New York City Dur­ing the Roar­ing 20s

How the Inter­net Archive Has Dig­i­tized More than 250,000 78 R.P.M. Records: See the Painstak­ing Process Up-Close

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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What’s Entering the Public Domain in 2022: The Sun Also Rises, Winnie-the-Pooh, Buster Keaton Comedies & More

in Books, Film, Music | December 31st, 2021

Ernest Hem­ing­way “made the Eng­lish lan­guage new, changed the rhythms of the way both his own and the next few gen­er­a­tions would speak and write and think. The very gram­mar of a Hem­ing­way sen­tence dic­tat­ed, or was dic­tat­ed by, a cer­tain way of look­ing at the world, a way of look­ing but not join­ing, a way of mov­ing through but not attach­ing, a kind of roman­tic indi­vid­u­al­ism dis­tinct­ly adapt­ed to its time and source.” So writes the late Joan Did­ion, a writer hard­ly with­out influ­ence her­self, in a 1998 reflec­tion on the author of such nov­els as A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and  The Old Man and the Sea.

The lit­er­ary phe­nom­e­non that was Hem­ing­way began in earnest, as it were, with The Sun Also Ris­es. Hav­ing been pub­lished in 1926, his first full-length nov­el now stands on the brink of the pub­lic domain. So do a vari­ety of oth­er works that launched sto­ried careers: William Faulkn­er’s first nov­el Sol­diers’ Pay, for instance, or A.A. Mil­ne’s Win­nie-the-Pooh, which intro­duced the now-beloved tit­u­lar bear to the read­ing pub­lic. Hav­ing cel­e­brat­ed his 90th anniver­sary back in 2016 with the addi­tion of a new pen­guin char­ac­ter to the Hun­dred Acre Wood, Win­nie-the-Pooh remains the core of what has devel­oped into a for­mi­da­ble cul­tur­al indus­try.

The work of Hem­ing­way, too, has inspired no small amount of com­mer­cial enter­prise. (Did­ion writes of Thomasville Fur­ni­ture Indus­tries’ new “Ernest Hem­ing­way Col­lec­tion,” whose themes include “Kenya,” “Key West,” “Havana,” and “Ketchum.”) But now that work itself has begun to come legal­ly avail­able to all, free of charge: “any­one can res­cue them from obscu­ri­ty and make them avail­able, where we can all dis­cov­er, enjoy, and breathe new life into them.”

So writes Jen­nifer Jenk­ins, Direc­tor of Duke’s Cen­ter for the Study of the Pub­lic Domain, in her post on Pub­lic Domain Day 2022. In it she names a host of oth­er 1926 books sim­i­lar­ly set for lib­er­a­tion, includ­ing Langston Hugh­es’ The Weary Blues, T. E. Lawrence’s The Sev­en Pil­lars of Wis­dom, Agatha Christie’s The Mur­der of Roger Ack­royd, and H. L. Menck­en’s Notes on Democ­ra­cy.

The deep­er we get into the 21st cen­tu­ry, the wider the vari­ety of media that falls into the pub­lic domain. Jenk­ins high­lights silent-film come­dies like For Heaven’s Sake with Harold Lloyd and Bat­tling But­ler with Buster Keaton, as well — the mid-1920s hav­ing seen the dawn of the “talkie” — as sound pic­tures like Don Juan, the “first fea­ture-length film to use the Vita­phone sound sys­tem.” Unlike in pre­vi­ous years, a large num­ber of not just musi­cal com­po­si­tions but actu­al sound record­ings will also come avail­able for free reuse. These include records by jazz and blues singer Ethel Waters, oper­at­ic tenor Enri­co Caru­so, cel­list Pablo Casals, and com­pos­er-pianist Sergei Rach­mani­noff. And as for those wait­ing to reuse the work of Joan Did­ion, rest assured that The White Album will be yours on Pub­lic Domain Day 2091.

On a relat­ed note, the Pub­lic Domain Review has a nice post overview­ing the sound record­ings enter­ing the pub­lic domain in ’22.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ernest Hemingway’s Very First Pub­lished Sto­ries, Free as an eBook

Hear the Clas­sic Win­nie-the-Pooh Read by Author A.A. Milne in 1929

Watch the Great Russ­ian Com­pos­er Sergei Rach­mani­noff in Home Movies

Safe­ty Last, the 1923 Movie Fea­tur­ing the Most Icon­ic Scene from Silent Film Era, Just Went Into the Pub­lic Domain

The Pub­lic Domain Project Makes 10,000 Film Clips, 64,000 Images & 100s of Audio Files Free to Use

Libraries & Archivists Are Dig­i­tiz­ing 480,000 Books Pub­lished in 20th Cen­tu­ry That Are Secret­ly in the Pub­lic Domain

Cre­ative Com­mons Offi­cial­ly Launch­es a Search Engine That Index­es 300+ Mil­lion Pub­lic Domain Images

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Asleep at the Wheel Frontman Ray Benson Discusses Half a Hundred Years of Songwriting: Stream the Nakedly Examined Music Interview Online

in Music, Podcasts | December 30th, 2021

This week’s Naked­ly Exam­ined Music pod­cast fea­tures the Gram­my-win­ning Texas swing band, Asleep at the Wheel, which Ray found­ed in 1969. They’ve released 26 albums of orig­i­nal tunes and clas­sic cov­ers while tour­ing con­stant­ly, with Ray being the only con­sis­tent mem­ber through their var­i­ous line-ups.

Your host Mark Lin­sen­may­er talks with Ray about the title track from Half a Hun­dred Years (2021), “Ped­er­nales Stroll” from Keepin’ Me Up Nights (1990), and “Am I High” from The Wheel (1977). Intro: “The Let­ter (That John­ny Walk­er Read)” from Texas Gold (1975). Clos­er: “The Road Will Hold Me Tonight” feat. Emmy­lou Har­ris and Willie Nel­son, record­ed in the ear­ly 80s but only released now on the new album. Learn more at asleepatthewheel.com.

Watch the video for “Half a Hun­dred Years.” Watch “Am I High?” live on 80s TV. Here’s the band live recent­ly at the Paste Stu­dio and play­ing their 25th Anniver­sary show on Austin City Lim­its in 1996. Their most famous tune is “Hot Rod Lin­coln.” Here they are with Willie Nel­son. Here’s a very old TV per­for­mance of “Take Me Back to Tul­sa.” Hear all of “The Let­ter (That John­ny Walk­er Read).”

Image by Mike Shore.

Naked­ly Exam­ined Music is a pod­cast host­ed by Mark Lin­sen­may­er, who also hosts The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life Phi­los­o­phy Pod­cast, Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast, and Phi­los­o­phy vs. Improv. He releas­es music under the name Mark Lint.

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Enjoy Classic Songs from A Charlie Brown Christmas, Performed by Vince Guaraldi Trio Drummer Jerry Granelli

in Music | December 28th, 2021

We’re liv­ing in times where so much is done to manip­u­late us. And things last for, what, a news cycle? A few min­utes? This [album] is some­thing that’s last­ed 50 years. And not only last­ed, but grown … I think there’s just a human­ness. — Jer­ry Granel­li 

As the Christ­mas sea­son winds down, so too do mar­ket­ing blitzes and con­sumerist fren­zies that make it hard to see the hol­i­day as any­thing but a year-end cash grab. But even the most cyn­i­cal among us might admit to being moved each year by one Christ­mas clas­sic, no mat­ter our reli­gious beliefs, cap­i­tal­ist sym­pa­thies, or lack there­of: that clas­sic, of course, is The Char­lie Brown Christ­mas Spe­cial. The tal­ents of Charles Schulz, pro­duc­er Lee Mendel­son, and the Vince Guaral­di Trio com­bined to make a show not only big­ger than its parts, but even more endur­ing, per­haps, than the jug­ger­naut of Christ­mas com­merce.

The choice of jazz for a prime­time chil­dren’s Christ­mas spe­cial was inspired and edgy in 1965, though Guaral­di and his band weren’t orig­i­nal­ly booked for the hol­i­days but for a nev­er-com­plet­ed doc­u­men­tary about Shultz that sparked the inter­est of cor­po­rate spon­sor Coca-Cola. Mendel­son real­ized the poten­tial of the loose, breezy West Coast jazz of pianist Guaral­di, bassist Fred Mar­shall, and drum­mer Jer­ry Granel­li for the new­ly-com­mis­sioned spe­cial, and the band import­ed much from their orig­i­nal music, impro­vis­ing two new com­po­si­tions and play­ing bluesy ver­sions of “O Tan­nen­baum” and “Hark! The Her­ald Angels Sing.”

As Granel­li remem­bers it, Coke execs weren’t pleased. “[A] lit­tle kid was going to come out and say what Christ­mas was all about, which was­n’t about shop­ping. And then the jazz music, which was impro­vised,” did not jive with the suits. Nonethe­less the show aired, to the great delight of chil­dren and grown-ups every­where for the past half cen­tu­ry or so. Granel­li him­self feared pigeon­hol­ing and left the project with “some resid­ual bad feel­ings over his pal­try cred­it and roy­al­ties.” He lat­er “spent decades avoid­ing any nos­tal­gia trip to the land of Linus and Lucy,” Nate Chi­nen writes at WBGO. “But with­in the last decade” before his death in July 2021, “he leaned into Peanuts, rec­og­niz­ing the joy that Guaraldi’s sound­track impart­ed, espe­cial­ly around the hol­i­days.”

In the videos above, you can see Granel­li play “Linus and Lucy” and “Skat­ing” with his trio, with Chris Gestrin on Piano and Simon Fisk on bass, in 2014. Men­tored by Dave Brubeck­’s drum­mer, Joe Morel­lo, Granel­li toured the States in his ear­ly 20s, then joined the Vince Guaral­di Trio on return­ing to his home in the Bay Area. He “quick­ly found his foot­ing, becom­ing an essen­tial pat of the Guaral­di sound,” writes Chi­nen. Guaraldi’s orig­i­nal themes like “Linus and Lucy” and “Skat­ing” “ben­e­fit immea­sur­ably from Granel­li’s whis­per-soft brush­work.” The Trio went on to record with Brazil­ian bossa nova gui­tarist Bola Sete, and the drum­mer made his mark on the music world in oth­er con­texts, co-found­ing and teach­ing at the Cre­ative Music Pro­gram of Naropa Insti­tute (now Naropa Uni­ver­si­ty) in Boul­der Col­orado in the 1970s.

“Jazz is just a reflec­tion of life,” Granel­li told CBC Radio in 2020. “Life is impro­vised, life is uncer­tain. It’s not sol­id. It’s not per­ma­nent. The art I choose dis­ap­pears after it’s played, it goes off into the ether. I love that.” That may be so, but Granel­li’s con­tri­bu­tion to the art of The Char­lie Brown Christ­mas Spe­cial — music record­ed in a 3‑hour ses­sion when he was only 24 years old — has now out­last­ed him, the last mem­ber of the Vince Guaral­di Trio to pass away. May he skate on in peace, wher­ev­er he is now.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

How Inno­v­a­tive Jazz Pianist Vince Guaral­di Became the Com­pos­er of Beloved Char­lie Brown Music

Peanuts Rock: Watch the Peanuts Gang Play Clas­sic Rock Songs by Queen, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Jour­ney & More

Umber­to Eco Explains the Poet­ic Pow­er of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Doreen Ketchens’ Astonishing Rendition of “The House of the Rising Sun”: A World-Class Clarinetist Busks on the Streets of New Orleans

in Education, Jazz, Music | December 27th, 2021

Dirt­i­ness has no descrip­tion. It is a  feel­ing. — music tran­scriber George Col­lier

You may be able to read music and play the clar­inet, but it’s extreme­ly unlike­ly you — or any­one — will be able to play along with Doreen Ketchens’ “dirty” solo on “The House of the Ris­ing Sun,” above, despite an assist from Tom Pick­les’ scrolling tran­scrip­tion.

Down­load the tran­scrip­tion for free and keep try­ing.

It’s what Ketchens, a world renowned clar­inetist and music edu­ca­tor, who has played for four US pres­i­dents and busks reg­u­lar­ly in the French Quar­ter, would advise.

“You have to prac­tice and be ready to per­form at the drop of a hat” she told The Clar­inet’s Ben Red­wine, when he asked if she had any advice for young musi­cians hop­ing to make it pro­fes­sion­al­ly.

She’s also a strong advo­cate of lis­ten­ing robust­ly, not throw­ing in the tow­el when some­one else gets the job instead of you, and let­ting your per­son­al­i­ty come through in your play­ing:

You don’t want to sound like you’re play­ing an etude book. This is for all types of music – even clas­si­cal. You want to move the audi­ence, you want to touch them.

Trained as a clas­si­cal clar­inetist, Ketchens cozied up to jazz short­ly after she cozied up to the tuba play­er who would become her hus­band. “All of the sud­den, jazz wasn’t so bad,” she says:

I start­ed to lis­ten to jazz so I could learn the tunes and fit in with his band. I start­ed lis­ten­ing to Louis Arm­strong. He is my biggest influ­ence. Some peo­ple call me Mrs. Satch­mo, I guess because that con­cept is in my head. I’ll hear some­thing he plays, which I’ve heard thou­sands of times, and I’ll think, “What? How did he do that?” Then, I lis­tened to the clar­inetists who played with him: Edmund Hall, Buster Bai­ley, Bar­ney Bigard. Those cats were awe­some too! Edmund Hall had this thing he could do, where it sounds like he was play­ing two tones at the same time. Peo­ple today might hum while they play to achieve some­thing sim­i­lar, but I don’t think that was what he was doing. Buster Bai­ley had a sim­i­lar back­ground to me, start­ing out with clas­si­cal music, then learn­ing jazz. Ear­ly on, I emu­lat­ed Jer­ry Fuller, clar­inetist with the Dukes of Dix­ieland. I would steal so many of his solos just so I could keep up with my husband’s band. Even­tu­al­ly, I real­ized what he was doing, and it trans­lat­ed into me being able to impro­vise. I’d start out tran­scrib­ing solos, then play­ing by ear, copy­ing what those clar­inetists were doing. I don’t remem­ber those solos now, but I’m sure that I still play snip­pets of them that creep into my impro­vi­sa­tions.

How­ev­er she got there, she pos­sess­es a sin­gu­lar abil­i­ty to make her instru­ment growl and her com­mand of 32nd notes makes us feel a lit­tle light­head­ed.

Clar­inetists abound in New Orleans, and they prob­a­bly all cov­er “The House of the Ris­ing Sun,” but you’ll be hard pressed to find a more excit­ing ren­di­tion than Ketchens’ on the cor­ner of St. Peter and Roy­al, with hus­band Lawrence on tuba and daugh­ter Dori­an on drums.  Here’s the full ver­sions, sans tran­scrip­tion.

You want an encore? Of course you do.

How about Ketchens’ mag­nif­i­cent solo on “Just a Clos­er Walk With Thee” for the Louisiana Phil­har­mon­ic Orches­tra?

Find more aston­ish­ing, tran­scribed solos and a heap­ing help­ing of Jacob Col­lier on George Collier’s (no rela­tion) YouTube Chan­nel.

His tran­scrip­tions, and those of col­lab­o­ra­tor Tom Pick­les, are avail­able for free down­load here, unless the artist sells their own tran­scrip­tion, in which case he encour­ages you to sup­port the artist with your pur­chase.

If you’re a music nerd who would like to dis­cuss tran­scrip­tions, give feed­back on oth­ers’ attempts, and upload your own, join his com­mu­ni­ty on Dis­cord.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Women of Jazz: Stream a Playlist of 91 Record­ings by Great Female Jazz Musi­cians

Jazz Vir­tu­oso Oscar Peter­son Gives Dick Cavett a Daz­zling Piano Les­son (1979)

Lit­tle Kid Mer­ri­ly Grooves to ZZ Top While Wait­ing for the Bus

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, the­ater­mak­er, and the Chief Pri­maol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Her lat­est book, Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo, will be pub­lished in ear­ly 2022.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Watch Bing Crosby’s Final Christmas Special, Featuring a Famous Duet with Bowie, and Bowie Introducing His New Song, “Heroes” (1977)

in Music, Television | December 24th, 2021

Bing Cros­by died in Octo­ber of 1977, but that did­n’t stop him from appear­ing in liv­ing rooms all over Amer­i­ca for Christ­mas. He’d already com­plet­ed the shoot for his final CBS tele­vi­sion spe­cial Bing Cros­by’s Mer­rie Olde Christ­mas, along with such col­lab­o­ra­tors as Ron Moody, Stan­ley Bax­ter, the Trin­i­ty Boys Choir, Twig­gy, and a young fel­low by the name of David Bowie. Of course, Bowie had long since achieved his own dream of fame, at least to the younger gen­er­a­tion; it was view­ers who’d grown up lis­ten­ing to Cros­by who need­ed an intro­duc­tion. And they received a mem­o­rable one indeed, in the form of the Bowie-Cros­by duet “Peace on Earth/Little Drum­mer Boy,” pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture.

This year you can watch Bing Cros­by’s Mer­rie Olde Christ­mas in its hour­long entire­ty, which includes per­for­mances of “Have Your­self a Mer­ry Lit­tle Christ­mas” and “Side by Side by Side” (from the late Stephen Sond­heim’s Com­pa­ny), a (per­haps embell­ished) musi­cal delin­eation of the extend­ed Cros­by fam­i­ly, and a ses­sion of lit­er­ary rem­i­nis­cence with none oth­er than Charles Dick­ens.

The set­up for all this is that Cros­by, his wife, and chil­dren have all been brought to Eng­land by the invi­ta­tion of the pre­vi­ous­ly unknown Sir Per­ci­val Cros­by, who desires to extend a hand to his “poor Amer­i­can rela­tions” — and who hap­pens to live next door to Bowie, that most Eng­lish of all 1970s rock stars.

The search for Sir Cros­by pro­ceeds mer­ri­ly, at one point prompt­ing his famous rel­a­tive to chat with Twig­gy about the nature of love and lone­li­ness, emo­tions “just as painful and just as beau­ti­ful as they ever were. Whether you’re a nov­el­ist, poet, or even a song­writer, it’s all in the way you sing.” These reflec­tions lead into a stark music video for the title track of Bowie’s “ ‘Heroes’ ”, which had come out just weeks before (coin­ci­den­tal­ly, on the very day of Cros­by’s death). Though a some­what incon­gru­ous addi­tion to such an old-fash­ioned pro­duc­tion, it does vivid­ly reflect a cer­tain chang­ing of the transat­lantic pop-cul­tur­al guard.

In their scene togeth­er, Cros­by and Bowie do exude an unde­ni­able mutu­al respect, the younger man admit­ting even to have tried his hand at the old­er man’s sig­na­ture hol­i­day song, “White Christ­mas.” Hav­ing set off the 1940s Christ­mas-music boom by record­ing it 35 years before, Cros­by sings it one last time him­self to close out this spe­cial. Before doing so, he describes the Christ­mas sea­son as “a time to look back with grat­i­tude at being able to come this far, and a time to look ahead with hope and opti­mism.” Like all the ele­ments of Bing Cros­by’s Mer­rie Olde Christ­mas not involv­ing David Bowie, these words were noth­ing new even then, but some­how they still man­age to stoke our Christ­mas spir­it all these decades lat­er.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Bowie & Bing Cros­by Sing “The Lit­tle Drum­mer Boy/Peace on Earth” (1977)

David Bowie Sends a Christ­mas Greet­ing in the Voice of Elvis Pres­ley

John­ny Cash’s Christ­mas Spe­cials, Fea­tur­ing June Carter, Steve Mar­tin, Andy Kauf­man & More (1976–79)

Revis­it Kate Bush’s Pecu­liar Christ­mas Spe­cial, Fea­tur­ing Peter Gabriel (1979)

Why “White Christ­mas,” “Here Comes San­ta Claus,” “Let It Snow,” and Oth­er Clas­sic Christ­mas Songs Come from the 1940s

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Why “White Christmas,” “Here Comes Santa Claus,” “Let It Snow,” and Other Classic Christmas Songs Come from the 1940s

in History, Music | December 23rd, 2021

Cast your mind back, if you will, to Christ­mas­time eighty years ago, and imag­ine which hol­i­day songs would have been in the air — or rather, which ones would­n’t have been. You cer­tain­ly would­n’t have heard the likes of “Jin­gle Bell Rock” or “Rockin’ Around the Christ­mas Tree,” rock-and-roll itself not yet hav­ing emerged in the form we know today. Even the thor­ough­ly un-rock­ing “Sil­ver Bells” would­n’t be record­ed until 1951, for the now-for­got­ten Bob Hope film The Lemon Drop Kid. What of chil­dren’s favorites like “Here Comes San­ta Claus,” “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Rein­deer,” and “Frosty the Snow­man”? None were pop­u­lar until Gene Autry laid them down in 1947, 1949, and 1950, respec­tive­ly.

Even “The Christ­mas Song,” whose most beloved ver­sion was record­ed by Nat King Cole, was­n’t writ­ten until 1945 (as was  “Let It Snow”). The year before that brought “Have Your­self a Mer­ry Lit­tle Christ­mas”; the year before that, “San­ta Claus Is Comin’ to Town” and “I’ll Be Home for Christ­mas.” That was record­ed first and most defin­i­tive­ly by Bing Cros­by, the singer most close­ly iden­ti­fied with the 1940s Christ­mas-music boom. That boom began, as the Ched­dar Explains video at the top of the post tells it, with Cros­by’s Christ­mas Day 1941 ren­di­tion of “White Christ­mas,” just weeks after the attack on Pearl Har­bor.

“It’s no coin­ci­dence that the boom in Christ­mas tunes came dur­ing World War II, when tens of thou­sands of Amer­i­can sol­diers were abroad defend­ing their coun­try, no doubt long­ing for the sim­ple warmth of home,” writes The Atlantic’s Eric Har­vey. “Irv­ing Berlin invest­ed ‘White Christ­mas’ with the sort of metero­log­i­cal long­ing that comes from liv­ing in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, but troops picked up on the sen­ti­ment, mak­ing the song a clas­sic in this regard.” This also hap­pened to be the zenith of the gold­en age of radio (a com­pi­la­tion of whose Christ­mas broad­casts we fea­tured last year here on Open Cul­ture). “By the 1940s, radios were a default pres­ence in most Amer­i­can homes. And by the late 1940s tele­vi­sion was grow­ing out of radio, and through the 1950s the pair set hol­i­day liv­ing rooms around the coun­try aglow with musi­cal per­for­mances.”

That most pop­u­lar Christ­mas songs still come from the 1940s and 50s (a Spo­ti­fy playlist of which you can find here) has giv­en rise to the­o­ries of a Baby-Boomer con­spir­a­cy to pre­serve their own child­hoods at all costs to the cul­ture. But then, as Christo­pher Ingra­ham writes in The Wash­ing­ton Post, “the post­war era real­ly was an excep­tion­al time in Amer­i­can his­to­ry: jobs were plen­ti­ful, the econ­o­my was boom­ing, and Amer­i­ca’s influ­ence on the world stage was at its peak.” Thus “what we now think of as the hol­i­day aes­thet­ic isn’t just about a par­tic­u­lar time of the year — it’s also very much about a par­tic­u­lar time of Amer­i­can his­to­ry.” This aligns with the per­cep­tion that Christ­mas has turned from a reli­gious hol­i­day into an Amer­i­can one. But take it from me, an Amer­i­can liv­ing in Korea: even on the oth­er side of the world, you can’t escape its songs.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Makes Music Sound Like Christ­mas Music? Hear the Sin­gle Most Christ­massy Chord of All Explained

Stream 48 Hours of Vin­tage Christ­mas Radio Broad­casts Fea­tur­ing Orson Welles, Bob Hope, Frank Sina­tra, Jim­my Stew­art, Ida Lupino & More (1930–1959)

David Bowie & Bing Cros­by Sing “The Lit­tle Drum­mer Boy” (1977)

Stream 22 Hours of Funky, Rock­ing & Swing­ing Christ­mas Albums: From James Brown and John­ny Cash to Christo­pher Lee & The Ven­tures

The Sto­ry of The Pogues’ “Fairy­tale of New York,” the Boozy Bal­lad That Has Become One of the Most Beloved Christ­mas Songs of All Time

Stream a Playlist of 79 Punk Rock Christ­mas Songs: The Ramones, The Damned, Bad Reli­gion & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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