My Two Cents: It's not the real Christmas music

Gazette Editor

It’s not anything to get Grinchy about, but it calls for a little Yuletide clarification, possibly a little review to put things in order, or closer to order.

Christmas comes with its own background music. Speakers in stores and restaurants crank out the tunes to get shoppers in the holiday mood.

The Christmas songs seem to hit the air waves and aisle-ways about the middle of November, and stay with us through the holiday. It’s a happy seasonal hum.

It’s also, for a goodly portion, bogus. The Christmas songs, when you really listen to them, are not the real Christmas songs. They are songs made as covers of the original Christmas songs which were made decades ago.

Exactly how this happens can’t be detailed here, but the motives are obvious. A song is written, recorded for the first time and becomes a big holiday hit.

As the years roll along, a performer, or an agent or a music producer gets an inspiration to share the lyrical joy, and generate a little cash, by recording the same song again, but with a next generation performer.

All this seems to spin out of control over the years.

A couple of references in the general jazz mode might illustrate the intrusion.

Who’s that singing “Zat You Santa Claus?”

At first you hear the lyrics, and smile. That’s Louis Armstrong checking in for another year with his Christmas classic. It automatically makes you smile.

But it’s not Sachmo. It leans a little toward country western with too much of guitars and bass.

“Zat You” tells the tale of a Christmas celebrant who’s more than a little leery of the sounds he hears in the middle of night on Christmas eve.

“Fillin’ my stocking, I can hear a knocking,” it reports.

“Cold winds are howling, or could that be growling? My legs feel like straws.

My-my, oh me-my, kindly will you reply?

Is that you, Santa Claus?”

At one point Sachmo asks the probable Santa to just slip his gift, if he’s bearing a gift, “under the door.”

Armstrong recorded “Zat You Santa Claus” on a Decca single record release in 1953.

Among the cover versions is one done by Garth Brooks four years ago, and one listed for Big Bad Voodoo Daddy in 1995.

It’s hard to imagine Garth Brooks, a hard-working musician who engages his fans, having an anxiety attack on Christmas eve at his house after he hears “a knockin’ while he’s “fillin’ a stockin’.”

We’re really talking about two different neighborhoods here.

Armstrong fans who might get disheartened by fade of the “Zat You” original can bounce back by playing “Christmas in New Orleans.”

“You’ll see a Dixieland Santa Claus.

Leading the band to a good old Creole beat.

Golly, what a spirit, you can only hear I

Down on Basin Street”

Another Christmas jazz mode degradation has been done to “Santa Baby” which was first recorded by Eartha Kitt in 1953.

“Santa Baby” is sort of an extended purring of a Christmas wish list by a woman who urges Santa to “Hurry Down the Chimney Tonight.”

The song was actually written by a niece of the late Sen. Jacob Javits of New York.

“Santa Baby, slip a sable under the tree for me,” is the first request.

“Santa honey, I want yacht, and that’s not a lot.”

Kitt’s unique vocal style made the song an annual parody on Christmas greed at its outer limits.

Among cover recordings of ‘Santa Baby’ are versions put out by Madonna and Taylor Swift. Neither can generate the unique feline purr that Eartha Kitt put into the original and into most of her songs during her career.

The up-tempo version by Taylor Swift goes too fast to purr. The diction is clear and the timing is precise. Somehow she makes the tune sound like it was originally written for the score of “Annie” and later bumped.

Both the covers recorded by Garth Brooks and Taylor Swift simply lack the jazz style and swing of the originals.

One more tale of Christmas covers outside of the jazz mode relates to “White Christmas,” the Irving Berlin classic which came out for the first time in 1942. Spokane’s Bing Crosby normally gets credit for the original, and the song had a debut when soldiers all over the world were listening to the tribute to a Christmas “just like the one I used to know.”

The song reportedly has been recorded 500 times.

In 1957, “White Christmas” surfaced on the “Elvis Christmas Album.”

Berlin hated rock ‘n’ roll, and he was so upset with Elvis singing a version of his song that he tried, unsuccessfully, to keep the Elvis version off the airways.

So, what might be a unique Christmas song from the Big Band era to listen for during the season? How about the Claude Thornhill 1941 piano composition “Snowfall.” That’s a tune which has been recorded by many groups over the years.

Raised in the Midwest, Thornhill did arranging and directed bands in the early 1940s. In l942, a year after he wrote “Snowfall,” his band was playing at a theater in New York for $10,000 a week. Thornhill shut it down to join the Navy and played with service band all over the world. “

Listening to a 1941 version of the Claude Thornhill band playing “Snowfall” will go a long way to clear away the din of all those Christmas cover songs that have bumped the originals.