Merry Christmas to All: New High Fidelity recordings of popular Christmas Hits (Audition AUD 33-5945)

 

"New High Fidelity recordings," claims Audition (Waldorf).  Well, that depends on our reading of "new."  In fact, all but one of these tracks originally appeared on two 1955 ten-inchers-Christmas Holiday and When Christmas Comes to Our House--on the Waldorf Music Hall label.  And this LP appears to be from 1959, given that Waldorf catalog numbers typically included the two-digit year.  Audition and Colortone releases tend to be from the late 1950s.

And, speaking of Colortone, the Colortone Christmas Holiday Time for Children recycled (re-recycled?) seven of these tracks, and so the sell-the-same-material-over-and-over-again train continues.  (My thanks to dc_animal for alerting me to that release.)  But, it's how the cheapies survived.  As for label head Enoch Light taking songwriting credit, along with Lew Davies, for The Night Before Christmas and Jolly Old St. Nicholas, this was standard procedure across the industry when it came to P.D. material--crediting the arranger or producer, and not the actual author and composer.  In fact, the lyrics for Jolly Old... date back to 1865.  They're by Emily Huntington Miller.  So there.  Meanwhile, Christmas Has Come Again is an old Scandinavian number called Nu är det jul igen.  On this LP, it is presented without an attribution.  Still cool.

The performers include Artie Malvin, Dottie Evans, and (of course) Enoch Light, but for this LP, the credit goes to "The Audition Studio Orchestra and Chorus."  Similarly, for the Colortone LP, the artists are (who else?) "The Colortone Studio Orchestra and Chorus."  But I've listed the actual artists in my sleighlist below, save for those of Winter Wonderland.  I can't trace the source for that recording.  There was an earlier Waldorf release of the number, but it's not the same performance.

Terrific audio quality, but cut-rate vinyl.  Still, a good rip.  And I wish they'd included that all-time classic, Santa Claus Is Flying Thru the Sky, but maybe Enoch had lost the recording rights.  Nope, nope... wait a second.  Enoch reissued it on Fairyland Records (a subsidiary of Corona Records Inc.) at around the same time as this LP, or a bit later.  So, he must have retained the rights.

Anyway, enjoy!

DOWNLOAD: Merry Christmas to All.zip

Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town--The Brigadiers Quartet, With Michael Stewart, and Enoch Light and His Orch.

Frosty the Snowman--Mike Stewart

The Night Before Christmas--Artie Malvin

Winter Wonderland--Unknown

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer--Artie Malvin

Jolly Old St. Nicholas--Michael Stewart, With Enoch Light and His Orch.

White Christmas--Waldorf Music Hall Orchestra and Chorus

Let It Snow!  Let It Snow!  Let It Snow!--Artie Malvin

When Christmas Comes to Our House--Dottie Evans With the Brigadiers Quartet

Jingle Bells--The Brigadiers Quartet and Orchestra 

Christmas Has Come Again--Enoch Light Orch. and Chorus

Lee

Christmas in one key: "Original Music Box Favorites, Volume Two" (Pickwick, 1980).

 

A pleasant group of holiday numbers played on a Regina Style 50 Music Box--from vintage music-box discs, we can assume.  And the fidelity is amazing, and not just for Pickwick--this may have been digitally recorded, especially given the release year (1980).

Howard Brinkman's liner notes are unusually elegant for this label group, even if they're the standard content hype.  Er...  Well, actually, his prose is pretty clunky.  When I first skimmed it, it seemed fancier than usual for a cheap-label essay, but on closer examination... ugh.

For instance: "The idea of authentically reproducing music and other sounds, not just mechanically producing music, is what really fed the phonograph market, not any qualitative preference."  That reads nicely, but it doesn't make much sense.  Of course, Brinkman--who wrote the liner notes for at least seventeen Pickwick albums (mostly rock)--was filling space with words on the back of a Pickwick cover, so we can excuse the nonexistent grammar of that sentence.  But can the early-20th-century public truly be faulted for preferring early sound reproduction, which only provided a rough replication of vocal and instrumental sounds, over the "crystalline voice of music boxes"?

A question we've all struggled with at some point in our lives, I'm sure.

The way I see (or, rather, hear) it is that even a crude reproduction of "real" sound (and I love early 78s to death, so please don't get me wrong) was epically more interesting and exciting than tunes played on a musical comb.  (See below.)

Which is not to dis music box technology--it was pretty amazing as a pre-recording medium.  Regina boxes sounded gorgeous, as this LP demonstrates.  But music boxes couldn't provide the sheer range of sounds, however crudely replicated, that the phonograph provided: singing voices (solo, quartet, choral), bands (marching, concert, dance), and, to an extent, authentic percussion.  As in, sort of'/kind of authentic, at least prior to electrically recorded audio.  Even a horn-recorded cymbal crash gives us a record (literally) of that audio event, whereas the bells, drums, etc. of carousel organs are mere special effects.  And I'm starting to sound like Brinkman...

It's true that, in the beginning, the phonograph couldn't yet match mechanical music for a vivid and immediate musical experience, but it offered a far greater variety of sounds, however muffled.  1905 concert band recordings, for example, sounded more like real concert bands than the fanciest carousel organ could ever approximate.  They were analog: I.e., analogous to the real-world source.  And what the heck am I babbling about?

Music boxes had a gorgeous sound, but it was the same sound from one perforated disc to another.  Also, it would seem from this set of selections that music boxes had a limited range of pitches.  Which is to say, all twelve of these selections are in the same key: F-sharp (or, if we're thinking "down," G-flat).  While ripping these, it occurred to me midway that "Hey, these all sound like they're in the same key."  Because, as I realized upon review, they are.  At first, I used a Youtube Middle C video for a reference tone, and I determined a tritone (three whole steps) difference between Middle C and the key of the Regina.  (I don't have perfect pitch, but my relative pitch is good.)  Plugging in my Casio WK-3800 (which, despite the brand, is a fine synth), I confirmed the key--F-sharp.  Or G-flat.  A weird default key for a music box, but then why not?

It's not a cut on mechanical music devices, which were state-of-the-art tech for their day, to note that the phonograph had more to offer.  Just as TV has more to offer than radio.  Then again, radio has made a comeback by way of internet radio and digital music streams (analogous to radio playlists), so maybe mechanical music will stage a comeback.  The probability seems low, but what do I know?  Hey, that rhymed...

DOWNLOAD: Original Music Box Favorites Vol. One.zip

O Holy Night

Christians Awake

Cloister Bells

Come Hither Ye Children

Under the Mistletoe Bow (Mother Goose Song)

On the Christmas Tree the Lights Are Burning

Holy City

Song of the Virgin Mary

Still Night Holy Night

Monastery Bells

Good King Wenceslas

Skaters Waltz

Lee

"Christmas Favorites," from Promenade. Or, what do MINT SPC pressings sound like?

 

This is complicated.  This four-EP Promenade set, wherein most of the sides are titled Christmas Favorites, is a fascinating hodgepodge of Lord-knows-what-source-LP-or-EP-set selections, with Santa Claus himself (sounding like Art Carney with a respiratory virus) turning up on the A side of the fourth EP to narrate the story of Christmas.  A quick Discogs search failed to reveal the original source for this track--or any of the others.  And, as usual, the audio quality is quite good, for the most part (though several selections are accompanied by annoying hum, which I didn't try to suppress, since doing so detracts from the fidelity), but the pressings are garbage, basically.  I previously described the sound-editing hassle involved, and so I won't say anything more about the hideous, day-ruining, "I'd love to smash these things into tiny particles" frustration I endured.  No point in revisiting that sheer Hades-on-Earth experience.  From which I'll never fully recover, probably.  But no point in describing it.

  
And now Blogger is creating larger-than-usual paragraph breaks. What the...?  It already decided to divert this blog's comments to my gmail account, and after informing me that I had turned off the comment notification feature (I had not).  And, on line, there is an explanation of this action on Google's part.  Essentially, the idea is to inconvenience its users for the sake of "security."  "We'll make this service more secure by not allowing you to utilize it."  I tend to doubt that inconveniencing customers does anything to hamper the efforts of hackers.

Anyway, the topside sleeve/mailing wrapper/envelope, which is for a completely different EP set, was used by the eBay dealer who shipped these mint-in-sleeves records.  And I had to wonder, did the mismatch originated with SPC?  In fact, did this EP set ever have its own sleeve?  Or any sleeve, period?

And, after searching eBay and Discogs, it does appear that these were released without a mailing envelope/sleeve, which seems hugely improbable, but then we're talking about a famously ultra-cheap label group.

Though mint, these discs feature all the pressing flaws we expect from the Synthetic Plastics Company of New Jersey, which I won't go into.  Except to note the following: Loud surface noise at the close of each track, pressing faults which necessitated umpteen file splices to remove, and... so on.  But these are stressors to be removed from my memory.  No point in dwelling on the visit-to-Hades nature of this audio-rescue effort.  So I won't.

But, despite all these things (which I refrained from noting), this is a hugely fun set.  The performances are mostly fine, and as noted above, the fidelity WOULD be terrific if not for the vinyl issues.  And I find these Franken-presentations perversely gratifying.  The let's-just-cobble-something-together aspect of budget collections is kind of endearing, I think.  Yes, the budgets all lied and claimed to offer a superior product, but what's a little truth-flipping?  As far as that goes, what IS truth?  We want to regard truth as an empirically testable feature of the natural world, but it's undeniably also, to a degree, something intangible.  But we won't discuss this.  I don't want to sound like I'm professing any version of, "Reality is simply what we perceive it to be."  Then again, what if that's the case?  But I won't go there...

DOWNLOAD: Christmas Favorites--Promenade EP set.zip

Santa Claus is Coming to Town; Jingle Bells; Adeste Fideles--Promenade Orch. and Chorus

Winter Wonderland--Billy Reed, Promenade Orchestra

Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer; Deck the Hall; Good King Wencelas (sic); God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen; Joy to the World--Promenade Orchestra and Chorus

Home for the Holidays--Frank Moon With the Promenade Orchestra

White Christmas; Silent Night; O Little Town of Bethlehem--Promenade Orch. and Chorus

Nuttin' for Christmas--Bob Stain With the Promenade Orch. and Chorus (originally credited on the Peter Pan single to "Bobby Stewart")

Frosty the Snowman; It Came Upon a Midnight Clear; Away in a Manger; The First Noel; Hark the Herald Angels Sing--Promenade Orch. and Chorus

Sleigh Ride--Laura Leslie With the Promenade Orchestra

Lee

A Christmas without Line Material... cannot be allowed. A re-re-re-repost.

1949 sleeve (above) and disc (below)

My latest re-re-re-repost of these marvelous sides, which are quite probably the best company-giveaway holiday singles of all time.  (That should be a Grammy category...)  Here goes:

Here's info on Line Material , if you want to read about the company.  (Or maybe not, since the site seems to have changed.)  I'm sure there's more material (no pun intended) out there regarding LM, but for our purposes, what matters are the marvelous Christmas sides they produced as giveaways for their employees, starting in 1957 and ending in 1962.  I'm also including a giveaway from 1949, with narration by Jim Ameche, though it's a very standard affair and nothing remotely like the elaborate, joyous productions to come.  Also, their 1956 The Magic of Christmas (kindly donated by Ernie), which isn't all that bad, and which ends this playlist. I didn't want to place it first, since it hardly compares to the 1957-1962 efforts, which were arranged by London-born John McCarthy (1919-2009), best known for his Ambrosian Singers Christmas sides.  I wonder if the superbly professional singers on these 45s are those same folks.  From 1961 to 1966, the Ambrosian Singers were known as the London Symphony Orchestra Chorus, and it's possible their services exceeded the holiday give-away record budget of LM at this point, since the last McCarthy LM side is the 1962 Let's Trim the Christmas Tree.  It could have been recorded the year before.  It's interesting that the Singers' increased status corresponds with the end of McCarthy's services to LM.  I feel bad for all the kids who, after six years of enjoying Christmas giveaway sides of a major-label quality, had to go without.  That must have been a bummer.

These are new rips (note: as of 2019).  I had been reposting my c. 2007 rips, but these should be an improvement, as I used my 1.0 mil mono stylus and VinylStudio declicking.  I've also acquired clean copies of every side but the 1962 title, which isn't all that nicked up--just moderately.  Nearly all its surface noise is no more.

If you haven't heard these before, you'll very possibly be surprised by the stunningly good quality of performance and production.  I consider it highly improbable that any other company's holiday sides came anyplace near these.  Oh, and, "Merry Christmas... from Line Material.  Merry Christmas... from Line Material. (Repeat till fade)."

UPDATE: And the King of Jingaling has the 1956-1962 LM accompanying-book scans here (save for 1957): LM books. Many thanks to Brad!  Happily, the link still current (as of 12/4/2024).

And, last year, Ernie posted the 1964 Line Material release (or the Canadian LM release, anyway) at his blog: The Story of Santa Claus.  Not on a par with the John McCarthy classics, but what is?  Probably a letdown to the kids who grew up on the 1958-1962 giveaways.  (Son or daughter of LM employee: "Where's the 'Merry Christmas from Line Material'????")  Interesting, nevertheless.

DOWNLOAD: Line Material Christmas sides.zip 1949-1962.

Santa's North Pole Band, 1957
The Sounds of Christmas, 1958
The Kinds of Christmas, 1959
Santa's Factoree, 1960
The Day That Santa Was Sick, 1961
Let's Trim the Christmas Tree, 1962

Keeping Christmas--Don Amache, 1949.
The Magic of Christmas, 1956


Lee

Carol of the Little Drummer Boy (repost from 2021)

At the moment, I'm doing a re-rip which has proved to be a tremendous sound-editing challenge. Had I known ahead of time what I was in for, I'm not sure what I'd have done with the four 45-rpm EPs. Tossed them down the bank? Hammered them into small pieces on the studio workbench? Used lighter fluid and a match? (No--I don't want to risk a fire.)  At any rate, they'll serve as an ample tribute to SPC's epic lack of quality control.  Like most cheap label groups, SPC saved on quality control by not having any.  (That'll do it!)

In the meantime (assuming I ever finish that project), a repost of the actual/factual/true/I-took-the-time-to-verify-the-details history of The Little Drummer Boy, which was plagiarized from Katherine K. Davis' 1941 Carol of the Drum--though, the last time I checked, Wikipedia was still getting the story incorrect. It's not rocket science. And, currently, Wikipedia gives the correct background for the number, only it has Simeone "popularizing" it in 1958.  I prefer to call theft "theft."  Or robbery, stealing, snatching, thieving, swiping, appropriating, etc.  Anyway, my 2021 essay:

Above is the original manuscript of Katherine K. Davis' 1941 choral piece Carol of the Drum.  Davis' song was stolen by Harry Simeone in 1958 and retitled The Little Drummer Boy.  As you can see below, Simeone initially attempted to take sole credit for it:

Classy.  Then things got even classier when Henry Onorati, the 20th Century-Fox Records head, decided he wanted a piece of the song, too, and so his name was added to Simeone's.  Now, the various on-line Drum accounts that I've read (say that ten times in a row) tiptoe around the issue in a rather inane fashion, as if reluctant to accuse Simeone or Onorati of theft, maybe because--I don't know--maybe because it might upset people who grew up thinking that The Little Drummer Boy was a 1958 original.  And so they soft-pedal the history.  Not sure.  It could be a case of not wanting to shatter people's illusions.  Or of bowing to common bias.  Or, simply, not giving a holy hoot.

What I do know is that, if you take something you didn't create and treat it as your own creation, you have committed an act called plagiarism.  Period.  It doesn't matter if Wikipedia or some other source wants to pretend that Simeone's record is merely a different version of Katherine K. Davis' song (!!), because suppose you or I decide to take the Beatles' Hey Jude, retitle it Make It Bad, throw in a few original guitar licks, and claim it as our own?  What do you think would happen?  Do you think we'd get co-composer credit with John and Paul?  No, I very seriously doubt that would be the result.

But, I guess, when two musical powerhouses decide to help themselves to someone else's work, it's somehow a different matter.  At any rate, Katherine Davis sued, and she retained partial ownership of the song, though she clearly should have gotten back the entire thing (plus the title).  

To make things less rational, I guess, Wikipedia and other sources seem to be operating under a very weird notion that major changes have been made to Katherine's original work over the years (in the choral realm, that is), but that's utter nonsense, at least when we're talking Soprano/Alto/Tenor/Bass settings.  First of all, four-part harmony is four-part harmony, whether it's sung by four people or forty, and whether it's done in SATB or "close" harmony fashion.  It's true that the Trapp Family Singers' 1951 version utilizes three voices for the women, with the female leads moving in triads rather than in a duet fashion, but I regard the addition of a fifth voice to be an embellishment of four-part harmony, not a new type or texture.  Katherine's setting is the template for all the standard choral versions.  All of them.  Period.

The Trapp Family's 1952 recording is the earliest I (or apparently anyone else) is aware of, and it's clear that, come the late 1950s, the work was turning into a standard holiday choral item, given that it enjoyed at least three 1957 recordings--those of The Jack Halloran Singers, The Testor Chorus, and The Moody Chorale.  Compared to the quiet but lively Trapp version, Halloran's arrangement is something closer to a dirge, and I much prefer a faster tempo.  Both the Testor Chorus and the identified singers on the lone "fake hit" version I've located (which was released by at least three different budget label groups) speed things up like they should, but Halloran's treatment, which was swiped by Simeone along with Davis' tune, is the standard, draggy one.  Maybe that's why so many people pan this Christmas standard--it seems to take forever to get to the "smiled at me" part.  I've included two recordings of the lone "fake" version, one in stereo, and the other in mono, and both mastered at different pitches.  (Not by me, I should note.)

The Trapp Family, of course, was the super-talented group whose story was fictionalized in The Sound of Music.  The true vs. invented details make for some hilarious reading.  By the way, the family's 1952 recording was reissued as a single by Decca in 1959 (left--image swiped from Discogs).  1959 was the year The Sound of Music opened on Broadway, and I'm pretty sure that explains the release.

Anyway, Davis, a profoundly gifted composer whose specialty was choral pieces for children--girls, especially--certainly didn't deserve to be treated like this.  I mean, it must be nice to have one of your works become hugely popular, but not so nice to have to share it with two thieves.

A question that always comes up is how to classify Drum/Drummer--as in, what specific Christmas song tradition does it conform to?  That's easy. Generally speaking, it belongs to the longtime Christmas carol tradition of treating the Nativity as a current event, in a "You Are There" fashion (e.g., Bring a Torch, Jeanette, Isabella).  More specifically, it belongs to the popular "What gift can I give?" tradition--as in, what gift do I have to give the baby Jesus?  The all-time great example of same has to be the 1872 masterpiece, In the Bleak Midwinter: 

What can I give Him, 

Poor as I am? — 

If I were a Shepherd 

I would bring a lamb; 

If I were a Wise Man 

I would do my part, — 

Yet what I can I give Him, — 

Give my heart.

The same sentiment is expressed, in a slightly different way, in Thou Didst Leave Thy Throne, in which the no-room-at-the-inn situation is ingeniously answered:

O come to my heart, Lord Jesus 

There is room in my heart for Thee

And so the drummer boy, who is poor like the Baby Jesus, wonders what gift he can give.  Answer: the drum.  So, the drummer boy gives the baby his drum, and the baby smiles at him.  A lovely touch, and one that appeals to children.  My late foster mother Bev, the English prof, felt that it takes a special genius to speak to children in art.  In this case, that genius belonged to Katherine K. Davis, and not to the two guys who shoved their way into the song credit.

A big thanks to Ernie, who ripped his Jack Halloran track for me from the hard to find Christmas Is A-Comin' LP of 1957, on which Davis is listed as the arranger, kind of ironically.  (The "Arr." part could be a typo--dunno.)  Halloran was the honest guy out of the three.  So, naturally, he ends up as a footnote.

DOWNLOAD: Carol of the Little Drummer Boy.zip

Carol of the Drum (Czech Carol, Katherine K. Davis)--The Trapp Family Singers, 1952
Carol of the Drum (Katherine K. Davis)--The Testor Chorus, C. Dr. Harry T. Carlson, 1957
Carol of the Drum (Katherine K. Davis)--The Moody Chorale, Dir. by Don Hustad, 1957
Carol of the Drum (Arr. K.K. Davis)--The Jack Halloran Singers, 1957
The Little Drummer Boy (Same as SPC and other budgets)--The Broadway Pops Orch. With Featured Vocalists and Chorus (Tiara TST 105, Record 2)
Little Drummer Boy (Same as SPC, etc.)--Unknown choir, from Tops in Pops (Ultraphonic 5020L).

Lee