Some of My All-Time Favorite Christmas Albums

It's officially Christmastime and I'm going to list a few of my all-time favourite Christmas albums. Now mind you, I'm not one of these collectors of obscure holiday music nor do I have an extensive collection of Christmas albums. I have plenty of mp3's of shows I have recorded over the years on radio stations and special podcasts that people have put together. But I really don't spend time shopping around for them, especially since the best stuff is from the 50s, 60s and 70s and nothing made recently or nowadays will ever compare.

So here is a short list of some of my favourites and ones definitely worth checking out if you're not familiar with them. In no particular order:

The Anita Kerr Sings - Spend this Holiday with Me (1969)

This is a wonderful album. The music arrangements are very typical (and great) late 60's/early 70's sounding for pop music of the time. Sounds very much like The Free Design from the music to the vocals. I caught two songs off the radio many years ago from this album--the title track and Jingle Bell Rock--and was never able to find out who the artist was until a few years ago when I ordered a copy of this album on cd from Brazil! Anyway, this is a 5 star album and it stays on my iPod all year round.

Glen Campbell - That Christmas Feeling (1968)

Another hard-to-find album. And another I keep on my iPod all year long. This one is very mellow and some may even consider it a bit too melancholy for the festive season. But I love it cause Glen sounds so good on it and the arrangements are top-notch. His rendition of Roger Miller's "Old Toy Trains" is my favorite and I've never heard a better version yet. Other standout tracks include "Little Altar Boy," "Christmas is for Children" and "It Must Be Getting Close to Christmas."

The Partridge Family - A Partridge Family Christmas Card (1971)

If you like the sound of the Partridge Family--aka L.A. studio musicians known as 'The Wrecking Crew'--then you'll love this album. Ok, we all know the Partridge Family was not a real band. They were just actors with a storyline based upon a real band known as The Cowsills. But 'Keith Partridge' and 'Shirley Partridge' really did sing and they contributed their vocals to this album. The rest of the fictional family did not contribute at all to the music and albums. That being said this is a great early 70's pop/soft rock offering featuring the West Coast sound. Most of the numbers here are upbeat and you can't go wrong with any that Keith sings on.

                        

Elvis Presley - Elvis' Christmas Album (1957)

This is not only one of my favourite Christmas albums of all time, but it's one of my favourite albums period. This was the first time Christmas music met rock & roll. Oh sure, Elvis kept the traditional songs modest and low-key but he totally rocked out on the contemporary ones. The arrangements here are very simple and basic. Nothing more than piano, electric guitar, acoustic guitar, drums, double bass, organ and background vocals. Just like his non-Christmas music of the same era. Standout tracks include all of them, but in particular 'Santa Bring My Baby Back to Me,' 'Santa Claus is Back in Town' and 'I'll Be Home for Christmas.' This album happens to be the best selling Christmas album of all time and for good reason.

                         

Vince Guaraldi Trio - A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965)

This is a jazz album that has transcended its exclusive genre to become a pop smash. The music is wonderful. Simple arrangements. Playful melodies. Tunes that stay in your head. Mostly instrumental but a few with children's choirs. Probably the most memorable and recognizable tune, 'Linus & Lucy,' has become a Christmas staple even though the song itself has little or nothing to do with the holiday, other than having been featured in the animated classic. Other than 'Linus & Lucy,' my faves on this excellent album include both versions of 'Christmastime is Here,' 'Skating' and Christmas is Coming.'

                            

Kenny Burrell - Have Yourself a Soulful Little Christmas (1966)

Another jazz Christmas offering. This one definitely not as well-known as the Vince Guaraldi one but equally essential. Burrell is a master guitarist and surely my favourite player of the genre. The arrangements here include piano, bass, drums, horns and strings. He mainly plays his hollowbody electric but there are a few songs where he plays a nylon string acoustic. This album is timeless and his playing is effortless and spellbinding. It is bebop jazz at its finest during a wondrous era of recorded sound. The most remarkable tracks include 'My Favorite Things,' 'Little Drummer Boy,' 'God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen' and 'Children Go Where I Send Thee.' Gotta love that 60's album cover, too.

So there are 6 of my favourite Christmas albums of all time. I don't want to make this post super-long and it's getting late so I may do a part-two at a later time.

Roger Miller Records

It's been over a year since I got my new turntable and over a year since I last blogged here. We'll I'm back and I'm going to write about some of the LP's I've come across recently.

I've been acquiring vinyl records over the last year from thrift stores and garage sales and found some pretty good stuff. Lately, I've become interested in Roger Miller's first few albums. (I show how to play the bass lick to his "King of the Road" song on my other blog.) I found out his early albums are not available on cd for some strange reason. I've seen other lesser known artists' albums get reissued on cd which is puzzling. I'm a Roger Miller fan, especially after having purchased the 3-cd collection, "King of the Road: The Genius of Roger Miller." I enjoy his unique style of country/folk/pop.

That 3-cd boxed set is obviously not comprehensive and I wanted to hear the other songs on the albums which did not make it to the boxed set. So I started looking around on blogs--which are a great source for sharing music--but no luck. Funny thing is, I was also looking around recently for some shared Sonny James albums on blogs but to no avail either. Seems there's no one out there blogging & sharing classic country music artists' music for some reason. I have my suspicions why but I will not get into it here.

So after having no luck on various blogs, I started looking on eBay for those original albums. Plenty of them there but I specifically wanted to find stereo versions. There were far fewer stereo editions than mono editions available. Oh, and the boxed set mentioned above features all the early cuts in pure mono. I've heard some of his songs in stereo and always liked those versions better. I saved the best ones I could find so I could decide whether or not to buy them later.

I had another idea; why not check out the records at a thrift store I had not been to in a while? That's what I did and guess what? I found a stereo copy in very good condition of "The Return of Roger Miller," his second album from 1965. For like a dollar or less!

I have a small stack of records I've been buying at various thrift stores over the last year and a half. I just recently checked them out and found out that I have 2 more Roger Miller albums there! I don't even remember buying them. But one of them is "The 3rd Time Around" from 1965 and one titled "The Tunes That Launched the Career of Roger Miller" from 1964 on Camden Records. The first 2 albums mentioned are on Smash Records.

Unfortunately, it's a mono copy of "The 3rd Time Around." So I have to keep looking around for a stereo edition of it as well as the next few that were released after this album.

The other album I discovered I already had was this one:

The sleeve has a copyright date of 1964 but after I recorded the album into my computer, created the individual tracks, burned them onto cd and then prepared to import them into my iTunes library, the year displayed as 1972. I can't find any info online about the precise year of this record. But it does have some of his earlier songs. Probably singles. I can't really say. But the songs are all in stereo and there are some on there that I was already familiar with because they happen to be on the boxed set. And a few others really stood out as some really good cuts.

Once I learn how to upload these LP's to a file sharing host I will make them available for downloading here. In the meantime I will keep looking out for more cool old records and digitizing the ones I already have.