The Takeaway begins the holiday season with a week-long "Remixing the Holidays" series. All week long, we’ll be talking with musicians, music lovers, writers, and you, our listeners, about the best songs of the season. Jon Solomon, a DJ who hosts an annual 24-hour Christmas show on Princeton University's WPRB gives us his best and worst Christmas music of the year.
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The show is a co-production of WNYC Radio and Public Radio International, in collaboration with New York Times Radio and WGBH Boston.
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Comments [6]
My favorite Christmas songs by far are "Little Drummer Boy" by Bob Seger and "Oh Holy Night" by Johnny Mathis.
My favorite by far is the cover of Mavis Staples' Christmas Vacation by Detroit's own Blasé Splee.
http://soundcloud.com/jonberz/blase-splee-christmas-vacation-by-mavis-staples
For melancholy Christmas songs, there's nothing like Joni Mitchell's "River"...from her Blue album
It's comin' on Christmas
They're cuttin' down trees
They're putting up reindeer and singin' songs of joy and peace
I wish I had a river I could skate away on...
To add to your Christmas jingle, if you dare
My dad used to sing:
"Up on the housetop , clob , clob , clob
Here comes that big fat old slob.
Dressed in his red suit , he looks like a Commie,
that's what I was told by daddy and mommy."
He was not a fan of this secular holiday borrowed in it's entirety from
pagan religious winter solstice festivities. In fact Christmas was illegal
in New England at it's inception. The purists realized it was heathen and
avoided it. Anyway I used to get a kick out of my pop's re-wording of
these songs
I notice that many of these songs speak of Christmas as a generic season, but not enough speak of Christ - like Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring, etc.
If we needed any reason NOT to contribute to public radio, this one easily fulfills the mission. Nothing like being asked to endure music already defined as awful.
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