Today’s selections are all instrumentals. With songs (i.e,. with words) I avoid the very familiar ones because I want my “brand” to be of giving you new musical treasures for your midwinter holiday memory banks. With instrumentals it doesn’t work that way.
In my experience (and it is extensive in this regard) when I encounter a tune (i.e., without words) that I have not heard before it may be very pretty or moving but since it isn’t already associated with Christmas it just doesn’t register as Christmassy music for me. Maybe it would be different if I were a musician or a dancer.
That even applies to melodies from songs that are Christmas standards in their home countries, and to tunes I hear in a Christmas context (like listening to a Christmas music album.) On the other hand, if it is a melody that I already recognize as being associated with Christmas (or Hanukkah, or the Winter Solstice) it seems like a holiday song even without having the words.
So to cater to my biases, not my brand, two or three of today’s instrumental pieces are probably going to be recognizable to you as familiar Christmas song melodies. But (I hope!) they still strike you as being fresh and new because of having creative arrangements and non-typical instrumentation. All of the songs are about sleigh rides, so technically they are not really Christmas songs at all. But many songs and tunes about wintertime activities tend to get pigeonholed into that midwinter holiday category.
The first one has long been a favourite melody of mine, Christmas or not, although I can’t recall when I first heard it. It is the Troika movement from Sergei Prokofiev’s Lieutenant Kijé Suite. Prokofiev first wrote it in 1933 as part of the score for Lieutenant Kijé directed by Aleksandr Faintsimmerone, of the first Soviet-era Russian talkie comedy films.
At that point in his career the conservatory-trained Prokofiev was well-known in Russia as an accomplished composer but had developed a reputation as being an avant garde one whose works were marked by dissonance. (He had of course been inspired by the great Russian composer Igor Stravinsky who was a generation ahead of him.) But and he was tiring of that style and wanted to break free.
This was Prokofiev's first attempt at a film music, and his first commissioned work. He had just returned to Soviet Russia after having spent 10 years studying and working in Paris. By his own admission he was "restive, and afraid of falling into academism." He welcomed the opportunity to remain avant garde by writing a movie score back when that was a new thing, and showing his compositional flexibility by doing it for a comedy film. For his part, the director Faintsimmer was taking quite a risk in choosing Prokofiev to compose the music for his first sound motion picture. But the film in general, and its scoring, proved to be a big success for both of them.
In response to the acclaim that the film was bringing him, Prokofiev recycled the melodies with considerably revised orchestration into a five-movement symphonic suite. This is the fourth movement from that suite. In the film it was the melody for a tavern song and the background music for an exciting ride in a sleigh pulled by three horses – the titular “troika.” (You can click here to hear it being played by a symphony as Prokofiev composed it.) But what I am giving you here is a re-arrangement of it written by Fraser Jackson for the Toronto-based Caliban Quartet of Bassoonists.
Caliban is comprised of Fraser Jackson, Nadina Mackie Jackson, Kathleen McLean and Matieu Lussier, augmented for this piece by Michael Francis on the walkabout dulcimer, Mark Duggan on the xylophone and Tambourine, and Brian Barlow on sleigh bells and triangle. It is from their 2005 CD Caliban Does Christmas.
Who is playing this version of Sleigh Ride began as something of a mystery. It is an “Easter egg” track on the above Winter’s Grace album that was released by bluegrass musicians Laurie Lewis and Tom Rozum. “Easter egg” means that it is a bonus track at the end of the CD that is not included on the playlist, and therefore there is no information about it in the liner notes. Therefore I had to hunt around a bit to figure out who’s doing this fancy pickin’.
I could recognize that this is a solo performance by an accomplished banjo player, but neither Laurie nor Tom plays that instrument, or at least not a sufficiently accomplished that they include it in their lists of multi-instrumental talents. I suspected from its unfinished, clumsy ending that it is not a disgarded planned track or even an out-take. From the laughs at the end it sounds like it was someone showing off for musical peers during a break in the recording session.
Checking the musicians listed for the various tracks there is only one banjo player – Craig Smith (1945-2012.) A bit of online research confirmed that he was considered to be a very fine banjoist. Reading the fine print in the thanks section at the end of the liner noted confirmed that I had identified the right musician. It says: “When we asked Craig Smith to play [on our proposed album] he said: ‘Why sure, I even know a version of Sleigh Ride.’” Mystery solved.
You will probably find yourself singing along with this music but Sleigh Ride actually started out as an semi-classical orchestral piece. Composer Leroy Anderson wrote it in a style that he thought would be suitable for the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra’s then-new Boston Pops series of performances. Conductor Arthur Fieldler agreed with that assessment. At the time neither the composer nor the conductor thought of it as a Christmas season song. It was first performed at the Boston Pops’ June concert in 1948.
The lyrics were added two years later by the tin pan alley lyricist Mitchell Parish. It now continues not only as one of the better-known Christmas classic songs but also as a mainstay fixture for light classical concerts during the Christmas season by symphony orchestras everywhere.
Jingle Bells is another unplanned track that grew out of a recording session. The duet is played by the Hawaiian ki ho'alu (slack key guitar) masters Led Kaapana and Bob Brozman. The two friends often play together and both are multi-instrumentalists. For this tune Led plays a Gjango a steel string steel guitar and Bob slides on a National steel guitar, both using “taro patch” tuning.
The slack key style of guitar playing was developed in Hawai’i when Mexican cowboys introduced guitars to the Island early in the 19th century. Ukuleles were first introduced on the Islands in the 1880s by Portuguese immigrants, and slide guitar techniques were invented there in the 1920s. The Hawai’ians adapted the standard tuning to better conform to their traditional music’s harmonic structures. According to Wikipedia:
Nearly all slack key requires retuning the guitar strings from standard (EADGBE), and this usually (but not always) means lowering or "slacking" several strings. The result will most often be an open major chord, although it can also be a major-seventh chord, a sixth, or (rarely) a minor. … Different tunings were once guarded fiercely and passed down as family secrets. …
The most common slack-key tuning, called "taro patch," makes a G major chord. Starting from the standard EADGBE, the high and low E strings are lowered or "slacked" to D and the fifth string from A down to G, so the notes become DGDGBD.
This Jingle Bells track is from Hawai’ian Slack Key Christmas, a sampler album from Dancing Cat Records. That company was founded by pianist George Winston to preserve a record of “both the musicians who have influenced his music and musicians whose music he felt needed to be preserved for future generations.” Winston plays only the piano player professionally but his favourite style of music is slack key guitar. He knew that in the world of slack key many of the most highly-regarded and influential musicians were not the professional performers but people who mostly play and jam with their friends as personal and family recreation. For that reason many of the most accomplished ki ho'alu players had never been recorded.
Previous to the founding of Dancing Cat Records almost all recordings that included slack key playing were as members of Hawai’ian bands or as accompaniment to singers. Dancing Cat reached out to those guitarists to professionally record them playing their compositions for what it calls their Masters Collection. To help sell the more esoteric albums by these musicians who are not known to the general public, the company has also put out two Christmas music sampler CDs in which they mostly play covers of the Christmas standards, .
Dancing Cat usually records the musicians playing solo, and indeed that is what most of the tracks on those two Christmas albums are. But sometimes jams break out when musicians are in the studio together. The liner note for this tune quotes Bob: “We took a break in the middle of otherwise more serious session work. It was spontaneous with a spirit of fun.”
This Dixieland jazz version of Over the River and Through the Woods is from the above CD album, originally released on 33rpm vinyl by Warner Brothers in 1959. It is one of nine Ira Ironstrings albums and several 45rpm singles that they released from 1958 - 1962 in the early days for that company as a record producer. The Ira Ironstrings albums were among the new company’s hottest sellers and people wondered who they were. The albums are clearly by a talented Dixieland band but there was no actual band by that name. At the time the company refused to divulge the names of the bandleader or members of this studio session ensemble. It later came out that the bandleader was Alvin McBurney (1908-2004) who used the stage name Alvino Rey. He was the brother-in-law of the new Warner Brothers Recording company’s President, who had formerly been the President of Columbia Records. Rey was still under contract to Columbia at the time, hence the secrecy.
As a musician Rey is best remembered for playing the slide steel guitar. He was one of the earliest musicians to introduce that Hawai’ian instrument to the wider world. He called it a “talking guitar”. As a band leader he was moderately successful, but actually Alvin McBurney did better by joking around playing lighthearted Dixieland jazz under his secret Ira Ironsides persona than he ever had under his official stage name of Alvino Rey.
As to the story behind the tune, it is the melody for a children’s song that is probably more familiar to Americans than Canadians. That is because it is associated with their Thanksgiving instead of Christmas (and a sleigh ride song is not very relevant to Canadian Thanksgiving most years.) If you are not familiar with the song here is a brief video in which it is sung by Larry Groce.
I cannot find when or by whom Over the River and Through the Wood was set to its familiar melody (and that’s not for lack of trying!) But it has had this melody at least since the mid-19th century. As far as I can tell, the melody is used for no other songs, and I have never heard the song sung to a different melody. Given the time period involved, and its survival in pop culture for about 180 years, this exclusiveness of the melody is very unusual.
Actually, the story about the poem that became the song’s lyrics, and the woman who wrote it, is very interesting. I wrote an essay about it that is included in one of my first online postings of this Bill’s Midwinter Music series. The story bears repeating so I’ll re-post that essay here:
Essay: Lydia Maria Child; more than a sleigh ride girl
Lydia Maria Child (née Francis; 1802-1880) is now primarily remembered for her authorship of this children’s song, which is very unfortunate. Even if she were to be remembered only for her contributions to children’s literature it should be for her having been one of America’s first authors to pioneer that genre, rather than for this particular children’s poem. In 1826, Maria (the name she favoured over Lydia) founded Juvenile Miscellany, the first English language publication intended exclusively for children. She wrote and self-published that children’s magazine for eight years.
But she was also much more than that. She wrote and published America’s first domestic advice manual and cookbook aimed for working class women rather than for the cooks and housewives of middle- and upper-class families. It was called The American Frugal Housewife. According to food historian Kathleen Fitzgerald: “Child was writing as ‘Aunt Maria’ for young wives who had migrated to the newly opened West or to big cities to start families and were setting up households without the help or advice of their mothers.”
More importantly, Child was an early anti-slavery activist who wrote and published an influential scholarly analysis of that topic called An Appeal in Favour of That Class of Americans Called Africans. It was America’s first antislavery tract in book form, published 19 years before Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
She knew that taking a position on the most important social justice issue of the day would be detrimental to the sales of her children’s literature as well as her domestic advice writings. The book’s Introduction she says: “I am fully aware of the unpopularity of the task I have undertaken; but though I expect ridicule and censure, it is not in my nature to fear them.” Her observation about unpopularity proved correct: Even though political views were not expressed in the children’s magazine her political views turned the parents of much of her audience against her, especially in the South, and led to the demise of both of her magazines and reduced sales of her books..
Besides her dedication to abolition, she was also one of the early women’s suffrage activists, believing that women and slaves were in a similar position in that white men held both in subjugation and treated them as property rather than as full human beings. In fact, her activism on that issue led to a serious split in the Abolition Movement itself when woman began insisting on equal opportunity to participate and be leaders in anti-slavery organizations.
Child also campaigned for the very unpopular idea of respect for the human rights and various cultures of America’s Indigenous people. She wrote a pamphlet that opposed the forced displacement of the Seminole people from their traditional lands in the places that became known as Northern Florida, Georgia and Alabama, and supported tolerance for Native people’s traditional cultural practices (including polygamy).
Although nominally a Unitarian she was not active in that or any other church. In 1855 she wrote a 3-volume history of Christianity in which she blamed many of the world’s ills on religious dogma and theology. “It is impossible to exaggerate the evil work that theology has done in the world”. Commenting on theologians: “What a blooming paradise would the whole earth be if the same amount of intellect, labor, and zeal had been expended on science, agriculture, and the arts!”
Reviewing the titles of her books, pamphlets or articles it does not appear that she was an activist for another social issue that was gaining prominence in America at the time, especially among women -- the Temperance Movement.
For more information about this pioneering author and social justice activist, in addition to her Wikipedia entry (which includes a list of her writings) I recommend this biography in the Introduction to a compilation of her correspondence (which also includes links to that correspondence), this brief biography from the Poetry Foundation, and this brief biography from ThoughtCo.com, or here from a libertarian organization, as places to start.
Lydia Maria Child remained active and prolific until her death in 1880 at the age of 78. It is very unfortunate that she is now only a footnote in history and is remembered primarily as the author of a catchy but rather banal children’s song.
Dec 15 - Sleigh-racing day! (all instrumentals)