Playlist:
Songs We Love The Burns Sisters Band 2:52
The Christmas Roundelay Phillio & Willio & friends 1:41
Why Does Every Christmas Song Have So Many Chords? Wendell Ferguson 4:56
Songs We Love was written and is led here by Marie Burns, accompanied by her sisters Jeanie and Annie. Listening to this you might think that they are a country & western group. But no, their background and the singing style for most of their other songs are rooted solidly in the upper New York community of folksingers and songwriters, and their activism for social justice issues comes from the Woody Guthrie end of the political spectrum.
They began singing professionally in the late 1970s as a quintet. Over time sisters dropped out to devote more time to their families. As a performing group The Burns Sisters are currently a duo of the two eldest singing sisters – Annie and Marie. This song is from their album Tradition: Holiday Songs Old & New, released in 1996.
The Christmas Roundelay is the “B” side of this 45 rpm record self-published by “Willio & Phillio”, who at the time were two aspiring puppeteers and singers. They are actually Phil Baron and the late Will Ryan. Will is credited on the record with having written this song so I suspect that is his voice leading it in the first verse. At the time they lived in Cleveland, Ohio where they self-published this 45 rpm record. They had gigs as a comedic singing duo on TV and radio, and traveled to put on shows in comedy clubs and at universities.
Will and Phil both later moved to Los Angeles and went on to have fairly steady roles in Disney Channel TV shows. Will did the voices for Teddy Ruxpin and Teddy the Tooth in both the Disney TV series and audiobooks, and Piglet in the television series Welcome to Pooh Corner. Phil is most well-known as the voice for Rabbit and Tigger, and the singing voice for Eeyore on that show and in many other Winnie the Pooh cartoons. They both had many other voice-acting gigs, mostly in children’s shows.
I originally got this song from one of the “sharity” blog sites that make out-of-print about Christmas music available for collectors. I can’t remember which one it was but it might have been Falalalala Fireside, Music you possibly won’t hear anyplace else, Ernie (Not Bert), Stubby’s House of Christmas, or A Christmas Yuleblog. (As far as I can tell only those first two are still active but all of them are still up and are a useful source of information and leads.) This obscure, out-of-print recording from the days of vinyl is right up any of those site’s alley.
All of those sharity sites were established before the days of YouTube and followed a similar ethic with regard to making old songs available: They did not follow the rules regarding obtaining legal clearances before posting the songs, but they did not knowingly post recordings that were still being published on either vinyl or CD. The general principles of sharity are that it is easier to get forgiveness than permission, and to have a willingness to remove any posts if a copyright holder requests it.
This year I was able to get a better copy of The Christmas Roundelay from YouTube but it was still pretty unbalanced in its stereo volume levels. I presume that is due to it not having been professionally recorded in the first place. Fortunately I am able to use a few of the features of my professional-grade Goldwave audio recording software (Thank you Jake Galbraith for introducing me to it!) and I spent some time improving the sound balance.
I suppose that from a music collector’s perspective this is no longer the authentic recording, but I think that it is better from a listener’s perspective. You can compare my revised version to this YouTube posting where I got it from.
Why Does Every Christmas Song Have So Many Chords? I learned about this song just a few days ago when Al Rankin, one of this newsletter’s subscribers, brought it to my attention. (Thanks, Al!) I admit that most of my selections have a bias towards songs and harmony singing and I tend to give musicians short shrift. So here is a song that was written and performed by Wendell Ferguson but it should especially appeal to musicians. I got the song from a YouTube video that appears to have been recorded in 2008 or 2009. You can click here or on the above picture to watch the video.
Besides being an incredibly funny song-writer (and namer of album-titles!) Wendell Ferguson is a musician’s musician. When I looked at the bio on his website I was somewhat surprised to find that he is mainly country performer, but not at all surprised that his main role is as a session and back-up musician for some of the biggest names in Canadian and American country, pop and folk music. He won the Canadian Country Music award for best guitarist seven times so they retired him from the category to give other guitarists a chance. Naturally he is in the Canadian Country Music Hall of Fame. Here is more information about him.
Near the beginning of this song Ferguson refers to Gershwin as the composer of a Christmas song. That caught my attention since I had never heard of one by him. Also, as a person who learns songs by ear I never notice what chords they have. So I fact-checked both the Gershwin reference and the basic premise of this song - I can’t let no fancy picker go around making fun of Christmas songwriters without good cause.
It turns out that George Gershwin did write the melody for one song that is at least Christmas-adjacent. It is a love song called Snow Flakes, AKA Love Me While the Snow Flakes Fall, and is in his rather obscure Broadway Brevities of 1920. You can read about it and see fake-book style sheet music for it here. The tune does seem to have a lot of chords. I can find no rendition of it as a song, but here is Gershwin’s Christmas tune being played on a piano. I am amazed that with the name Gershwin attached to it no one appears to have ever included the song on a Christmas album. Perhaps it could become another setting for While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night. ;)
As for the other Christmas songs demonstrated by Ferguson they do look to have a scary-difficult number of chords:
Dec 20 - Christmas Songs about Christmas songs