Playlist
Hannelah Cori Connors 3:48
Would You Like to Hold the Baby Joyce Poley 3:53
Somebody Talking ‘bout Jesus Odetta 2:02
Hannelah This is a new Christmas story that Cori Connors made up. She tells the story poetically in the song, but here is a prose version of the story as well as the song’s lyrics. Back in 2006, instead of the usual researched liner notes I wrote a story that I called The Christmas Angels to accompany my annual Christmas Music Sampler so I know that when you are developing a fictional story the characters can come to life in one’s mind. In the end, it seemed to me like mine were telling me how the story should develop. Perhaps Cori Connors felt the same way about Hannaleh.
I can’t recall how I first learned about singer-songwriter Cori Connor but she is one of those singer-songwriters whose website I check every year to see if she has released a new Christmas album. Over the years I feel as if I have gotten to know her and like her has a person.
Cori and her family live in Farmington, Utah, where her husband David has been Mayor and a District Court judge. You can hear them sing a heartwarming duet together here. (It is bringing a tear to my eye as I type this.) She has seven children, and now eleven grandchildren. I can’t recall ever reading that they are Mormons, but her songs carry the strong family and religious values of that religion. They also show changes in her perspective. Cori’s two most recent albums are what one might expect from a Mormon grandmother – the latest one is a collection of lullabies and the one before that was commissioned by a pre-school curriculum program.
Cori is among the relatively small proportion of singer-songwriters whose songs have gone on to be recorded by major pop singers. In her case, singers who have covered her songs include Linda Ronstadt, country music star Chris LeDoux, and Tarja Turunen (who was the lead singer of the hit Finnish metal band Nightwish.) Those cover recordings combined with Cori’s own album sales have earned her platinum status as a songwriter from the National Music Publishers Association.
Cori has released two self-published Christmas albums. As soon as I discovered her 2001 Sleepy Little Town album I copied several songs from it into my candidate files and they began appearing on my annual Christmas Samplers CDs. I bought One Small Boy as soon as it was released in 2010 and this is the second song that I have drawn from that album. Click here to hear the very different style of song that got used before Hannaleh. It will give you a better sense of why I feel I know Cori personally from her song-writing.
I got Would You Like to Hold the Baby? from a great self-published 1998 Christmas album from the singer and songwriter Joyce Poley called The Gift of Christmas. Here are the lyrics:
I bought the album from a thrift store this year, and it is one of my best thrift store or garage sale music finds ever! As you might guess, when I am looking at used Christmas albums I am not just looking for ones by singers or groups who I know that I like, and certainly not for ones by famous celebrity pop singers (which I know from experience mostly include covers of the “Christmas favourites” and are performed with over-the-top production values.) So although I had never heard of Joyce Paley before it did not put me off. Discovering performers who are new to me is sorta my thing.
When looking at an album from performers who are unknown to me I mainly select albums by scanning the song-list on the back. If all or almost all of the songs on the list are the familiar “Christmas favourites” I won’t buy it. If I don’t recognize the names of the songs that is promising, and I look through the liner notes more carefully. In this case, the only familiar songs were The Christmas Wish, Roger Miller’s Old Toy Trains, and the ubiquitous Silent Night as the closing song. This album has almost no information in the liner notes other than that the songwriter attributions which were mostly to Joyce Poley herself. The song titles seemed mostly secular and not about Santa Claus. Very promising! I’ll buy it.
The going thrift store price for CDs is about $0.50-$2.00 and I enjoy taking my chances on my treasure hunts for good Christmas music. About 50% of the albums I buy this way turn out to be duds, with no songs that appeal to me. I put them on the recycling table in my apartment building’s laundry room.
A lot of albums that I buy using this system turn out to be from singer-songwriters and musicians who have a local or regional fan base. Often they sell their CDs at their Christmas concerts. If almost all of the songs relate to the Nativity story that suggests that their venues are church congregations, and the type of churches that tend to host touring musical groups and singers tend to be evangelical.
Very roughly speaking, if the songs are mostly Nativity but also include some secular ones it is probably Country music. If a lot of the songs are about Santa, elves and reindeer it is probably a children’s album. If the song titles seem to be mostly secular (but not about Santa) I don’t know what I might get. I tend to avoid albums from large choirs, but not ones by smaller music ensembles; I suppose that is a personal bias. But as you can see from my music selections in this series I’m willing to give all of these genres a try.
It turned out that Joyce Poley is primarily known as a hymn-writer for Unitarian-Universalist churches rather than as a performer. I found that she is a very good songwriter, and as you can hear, a good interpreter of her own songs. A lot of the tracks from this album have gotten through my first song filter and have been copied into the candidate files on my computer.
Besides UU hymns and songs she also writes ones that relate to ecological and social issues, peace, and compassion. I learned this from her website, which is for selling her sheet music and doesn’t even mention this or any other album. Here is what it says in the brief “About” on that website:
Joyce has been a singer/songwriter most of her life, and is well known in Unitarian Universalist circles as a composer and song leader. Her work has been described as “accessible” and “spiritually rich” and is widely used in places of worship as well as at a variety of school and community events.
Most of her songs are written with group singing in mind, and often include sections for soloists and/or small choirs. Two of her most popular songs are One More Step and When Our Heart Is In A Holy Place, both of which are included in the UU Association hymnals. In addition, her Christmas pageants have been presented in hundreds of congregations throughout North America – to considerable acclaim.
Joyce lives in Surrey, British Columbia, Canada.
This version of Somebody Talking 'bout Jesus was recorded in 1960 by the great American contralto folksinger Odetta (1930-2008). The song is in the song category that used to be referred to as “negro spirituals”. I don’t know what the acceptable term for them is now: I see that the Wikipedia entry for them is headed just spirituals but that bare term might leave some room for confusion.
The song was collected by Harold Courlander in 1950 from the singing of Dock Reed, accompanied by Vera Ward Hall. (Remember them? If you want a refresher read my newsletter posting from Dec 4.) I don’t know if there is earlier documentation about this song or not.
As for Odetta herself, it is impossible for me to do a satisfactory amount of research to explain what an important voice she was in the 1950s and ‘60s American folk music revival, for the civil rights movement, or in the development of contemporary Black gospel music and all of the forms of pop music that have arisen from that source. There very good recent article about that from The New Yorker so I won’t even try. There is also lots of other information about her online. When googling you do not need her full name – simply Odetta will do – and her extensive Wikipedia entry might be a good place to start.
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