Music To My Ears: The Enduring Dreams Of Secular Xmas Songs

The religious devotion behind Christmas music is an ancient facet of Western culture, but the song-minded impulse to celebrate the holiday's secular virtue is a modern development, proving our enduring ability to remake our culture to fit our contemporary dreams.
Even a time-tested hymn like "Good King Wenceslas," whose music was first published in Germany in 1582, was originally an ode to the vernal equinox, boasting such passages as "Spring has unwrapped her flowers." Its current lyrics (extolling a pious and beneficent legendary king from 10th-century Bohemia) were provided in 1853 by an English cleric who debuted them in a book called "Carols For Christmas-Tide."
As we experience the final holiday season of the second millennium and the wide range of seasonal songs that enhance it, many listeners might not be aware that the 20th-century panorama of nonreligious Christmas music-from Bessie Smith to Bing Crosby to Jimmy Buffett-has historical roots existing outside the bounds of mere errant ecclesiasticism. In Smith's case, her 1925 recording "At The Christmas Ball," with its initial braying horns and "Hooray for Christmas!" outburst, echoed the Africa-rooted Junkanoo (aka John Canoe) festivals of the American South (and the Caribbean), which began after midnight on Christmas morning and were traditional from the 1700s until as late (in some regions) as the 1940s.
The post-harvest carnival atmosphere of Christmastime in the Southern states before the Civil War (1861-65) was observed by both plantation overseers and the slave population (which was customarily given anywhere between a day and a few weeks of respite from their usual regimen) as they engaged in various public revels. The paternalistic calculation by slave owners in such brief spells of liberty-often fueled by copious free alcohol and the gaudy trappings of materialism-was to superficially sate greater thirst for self-empowerment.
In "The Battle For Christmas" (Vintage Books, 1996), historian Stephen Nissenbaum quotes African-American abolitionist/statesman Frederick Douglass' own writings as a former slave, in which Douglass surmised that such hard-partying holiday indulgence in the South played into racist bosses' commercial designs. "Their object seems to be, to disgust their slaves with freedom, by plunging them into the lowest depths of dissipation . . . So, when the holidays ended, we staggered up from the filth of our wallowing, took a long breath, and marched to the field-feeling, upon the whole, rather glad to go, from what our master had deceived us into belief was freedom, back into the arms of slavery."
The manipulative sins, personal sorrows, and wrenching self-deceptions of these pleasure-exploiting ploys laid the basis for some of the 20th century's most bittersweet Christmas songs, including 1924's "Santa Claus Blues" from Louis Armstrong with the Red Onion Jazz Babies, "Blind" Lemon Jefferson's 1928 "Christmas Eve Blues," Bo Chatmon and Walter Jacobs Vinson's (as the Mississippi Sheiks) 1930 "Sitting On Top Of The World" (in which the torment of being trapped in work "overalls" on Christmas Day is recounted), Robert Johnson's 1937 "Hellhound On My Trail" (with its futile fugitive fantasy: "If today was Christmas Eve/And tomorrow was Christmas Day/Aow, wouldn't we have a time, baby?"), and Sonny Boy (aka John Lee) Williamson's abject 1938 recording, "Christmas Morning Blues."
The seasonal lessons of these and comparable songs are just as instructive as those informing the saga of a savior's humble birth, as each in its own fashion counsels the unwary not to be hoodwinked during the year by what's currently hustled as dap style, "vivrant things," or the shortest route to a wad of dead presidents.
Yet even those who understandably decry the well-moneyed modern merchandising of Christmas should also recognize that even in antebellum America, efforts at preserving the pure and humble joys of the holiday often came from unexpected precincts. The rustic, temporal, wintertime anthem of "Jingle Bells" (whose first word, by the way, was intended as a verb) was actually penned as a Sunday school amusement and copyrighted in 1857 under its seminal title, "One Horse Open Sleigh"-yet its author was neither a country preacher nor a rural poet but rather wealthy Bostonian James Pierpont, great-grandfather of curmudgeonly John Pierpont Morgan, financier/founder of U.S. Steel, International Harvester, and the Pierpont Morgan Library.
Most people are aware that the nondenominational "White Christmas," which songwriter Irving Berlin (a secular Jew) published on May 6, 1942, is one of the most successful songs of all time. But at the point that same month when Bing Crosby cut the definitive version in Decca's Los Angeles studios for the soundtrack to the Paramount film "Holiday Inn," such "Christmas music was still largely the province of classical artists and church choirs," according to Crosby authority F.B. Wiggins' liner notes for "Bing Crosby: The Voice Of Christmas-The Complete Decca Christmas Songbook" (MCA/Decca, 1998). Nonetheless, the song copped the Academy Award for best film song of 1942.
Crosby's 1945 "Merry Christmas" EP, on which "White Christmas" was included, became the biggest album seller in history prior to the arrival of the CD. Among the earlier Christmas recordings by Crosby on that five-track collection were his 1935 renditions of the church hymns "Adeste Fideles" (1760) and "Silent Night" (1818), which Crosby had first balked at cutting because he felt such a move was borderline profane for a popular entertainer. In the decades since, "White Christmas" has been covered by acts as varied as Frank Sinatra, Otis Redding, the Ravens, the Drifters, the ska-era (Bob Marley & the) Wailers, Ernest Tubb, Garth Brooks, and Anne Sofie von Otter.
What rarely gets mentioned as the years accumulate is the potent message implicit in Berlin's classic, which emerged at a time when the gravest conflict in history, World War II, was raging, with Hitler unbeaten in Europe and the U.S. formally involved for only five-odd months following the Dec. 7, 1941, surprise bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese. "White Christmas" evoked a less-fearsome period, when the future seemed brighter and humanity's outlook was more merry. The best edition of Crosby's timeless interpretation may be his inaugural studio take of "White Christmas" on May 29, 1942-which remained unreleased until the '98 "Voice Of Christmas" anthology-on which Crosby haltingly dropped the third word in the concluding phrase, "May all your Christmases be white." Within its poignant imperfection is one of the most enduring lessons of Christmas: We're only human, and our aims are imperfect, thus the greatest gift we offer one another is our effort to refine the dreams we dream.