Obligatory Yuletide Offering

Here's some stuff.
Don't say we never gave you anything.

Merry Christmas and Season's Greetings
from the Fluville Chamber of Commerce.

Drive Safely.

***********************************

Download:

"White Christmas" mp3
by Bob Marley and The Wailers, 1963.
available on Destiny: Rare Ska Sides From Studio 1

"Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" mp3
by Darlene Love, 1963.
available on A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector

"If Christmas Can't Bring You Home" mp3
by the Reigning Sound, 2005.
available on Home for Orphans

"Christmas Eve Can Kill You" mp3
by The Everly Brothers, 1972.
available on Stories We Could Tell

"Santa Claus Go Straight To The Ghetto" mp3
by James Brown, 1968.
available on Funky Christmas

"Merry Christmas, I Love You" mp3
by James Brown, 1966.
available on Funky Christmas

"Let's Make Christmas Mean Something This Year" mp3
by James Brown, 1966.
available on Funky Christmas



"All I Want For Christmas" mp3
by Solomon Burke, 1972.
Pride 45-1022
out of print

"Christmas Must Be Tonight (Alternate)" mp3
by The Band, 1975.
available on Northern Lights Southern Cross

"Christmas Wish" mp3
by NRBQ, 1979.
available on Peek-A-Boo: Best of 1969-89

"My Mom and Santa Claus" mp3
by George Jones, 1968.
available on A Good Year For The Roses:
The Complete Musicor Recordings 1965-1971 (Part 2)

"Rock & Roll Santa Claus" mp3
by Huey "Piano" Smith and the Clowns, 1962.
available on Twas the Night Before Christmas

"'Twas The Night Before Christmas" mp3
by Huey "Piano" Smith and the Clowns, 1962.
available on Twas the Night Before Christmas

"Doing The Santa Claus" mp3
by Huey "Piano" Smith and the Clowns, 1962.
available on Twas the Night Before Christmas

"Christmas In Prison" mp3
by John Prine, 1973.
available on Sweet Revenge

"Jesus Christ" mp3
by Alex Chilton, 1975
from Radio Broadcast WLXY Memphis

"The Christmas Song" mp3
by Dexter Gordon, 1970.
available on The Panther!

More Christmas music can be found:
HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE.

top photo: © Ted Barron, 2010.

Israelites

by Alex Abramovich

“I saw the film of Exodus in Kingston,” Ernest Ranglin said, when he was interviewed for a book called The Book of Exodus: The Meaning and the Making of Bob Marley and the Wailers. "A lot of people went to see it. I know it was a moving movie, with its moral about oppressed people fighting for their existence. I guess that’s why I did the tune, too.”

Ranglin wasn’t the only musician to look at independence-era Jamaica and see the Hebrew exodus. “Get up in the morning slaving for bread, Sir/So that every mouth can be fed,” Desmond Dekker sang, in an achingly beautiful song called “The Israelites” (which many of us first heard in a 1989 film, Drugstore Cowboy, which had to do with more American forms of enslavement). And a few years later, in yet another song called “Exodus,” Bob Marley sang: “Send us another brother Moses/From across the Red Sea!”

Then again, Marley himself was something of a latter-day Moses: “Bob Marley/Poet and a prophet,” Anthony Kiedis once sang. “Bob Marley/Taught me how to off it/Bob Marley, walkin’ like he talkin’/Goodness me, can’t see you see I’m going to cough it?” I don’t know what Kiedis meant by that. But then, I kind of know what he meant by it: He was describing the life arc and career trajectory of a moral and oppressed man who fought for his existence and did tunes, too.

Prince Buster was another Jamaican musician who saw Jamaica as a sort of Babylon and did his best to chant it down; his song “Islam” is a case in point: “My people, my people,“ he sings, “Do you not want to go home?/Africa is calling, and you not want to go home?”

A few years ago, I attended a service at an African synagogue; which is to say, a synagogue in Africa. I don’t usually attend services; bored, I looked around and saw: Indian Jews, Ethiopian Jews…. “Those people and my people?” I wondered. And then I thought, “who knows: maybe there just here for the contacts.” And then I remembered an old Jewish joke I’d heard, many years ago, in Brooklyn:

An old Jewish couple goes out to a Kosher Chinese joint in Crown Heights. The Chinese waiter speaks perfect Yiddish. The Jewish couple is stunned; asks him to sit with them and tell something of his life. And so, the Chinese waiter does, again in perfect Yiddish. On their way out, the Jewish couple compliments the restaurant’s manager. “The food was delicious,” they say. “And this waiter! Where did you find a Chinese waiter who speaks Yiddish so perfectly?” And the manager says “Shhh! He thinks it’s English.”

This song is dedicated to the waiter.

"Dining In Chinatown" mp3
by Jennifer Wells
available on Northern Soul's Classiest Rarities, Vol. 2

**********



Download:

"Exodus" mp3
by Ernest Ranglin, 1963.
available on War Ina Babylon/An Island Reggae Anthology

"Israelites" mp3
by Desmond Dekker and the Aces, 1968.
available on Israelites: The Best of Desmond Dekker

"Exodus" mp3
by Bob Marley and the Wailers, 1977.
available on Exodus

"Islam" mp3
by Prince Buster, 1965.
available on Rock A Shacka Vol. 5 Dance Cleopatra

"Give it Away" mp3
by The Red Hot Chili Peppers, 1991.
available on Blood Sugar Sex Magik

Waiting

Sam Phillips had slapback at Sun, and Capitol Records built large reverb rooms into the basement of their Hollywood studios, which can be heard to great effect by Speedy West, who joins Hank Thompson on "Waiting In The Lobby Of Your Heart." In this song Hank describes the painful wait that sometimes a man must endure, not knowing whether he's here nor there, or where he should be - suffering an existential mind-fuck, or maybe just lost in space.




















Download: "Waiting In The Lobby Of Your Heart" mp3
by Hank Thompson and His Brazos Valley Boys, 1952.
available on All-Time Greatest Hits

Also:

"I'm Waiting For The Day" mp3
by The Reigning Sound, 2001.
available on Break Up Break Down

"Tired of Waiting For You" mp3
by The Kinks, 1965.
available on BBC Sessions 1964-1977

"Crying, Hoping, Waiting," mp3
by Buddy Holly, 1959.
available on The Buddy Holly Collection

"Waiting In Vain" mp3.
by Bob Marley and the Wailers, 1977.
available on Exodus.

Photo: Butte, Montana 1994. © Ted Barron