Track 34 My Green Christmas Tree, The '60s Invasion (2012)
This year's mix includes two tunes from the New England-based group The '60s Invasion whose album Incense and Chia Petsis chock full of holiday parodies made from hit songs from the 1960s. In a previous post I offered some information about the band and the first of these two songs, "Christmas in New England," based on the Mamas and Papas' hit "California Dreaming." The second is a parody version of "My Green Tambourine," by The Lemon Pipers, called "My Green Christmas Tree":
This year's mix includes only one true "song poem," which I suspect a good many will say is one song-poem too many. What are song poems? Well, as the old saying goes, if you have to ask you probably don't want to know. Basically, they're just lyrics written by everyday people and set to music by commercial artists for a fee. I've included more than a few of these little gems on various previous mixes and I've written about them here several times, too, including a post from 11 years ago about the song "Santa Claus Polka," Track 31 from my 2011 mix "Gee Whiz . . . It's Christmas (Again)!"
This year's entry is "Ring Out the Bells," performed by Norm Burns and featuring lyrics by some unknown but no doubt earnest soul who paid a few hundred dollars to Sterling Records to have their poetry turned into a song. You can hear the result just as I did on Bob Purse's wonderful website The Wonderful and the Obscure. Bob's site is a treasure trove for song poem enthusiasts, featuring several hundred different song poems and lots of colorful background and commentary. Heck, there are more than 40 entries on Norm Burns alone, and Norm is just one of the many folks who made a living setting poems to music for regular folk like you and me.
For those who would like to know more about the wonderful world of song poems, the following video is a playlist that includes 22 different selections. It is not for the faint of heart, and it includes a couple of tunes that may not be safe for work because of adult language. Aw, who am I kidding, noneof these tunes is safe for work unless you want your coworkers to think you've lost your damned mind!
Give Me Your Heart for Christmas, Dora Hall (1965)
This is the second holiday song I've used by aspiring entertainer and corporate trophy wife Dora Hall following "Kissin' by the Mistletoe," which can be found on my 2016 mix Let It Snow. Hall is a former vaudeville performer whose dreams of stardom were rekindled when her husband took over the Solo Cup Company and started promoting her records on every package of Solo Cups. I previously provided some background on Hall, which you can find HERE. I love Dora's story and she brings a refreshing enthusiasm to her work as the spouse of a successful corporate executive. And I salute her husband, too. He used his position to advance his wife's singing career and singlehandedly created one of entertainment's greatest supplies of kitsch.
It's been mighty cold in Los Angeles lately, at least by Southern California standards. Hope you're keeping warm wherever you are. I'll be back with more sometime soon.
Tonight's posting is coming to you from Houston, Texas, where it already feels like Christmas — or at least the North Pole. I mean, it's COLD down here tonight, with temperatures around 30 degrees and a cold, moist wind that cuts to the bone. It's a good night for staying indoors and catching up on stuff. Time to continue with our look at some of the tracks on Let It Snow!, my latest holiday mix for December 2016:
Track 16 A Swingin' Little Christmas Time, by Jane Lynch (2016)
Tim Davis, Jane Lynch and Kate Flannery
I first became aware of Jane Lynch the same way an awful lot of others did, I'm guessing — from her role as Christy Cummings, the uptight lesbian dog trainer in Christopher Guest's wonderfully funny 2000 feature Best in Show. Since that gig, Lynch has been working pretty steadily in both film and television. In 2009 she was cast as Sue Sylvester in the hit TV series, Glee, for which she earned an Emmy in 2010 as best supporting actress. What I didn't know until recently, however, is that Lynch is also a singer — and a damned good one, too. Several weeks ago, she released her first holiday album, "A Swingin' Little Christmas," which, of course, is where you'll find the tune "A Swingin' Little Christmas Time." Accompanying Lynch on the album is the Tony Guerrero Quintet; Tim Davis, the vocal producer from Glee; and Kate Flannery, best known for playing Meredith, everyone's favorite inebriate on NBC's "The Office." How did this project get going? According to Lynch,
we’ve been touring with the Tony
Guerrero Quintet doing a show called “See Jane Sing.” We’ve been this kind of
traveling group for the last year and a half or so. Around April, we said, “Why
don’t we do a Christmas album?” We were going to do it on our own nickel, so we
looked to see which songs are free and in the public domain. There’s some
beautiful classic stuff, so we picked 10 of those and Tony wrote five (new
songs), and you have our album!
The album has a little of everything — fun and frolicking in places, sentimental and wondrous in others. In short, it's just the ticket to put you in a holiday mood. And if you want an even surer mood elevator and plan to be in the Los Angeles area next Wednesday, December 21, Lynch and her fellow travelers will be performing in the wonderful performance space at Largo at the Coronet. Now, that looks to be a fun evening! Hope to see you there.
Track 14 Holiday Greetings from the Cast of Mama's Family (1986)
The Cast of Mama's Family Celebrate the Holidays
This isn't so much a track as a little snippet of what passed as dialogue on the popular syndicated comedy "Mama's Family." The show started as a regular sketch on the wonderful Carol Burnett Show, and it featured Vicki Lawrence as the demanding and outspoken Thelma Harper, a/k/a Mama. NBC picked up the show as a January replacement series in 1983, but the network never found the right slot for the program, and it was canceled half-way through its second year of production. The network continued to air reruns during the summer of 1984, however, and it attracted enough viewers to continue in syndication for several years, where it did reasonably well.
Track 13 Kissin' by the Mistletoe, by Dora Hall (1964)
Solo Cozy Cups
I don't imagine many of you remember much about entertainer Dora Hall, am I right? In fact, I'll go a step further and guess that you've probably never heard of her at all. But her story is a uniquely American tale that has always fascinated me, for thanks to her husband's position as president of the Solo Cup Company, this sweet little grandmother hustled and clawed her way through that acid-tinged psychedelic haze of 1970s Hollywood to become the genuine Queen of the vanity recording industry.
Ms. Hall first started, er, ah . . . um "entertaining" people in the 1920s and '30s as a fledgling singer and/or dancer, but she was a woman of modest talents and she enjoyed little success. By the late 1930s, she'd been pretty much filed and forgotten, so that, it seemed was that. Shortly afterward, she met Leo J. Hulseman, the founder and president of the Solo Cup Company. The two fell in love, married and raised a family, and Mr. Husleman managed to build the Solo Cup Company into an economic powerhouse. Well, that may be a bit of an overstatement, but he sure did well for himself, and so, eventually, did his lovely bride. Once their children had left the nest, Mrs. Leo J. Husleman, who adopted the stage name Dora Hall, decided the time was right to make it big on the stage, screen and airwaves with the help of her husband's wealth and prominent business position.
The first step involved Dora's musical talent. She recorded a series of musical numbers that Solo began to give away with every purchase of Solo Cups. I remember my aunt used to buy Solo Cozy Cups when our families made our annual summer vacation trip to Casco Bay, Maine. Somewhere I still have the back of a package of cups on which Dora's rise to stardom was dutifully described. By the 1970s, the Huslemans had branched out into TV. The couple put together several TV specials featuring Dora and a series of second-rate entertainers such as impressionist Rich Little, singers Donovan and Frank Sinatra, Jr., and alleged comedian Phil Harris.
"Kissin' by the Mistletoe" is one of several Dora Hall holiday records. Several of her other contributions to our cultural history appear below. Amazing, right? And uniquely American, to be sure.
