John Sinclair

"Merry Christmas Baby" - Topical Blues

It's Pearl Harbor Day as I write this column, December 7th, and tomorrow is not only the Roman Catholic observation of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary but also the day John Lennon was murdered-a Holy Day of Observation of a whole different order.

Soon it will be Christmas, of course, and then New Year's Eve, and after that the Carnival season begins to dominate New Orleans, where I used to live, until the day after Mardi Gras, filling the air with all sorts of songs celebrating this one-of-a-kind Crescent City holiday.

These real-life holidays, like all real-life issues, provide a great deal of specific inspiration for blues composers and their interpreters. And although the winter holidays will have long been concluded by the time you read these words, there's nothing more topical than a rhythm & blues Christmas song-whether it's a cornball seasonal classic like Irving Berlin's "White Christmas" done up in an impossibly soulful rendition by Clyde McPhatter & the Drifters or a supersonic reading of the sort offered by Sugar Boy Crawford, or an original ghetto musing like "Christmas in Jail" or "Let Me Be Your Santa, Baby.".

Howlin' Wolf's version of the Mississippi Sheiks' late-'20s hit called "Sitting on Top of the World" drops a pure blues reference to the season when the Wolf laments, "I worked all the summer / Worked all the fall / Had to make Christmas / in my overalls." Robert Johnson chortles, "If tonight was Christmas Eve / and tomorrow was Christmas Day (Oh, wouldn't we have a time, babe)." And the original Mr. 5 By 5, the great Jimmy Rushing, fronting the Count Basie band in what could well be termed the first actual rhythm & blues record, "Good Morning Blues," from 1937, notes that "Baby, it's Christmas time / And I wanna see Santa Claus / If you don't show me my pretty baby / I'll break all of the laws."

Santa Claus is all over the blues. There are swing-to-bop salutes like Louis Prima's "What Will Santa Claus Say?" (1936), "Santa's Secret" (he's smokin' reefer!) by Johnny Guarnieri (1944), "Boogie Woogie Santa Claus" by Mabel Scott and the Marshall Brothers' "Mr. Santa's Boogie" (1948), "Santa Claus Got Stuck in My Chimney" by Ella Fitzgerald (1950) and Louis Armstrong's "'Zat You, Santa Claus?" (1953).

Then there are the great R&B tributes from the mid-'50s, like "We Wanna See Santa Do The Mambo" (Big John Greer), "Hey Santa Claus" (Moonglows), "Be-Bop Santa Claus" (Babs Gonzalez), "Santa Claus Wants Some Loving" (Albert King) and "Santa Baby" (Eartha Kitt). The Godfather of Soul, the great James Brown, cut a whole Christmas album in the late ' 60s, with stellar cuts like"Santa Claus Go Straight to the Ghetto."

They've even got Santa Claus in New Orleans, where not a speck of snow is ever to be seen. Earl King begs "Santa, Don't Let Me Down"; Milton Batiste warns that "Big Fat Santa Is Coming to Town"; Huey "Piano" Smith & the Clowns are "Doin' the Santa Claus"; and Rockie Charles confesses that "I Just Called to Wish You a Merry Christmas."

On the pure-D blues front, Sonny Boy Williamson added a sly double-entendre take on his Checker single, "Santa Claus," admitting that he was just going through his baby's "dresser drawers" to see what she bought him for Santa Claus. Meanwhile, Lowell Fulson suffered a "Lonely Christmas," B.B. King had a "Christmas Celebration" and the twin holiday classics, "Merry Christmas Baby" by Charles Brown and Amos Milburn's "Please Come Home for Christmas," may still be heard in the hipper precincts every holiday season.

To make a long story short, there are so many blues and R&B Christmas records that it makes one's head spin, and most make for excellent listening irrespective of their corny thematic content. Actually, for me, the Christmas content provides a special treat of the highest order, because these songs demonstrate the breadth and depth of the African American sense of irony which helps make the blues what they are; direct commentaries on the realities of everyday life delivered with emotive power and a knowing twist of wry.

Think for a moment, if you will, of the reality of Christmas in the rural South of the 1920s and' 30s, or the urban ghettos of the 1940s and '50s, or in the vast ugly "inner city" housing projects of the past 50 years in America. Muddy Waters has spoken of the joys of receiving an orange for a Christmas present, others of rough hand-made wooden toys or a handful of hard candies, an extra day off from field labor, looking into the festive store windows with no hope of reaping the treasures displayed there.

That's the blues, for real, staring you right in the face, and all you can do is try to laugh it off and sing a little song of the imagination, making this improbable white people's holiday into something you can live with despite your own utter disenfranchisement from the jolly world of Santa Claus and his little elves. Yeah, that's the blues, all right, giving us a way to live and enjoy life to the full when even life itself seems an improbable proposition.

(c) 2004 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.