We've been letting down our end. Great music has been contributed to our canon of Christmas carols for more than half a millennium, including a profusion of what may be termed "Great American Songbook" Christmas music in the 20th Century.
But then the 1960s mutated into the late '60s, and the American Songbook was closed -- its Christmas chapters with it. Oh, Paul McCartney gamely ponied up with "Wonderful Christmastime" in 1979, and George Michael, then of Wham!, added "Last Christmas" in 1984, which is of course a typical lovesong only incidentally set at Christmas. But "Last Chrismas" is at least a good tune, which is much more than can be said for that dismal and unmusical hectoring of the same year called "Do They Know It's Christmas?"
Then there are the honorable mentions for attempted contribution to the Christmas carol canon -- songs that may prove to be durable, but may just as easily turn out to be near-misses. Like "Grown-Up Christmas List", by the impressive David Foster with Linda Thompson-Jenner and introduced by Natalie Cole in 1990. That may be a little too grown-up, and can have the effect of letting the 7-Up out of one's Christmas punch. Maybe a judicious revision of the lyrics could "jolly it up", as Frank Sinatra asked Hugh Martin to do with the lyrics to "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas", thus transforming it from forgotten 1940s film soundtrack fodder, to third-most performed Christmas song of the past half-decade.
"Mary Did You Know?", by Buddy Greene and Mark Lowry and released in '92, is very much in the same line: Impressive, but a bit of a downer. A nitpicker may make the case that an ancient carol like the "Coventry Carol" is a bit of a downer too, and that's a hit even after half a millennium. But the "Coventry Carol" is modal -- unless my music PhD brother says otherwise -- with those progressions which resolve in twist endings of brighter notes and chords.
So, what we're left with is old chestnuts -- some of them half a millennium old, some of them half a century old -- and not so much from the mostly useless last couple of generations.
And then, sometime about Christmas of 2008, some kids step onto a stage someplace in America and announce that they're the Annie Moses Band. They call their idiosyncratic genre "chamber-pop", which is as good a denomination as I can think of, though a little too close to "chamber-pot" for my comfort. But that's as may be.
It turns out that none of them are called Annie Moses. They're Wolavers, Annie Moses being a great-grandmother. I needn't attempt a band biography here; people who know exponentially more about it have supplied those online and in print. But suffice it to say it's a family troupe, with the two parents and some six kids. The kids, though they come off as pretty grown up by now, are virtuosos of the various stringed instruments, as well as formidable singers. The father is a composer and pianist, the mother a lyricist and vocalist.
And it is no music promoter's sloganeering to say that they make a top-tier, international-class chamber music string ensemble, and a convincing contemporary Country band, in the course of the same set.
Of particular note are the original carols "Bethlehem, House of Bread" and "Red, White & Blue Christmas". The latter may have found itself more at home in a nation bristling to march into the belly of the beast, than a nation which recently elected some glib kid Chicago politician as Commander-in-Chief. "Red, White & Blue Christmas" may be just about seven years too late. But it is the closest thing I am aware of -- musically -- to an American Songbook Christmas carol in this past half-century, and the closest lyrically to the Second World War era's pop music for fightin'.
"Bethlehem, House of Bread" might as well be an updating of a haunting "mystery play" hymn of the 15th Century.
Their arrangement of "O Come, O Come Emmanuel" finds the sympathetic jazz/impressionist-classical chords implied in the melody.
And their "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen" is, as some unidentified musicologist wrote of the jazz pianist Ahmad Jamal's 1990s excursions, "large open voicings and bravura-laden playing."
The Annie Moses Band are clearly passionate Evangelical Christians and take-no-prisoners American patriots (bless their hearts). Not to mention they're a large, intact family. So America's own brand of upper-class twits -- the self-appointed elite, the new snobs, the smarmy and the snarky who set their clocks by Jon Stewart -- will of course be wont to sneer.
But the great majority of what is called the music "industry" these days ought to listen to this Annie Moses Band, and despair. If they live to be 100, they will never be the musicians these kids are, or the composers the parents are.
If the Annie Moses Band never played another lick, it could be justly said of them that they were as good as and better than any musicians of their time, and that they contributed as much music worthy of the Christmas canon in one album as the entire music industry has put up in decades.
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