White Christmas
	No production credits
	Released on August 6, 1992
	no chart information
	Find it at GEMM
15 444 cover [high resolution scan]

A rchival recordings from what I would presume are the old Bing Crosby Christmas specials on radio and TV. In other words, just the sort of thing you’d expect the graverobbers at Laserlight to dig up and pass off as “digital” quality (Aduste Fidelity is more like it). Yet there’s something endearing in the staged banter before songs and tinny recording quality that transports you back to Christmas Past, when Bing was the global ambassador of good yuletidings. The fifteen songs on here are all of them old standards, from Mel Torme’s classic “The Christmas Song” to that ancient musical allegory for Christian charity, “Good King Wenceslas.” I usually work this into the holiday mix a few times every year, if only for the reassurance that, yes, fifty years on people will still be singing about chestnuts roasting and one-horse open sleighs, even if they’re tweeting of a white Christmas. I don’t give Laserlight credit for preserving any of this; they’re profiteers not historians. But like Alistair Sims in all his grainy and poorly preserved magnificence, Bing Crosby warbling through the old radios of the ages is as incorruptible and ageless as our earliest memories of Christmas. I’m not suggesting you buy this, or any save the original White Christmas (multiple namesakes exist of diminished merit). I’m simply saying that the tradition of Christmas as an annual renewal of mankind’s faith grows stronger with historical examples like this.

TRACK LISTING

1. THE CHRISTMAS SONG    (Mel Tormé/Robert Wells)    4:10
2. JINGLE BELLS    (Traditional)    2:45
3. SILENT NIGHT, HOLY NIGHT    (Traditional)    2:35
4. GOD REST YE MERRY GENTLEMEN    (Traditional)    2:12
5. LET IT SNOW, LET IT SNOW, LET IT SNOW    (Jule Styne/Sammy Cahn)    2:01
6. I'LL BE HOME FOR CHRISTMAS    (Walter Kent/Kim Gannon)    2:53
7. ADESTE FIDELES    (Traditional)    3:09
8. WHITE CHRISTMAS    (Irving Berlin)    2:03
9. JOY TO THE WORLD    (Georg Frederich Handel)    1:42
10. THE FIRST NOËL    (Traditional)    2:24
11. GOOD KING WENCESLAS    (Traditional)    2:36
12. AWAY IN A MANGER    (Traditional)    1:40
13. DECK THE HALLS    (Traditional)    1:11
14. O LITTLE TOWN OF BETHLEHEM    (Lewis Redner/Phillips Brooks)    1:22
15. SILVER BELLS    (Ray Evans/Jay Livingston)    3:04

CREDITS

A. Backhausen, Cologne -- cover
M. Kinnert -- illustration

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