Friday, November 26, 2010

30 or so Songs of Xmas # 01

It's the day after Thanksgiving, so it's time to start cranking out my collection of Christmas Music.

Back in the day, the early 80s, Christmas rock music was hard to come by. There wasn't much of it, and what there was wasn't available in stores. You would have to wait until an Xmas song you wanted came on the radio and you had to have your cassette recorder ready to tape. Jeez talk about primitive. Music collecting back then really was about the hunt. And the good thing about music collecting is that you can listen to it, rather that just have a useless possession.

By the 90s, some Xmas songs wound up on singles or on greatest hits albums. So you actually could possess the music, but playing it around the holiday was extremely laborious.

How it's the 21st century and I have 100s of Xmas songs on my hard drive. All in the same folder. No labor at all to play them.

I'll post one my favorite Xmas songs every day until New Years. Hopefully I can find each on YouTube, which would take care of any copywrong issues.

My first pick is Sting's version of I Saw Three Ships.



Sting has his share of duds as a solo artist; this sure ain't one of them. I really,really love this song, especially the percussion. The whole sound is really different. Caribbean maybe?

I really like this song despite its seemingly stupid lyrics. There were several YouTubes of this song. I picked one with lyrics (which don't seem to match up 100%, but it's good enough for our purposes here, already created, and free).

Three ships? I guess that's a reference to the holy trinity, but that seems to be stretching it. It could be a reference to the three magi, but they didn't travel with Jesus, they traveled to him. So pretty much the title and overall theme are questionable.

And then there is the line featuring "The savior Christ and his lady". Jesus never married, so who is his lady? I guess that would have to be Mary, but when is your mother ever called "your lady"?

Think about that if you wish, but enjoy the song either way. I do.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

"I Saw Three Ships (Come Sailing In)" is a traditional and popular Christmas carol from England. Some sources assert that this song is "an upbeat variant of Greensleeves"

So blame everything on the fact that its an english carol with lyrics that are 100+ years old.

Marty

Scoats said...

I wiki'ed that too before writing. It still doesn't explain the lyrics. The birth of Christ was over 2000 years ago, lyrics from 100+ years ago should still be relevant.