Anne Margaret Daniel

Christmas in the Heart
Bob Dylan
Released October 13, 2009 by Sony/​Columbia Records
Produced by Jack Frost

Why in the world should it be any surprise that Bob Dylan has finally recorded an album of Christmas music? Major recording stars from Bing Crosby (who made a corollary career of Christmas) and Perry Como to Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley, Jimmy Buffett and the Beach Boys, Ed “Mingo” Ames and his brothers, and all the celebrities who lent their voices to those spectacular red-ribbon-wrapped Firestone Christmas collections of the 1960s helped to shape the season for Americans, and – to a lesser degree – worldwide.

Dylan’s friends and colleagues have made Christmas albums, too, regardless of their religious backgrounds and convictions. Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson have both recorded Christmas songs. Barbra Streisand, his Malibu neighbor, made a Christmas album in 1967 that was high on the religious, featuring “Ave Maria” and “The Lord’s Prayer” (as well as, for no apparent reason other than to show she could sing as well as Julie Andrews, “My Favorite Things”). Neil Diamond’s 1992 and 1994 Christmas albums have just been cherry-picked and repackaged for release by Columbia, also today, as “A Cherry Cherry Christmas." The album features two new Diamond songs, the title track and “Christmas Dream.”

So it’s a precedented, even typical, thing to do for a popular singer, releasing a Christmas album. We’ve seen from Dylan’s “Theme Time Radio Hour” how much he likes the history of music, and, in each show including the Christmas special, he lay down well-worn and obscure tracks, and lessons, side by side. He’s engaged in a bit of the same here, with traditional, sentimental, religious, and pop Christmas songs cheek by jowl. What he’s also engaged in here is something that’s a departure from all Dylan’s albums in the past except for, perhaps, the much-maligned “Self Portrait.” He’s working with a group of musicians with whom he sounds to be having a lot of fun; he’s exercising his considerable and sometimes self-deprecating sense of humor; and – a first for Dylan – he’s giving it all away. Sean Wilentz, writing online for The Daily Beast, echoed Woody Guthrie in referring to Dylan’s spirit of caritas, in giving all the royalties from this album to hunger relief organizations, as Dylan’s providing a Christmas dinner for the families on relief. Bless Bob for this undertaking, no matter what you may think of the album once you’ve listened to it in its mixed entirety.

What do we see, when we first look at “Christmas in the Heart”? The cover image of a Currier-and-Ives meets Russian sleigh ride scene has already been widely reproduced on the Internet. So, in many other places, has the image on the verso of the front cover: Bettie Page, in all her stockinged, stacked, spike-heeled, fur-trimmed glory, holding a tiny Santa Claus, like a Femlin, in her hand. Page was Playboy Magazine’s Miss January 1955, in the famous photo where she hangs an ornament on the Christmas tree while wearing nothing but a Santa hat and a wink. It’s a photo that was bound to have stayed with thirteen-year-old Bobby Zimmerman, if he got his hands on it in Hibbing that late winter or early spring. (Born again in Key West in 1959, Page would go on to work as a missionary to Angola, in a manifestation of more traditional Christmas spirit).

The inside photo is of a gang of ramshackle-day-parade Santas; someone’s horn section, by Leonard Freed. And the album’s back cover is a blue-period of the three wise men heading toward the star, by Ed Fotheringham, an illustrator who has done work for Elvis Costello, Mudhoney, the Rev. Horton Heat, and The New Yorker (chiefly works of painters and musicians from jazz greats to punk rockers).

No lyrics are provided. We don’t really need ‘em, do we now? When the needle drops – or, rather, when the cd player begins to spin the old-record-look cd – all we hear are old familiars, old holiday friends, with only the slightest curveballs from Dylan. Of the tracks, “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” (a standout), “O Come All Ye Faithful/​Adeste Fideles,” “The First Noel,” and “O Little Town of Bethlehem” – all traditional carols – are arranged by Dylan himself. Along with his regular band members, the album features David Hidalgo on guitar, accordion, mandolin, and violin; Phil Upchurch on guitar; and Patrick Warren on piano, organ, and celeste. The backing, and sometimes lead, vocalists are Amanda Barrett and Abby De Wald of the Ditty Bops; L.A. singer and composer Bill Cantos, self-described freelance vocalist Randy Crenshaw, and Walt Harrah, who perform together in the Christian quartet Haven of Rest (with Jeff Gunn); Nicole Eva Emery of Lovebird. They’re a motley and diverse crew, a Rolling-Thundery lineup. I wish they’d all go on the road with Bob.

The album opens with the sound of jingle bells, and “Here Comes Santa Claus.” Gene Autry, Hollywood’s Singing Cowboy, wrote the song when Dylan was a little boy. Christmas is supposed to be a happy time, whether you’re happy about Jesus’s birthday or Santa Claus and presents, or both. Remember the joyous cacophony of Ebenezer Scrooge’s discovery of Christmas Day? “No fog, no mist; clear, bright, jovial, stirring, cold; cold, piping for the blood to dance to; Golden sunlight; Heavenly sky; sweet fresh air; merry bells. Oh, glorious. Glorious!” “Here Comes Santa Claus” has this same Dickensian sound, and Dylan and his team do it proud: David Hidalgo’s bright, frisky instrumentals sparkle, and the singing infects you with slap-happy joy. You want to be the person who plays the sleigh bells.

The mixed male and female voices work in a call-and-response with Bob in this song, as in later songs. He’s the bandleader, and they are a happy chorus repeating and replying. When they all sing at the same time, it’s really good to hear Dylan with any sort of singers around him. We were used to it long ago, when Dylan was happy enough to share the mics with Rick and Richard and Levon, but it’s been awhile since even Larry Campbell’s fine voice was permitted to join in harmony onstage, let alone on a studio album, with Dylan. It’s beautiful to hear on “Christmas in the Heart.” There’s something truly moving about the quality of vocal sharing, taking turns, and collaboration.

“Do You Hear What I Hear?” was, once upon a time, designed as a protest song – in the wake of the Cuban Missile crisis, in 1962. Dylan doesn’t sing it that way; he gives it a slow Texas-two-steppy rocking-chair beat, though George Recile’s drumming does have a rat-a-tat-tat military rhythm. Dylan’s voice is alone on most of this song, and it is at its strongest, as is the case on the other songs, in its lower register. That clear tenor that once moved so sweetly against Johnny Cash’s rich rumble is present only when Dylan floats up at the end of a line, but when he sings low his voice remains resonant.

Secular Christmas is a sentimental season, and it’s also a romantic one – a time for holding hands in the snow, walking in a winter wonderland. “Winter Wonderland” starts out in a chorus of belles and bells, and an avuncular Dylan, the good humor man, joins in the fun in such a Crosbylike manner you can almost see him in a tweed jacket, holding a pipe…almost. The song feels intensely American here. Young Bobby Zimmerman, growing up in a Jewish household in Minnesota and surrounded by Christmas traditions in the Middle West of the 1940s, was not so far away from the Middle West that Minnesota’s Scott Fitzgerald conjured only twenty years before in The Great Gatsby:
“When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour, before we melted indistinguishably into it again. That’s my Middle West—not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow.”

“Hark The Herald Angels Sing” is my favorite track on the album. Dylan continues in the American vein, and sings it Woody-wise, pronouncing “glory” and “born” with an “aw” in them, delivering a nasal “sing” as “saaang,” and dropping the t’s on Christ. The sweetness and clarity of the women’s voices in the background make his ragged request that we hark to the sound of the herald angels’ song a moving performance of the old carol.

“I’ll be Home for Christmas” seems at first to be cruelly mic’d – you can hear every little hesitation, and the occasional falter and break in Dylan’s voice. Then you realize that it’s a performance by a singer who is sad that, this year, he won’t be home for Christmas. Your voice might break, too, if that happened to you. The wistfulness and even tragic tone of the song not only profit from but require a singer’s voice cracking, when he’s singing of the mistletoe and presents under the tree for him, when he gets home – if he gets home. This Christmas, he won’t: “Christmas Eve will find me where the lovelight gleams/​ I’ll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams.” The romance of hearth and home were made powerful in the original song in 1943 by its wartime setting – Walter Kent, who composed the melody, had also composed in 1941 Vera Lynn’s World War II classic “(There’ll be Bluebirds Over) The White Cliffs of Dover.” The troubador with so many homes, who spends so much of his time out of them and among us, makes of this song something we might find personal to him.

“The Little Drummer Boy” is another 20th-century Christmas song in which Dylan manages a little-boyish gentleness on many of the lines – the final “me and my drum” is light enough to sound like a child is singing it. His performance on this song – and many of them are performed in different personae: the old uncle at the dining table after Christmas supper; the caroler; the Rudy Vallee-style bandleader; Der Bingle – is among Dylan’s best. There are harsh beginnings to a lot of the lines, but with a sweet floating lift in the end, the way Dylan sang on, for instance, “If you Ever Go To Houston,” and the way he sings in concert these days. This song is as old as Dylan; composed in 1941, it is one of the most popular newer songs on the album, recorded by, among many, the Trapp Family Singers of “The Sound of Music” fame, Rosemary Clooney, and the duet of David Bowie and Bing Crosby in 1977.

“The Christmas Blues” is a little-known track on which Dylan sounds for all the world like a more gravelly Sinatra in the “She Shot Me Down” idiom, or a regular at Preservation Hall. His voice sounds better and more comfortable on this song than on others, and the wah-wah instrumentals complement it beautifully.
Dylan begins “O Come All Ye Faithful (Adeste Fidelis)” in Latin, in which he is idiosyncratically interesting. He doesn’t sing in other languages often, but seems to have fun when he does – remember his far more flowing, better-accented deliveries in Spanish on “Desire” – but the final “venite adoremus dominum” is quite moving, as is “Christ the Lord” that concludes Dylan’s part before the female voices take the next verse. He rejoins them for the chorus almost humbly, as one of the mix of voices, like someone showing up late at a carol singing and being incorporated into the group with goodwill and good cheer.

“Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” begins with Dylan singing alone – as befits a number delivered by a solitary singer reminding us of that circumstance: “someday soon we all will be together, if the fates allow.” When others join in, and they are all indeed together, it feels like you should thank the fates for what they’ve allowed. “Must be Santa” picks up the album’s tempo with a Mexicali polka romp and roll, and provides a song that’s not as well known. Dylan has always had a sense of humor – think of his own songs and the riffy little rhymes (Coca-Cola and gondola), the deadpan challenges (it’ll be too dark for you to find the door), and the groan-inducing Shakespearean-style wordplays and puns (Freddie or not, here I come). The humor shines here, embedded in, perhaps, a touch of the Great Poet recognizing that heavy is less entertaining than levity.
“Silver Bells” slows the album down again. A weary, but happy, man walks through what has to be New York, past the windows of Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s, through the crowds of shoppers and children out of school. Eleven-year-old Bobby could have first heard it in “The Lemon Drop Kid,” at his family’s movie theater with Bob Hope singing it, or in Crosby’s famous recording. Donnie Herron’s fiddle – it sounds like Herron, at least – is the best feature of this song for me, though the way Dylan delivers the line “this is Santa’s big scene” makes me feel like a little hep-cat girl, wearing a black turtleneck and tights, snapping my fingers for him in the Village many lifetimes ago.

Two traveling songs in a row follow; a pretty, lilting version of “The First Noel,” sung mostly by the ladies, gives way to a song best known for its version by women, “Christmas Island.” The Andrews Sisters – Maxene, Patty, and LaVerne – were top American artists by the time Dylan was born, and touring ceaselessly when he was a boy, entertaining the troops, during World War II. They recorded the song both on their own and with the ubiquitous Santa Bing, though I wonder if Dylan didn’t spend more time listening to their hits “Bei Mir Bist Du Schon/​To Me, You are so Beautiful,” “The Beer Barrel Polka,” “The Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B,” and “Beat me Daddy, Eight to the Bar” – all, in their own ways, sticking in his musical consciousness for different reasons. The alohas at the beginning and end of the cover on “Christmas in the Heart” make me feel like Don Ho is guiding the song, and the women’s voices are too cloyingly sweet – they only make you miss the brash, tinny, bold quality of the Misses Andrews.

“The Christmas Song” is sweetly delivered by a grandpa setting up a happy Christmas for his grandchildren. Dylan enunciates carefully, every word clear and crisp, from the “tiny little tots” to the “simple phrase” of Merry Christmas to you. And this simplest of good holiday wishes is the end of the secular music on the album. “O Little Town of Bethlehem” comes last, an American hymn, composed by Phillips Brooks, an Episcopalian priest and minister to the city neighborhoods of Philadelphia, in the aftermath of America’s Civil War. Brooks’s hymn, as performed on “Christmas in the Heart,” ends full of grace with “the dear Christ enters in,” concluded, as is fitting, with a long, drawn-out Amen.

“Christmas in the Heart” is the right title for this album: beginning with everybody’s secular Christmas (“Here Comes Santa Claus”) it ends with the heart, and the blessing of that Amen. At Christmastime, it is meet and right to be devout, and worshiping, and grateful, if you are of a Christian faith – but you are also celebrating the happiest of birthdays. Dylan has come a long way, musically and in terms of sheer years, from his “Saved” days, but both the sense of caroling in the snow and of the singing of hymns in a church pervades “Christmas in the Heart.” The record runs a gamut of secular, seasonal goodwill; a historical chronicling of the singers and versions of these songs during Dylan’s own lifetime; and Christian peace and joy. It’s a crowded way, and “Christmas in the Heart” takes us all along it on the wings of angels, and in a one-horse open sleigh.

Anne Margaret Daniel

A Christmas album that will feed hungry folks. Finally, I'm in the holiday mood.