Twelve Days of Winter #10. Eliza Carthy and Jon Boden: I Want A Hippopotamus for Christmas
December 15, 2024
Andrew Curry writes: There are some truly dreadful Christmas novelty songs, but some have a certain wit about them. I’m willing to stick my neck out here, and argue that I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas comes into this second category.
(Photo: Bernard Dupont via Wikimedia. CC BY-SA 2.0)
Here’s flavour of it:
I want a hippopotamus for Christmas
Only a hippopotamus will do
Don't want a doll, no dinky Tinker Toy
I want a hippopotamus to play with and enjoy
The first version I heard was by the American country singer Kacey Musgraves, and Kate Rusby seems to have been the first British folk singer to release it, as Hippo for Xmas. But then Kate Rusby has made a whole cottage industry out of Christmas records—six, to my count, including everything from carols to wassail songs to Christmas pops (A Spaceman Came Travelling), as well as the Hippo companion piece, Santa Never Brings Me A Banjo.
We’ve gone for the version of the song by Eliza Carthy and Jon Boden, basically because I prefer the arrangement. I’ll get back to that.
The song was recorded in 1953 by ten-year old Gayla Peevey, who was a child star. It went to #24 in Billboard charts that December, after she had performed the song on The Ed Sullivan show. Her local Oklahoma zoo and a local newspaper used the success of the song to raise money for a hippotamus which it said it was going to give to Gayla for Christmas.
Of course, this was a stunt. They did present the hippo to her, and she gave it straight back to the zoo.
The Eliza Carthy and Jon Boden version sounds like a traditional folk song, at least for some of it, with accordion and maybe even some morris dancers tapping along in the background, before what sounds like a New Orleans street band picks up the tune.
The song is on their seasonal record, Glad Christmas Comes, released last yearfor which the press release was suitably tongue in cheek:
Christmas in the Carthy and Boden households is a serious business. Comfort is sacrificed to ramming them chock-full of as much greenery/bling/tat as is humanly possible.
Why wit? Because the song is so gentle, and hippos are so vicious. They are among the most dangerous animals in Africa, and the notion that you’d get near enough to give then a rub-down and a massage in the garage should probably come with a massive health and safety warning. Don’t try this at home.
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