Introducing ‘Twelve Days of Winter’—a song a day
December 12, 2024
Andrew Curry writes: For the next 12 days here on Salut! Live we will be running a seasonal series called ‘12 Days of Winter’ which will celebrate folk song about this time of the year.
Some of these will be versions of Christmas songs, some will come from the religious tradition, some will be songs about the hardships of the cold or the snow.
(‘Christmas Wassail 2019’. Photo: Diego Sideburns/flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
It’s easy to be dismissive of Christmas songs, and with good reason. These days the popular repertoire includes too much schlock, too much schmaltz, far too much over-sentimental dreck, and not much schmerz.
Right through December it is impossible to go into a shopping mall or supermarket without hearing some over-familiar Christmas numbers on a permanent loop—Slade, Greg Lake, Mariah Carey, Paul McCartney, Roy Wood’s Wizzard, John Lennon and the Yoko Ono Band. You’ll have your own bêtes noires. At least we don’t have to listen to Rolf Harris any more.
But the source of many of our seasonal songs is in folk music and collective singing, in the shared experience of the winter holiday, in the traditions of wassailing and carol singing.
Indeed, as the Trad Folk site reminds us,
the wassailing tradition is not only alive and well, but also blossoming once again.
Some of these songs were hard-edged and clear-eyed about the hardships of the season. The best modern Christmas songs keep hold of some of that edge.
In this spirit, Colin Randall and I will be selecting a song a day between now and Christmas Eve that honours this tradition. And to start us off, by way of a bonus track, here’s an electric-folk version of Jack Frost from Magpie Arc, with Martin Simpson on lead vocal. The song was written by Mike Waterson in 1970, and his brother-in-law Martin Carthy said of it later,
Mike [Waterson] wrote Jack Frost more than 35 years ago and, unusually for him, has not let it disappear in the ether… He is easily the most underrated songwriter around today (certainly by himself), but he does have his admirers for the unforced ease of his language and for his timing.
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