🎄 Holidays! Christmas rarities and long-lost records

Can you describe the orchestration, instruments used, perhaps, as a clue - or upload it somewhere where we can listen to it?
In 1988, a popular choice would have been the Mannheim Steamroller version.


The Mannheim Steamroller Christmas Album is excellent. I had heard that it had topped the list as the best selling Christmas album of all time.
 
The song is definitely from the 50's or early 60's. Anything newer I would have found by now. The only orchestra that would have jazzed it up this way would have been Percy Faith. The song starts out with a violin solo almost exactly like Percy Faith did on I'll be home for Christmas. My song sounds like its using the same violinist. I will have to figure out how to post it on YouTube. If they hit me with a copyright violation, they will have to identify who's song it is. I can post a link after I figure out how to post to YouTube.
 
Some smartphones can use an app to help identify music also. I've used SoundHound in the past. As long as it's playing, and your phone's microphone can pick it up, it might be able to identify it unless it's somewhat obscure.
 
Ok, I made a video with the soundtrack to post on YouTube. In the process of posting it YouTube found copyrighted material by Lex DE Azevedo. Looks like he recorded it with the London Philharmonic orchestra. The version on line has a choir singing. The version I want is instrumental only. Now I just need to find that.
 
With the Passing of Gordon Lightfoot this year, I was just reminded of the one song that is not really Christmas but as close as he got. Song for a winters Night. Its just a quick guitar song that was like many other songs of his. But is was a hidden treasure. Listen to it sometime if you haven't already. Then listen to what Sara McLachlan made from it. Many other well known singers are covering it now as well. Recently I have found choirs with full orchestras doing renditions of it on YouTube. Many of Gordon's songs are hidden treasures and I am going to miss him.
 
I have recently picked up two Mannheim Steamroller Christmas cd's from a used book and record store. I am looking forward to hearing them over the next month.
 
Bumping up our thread for the rare and forgotten music titles we remember from the past.
 
I have recently picked up two Mannheim Steamroller Christmas cd's from a used book and record store. I am looking forward to hearing them over the next month.

Someone was playing the 1984 Mannheim Steamroller album through our sound system in our clubhouse and it reminded me how much that album affected me when I first heard it. I still recall the amazement that came over me when I was listening to our radio station sometime in the late 80s while driving to work and on came "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen". The middle part of that track just blew me away and I had to pull off the road and let the track finish.

Upon finding out at work who it was, I spent my lunch hour that day tracking down two Mannheim Steamroller Christmas albums.
 
"Christmas in the Trenches" by John McCutcheon is one of my favorite folk-Christmas tunes...
 
Here is one that is usually overlooked. Jorma Kaukonen: Christmas. Kaukonen was a founding member of Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna, but his style is folk-rock/Americana. It's a lighthearted album with a handful of originals and a few covers of familiar tunes.

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Someone was playing the 1984 Mannheim Steamroller album through our sound system in our clubhouse and it reminded me how much that album affected me when I first heard it.

I got a free copy of Billboard in the mail yesterday (they still occasionally try to get me to re-subscribe) and I was looking at the Holiday Albums chart. To my amazement, there was not a single Mannheim Steamroller album listed. Maybe it's just too early in the season, but many other classic albums are there -- Carpenters, Nat King Cole, Stevie Wonder, Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Bing Crosby, and so on --- but no Steamroller. Sadly, Herb's albums are not there either.... at least, not yet.

 
Greg Lake's "Father Christmas" is one selection that I truly like. I don't hear it often but I recently got an Emerson, Lake and Palmer cd that has it as the closing song for the disc.
One album track that I used to hear on AM radio played each Christmas for a few years was Roberta Flack's "The 25th of Last December" from her Blue Lights In The Basement album. It is not a Christmas song but it got airtime.
 
I got a free copy of Billboard in the mail yesterday (they still occasionally try to get me to re-subscribe) and I was looking at the Holiday Albums chart. To my amazement, there was not a single Mannheim Steamroller album listed. Maybe it's just too early in the season, but many other classic albums are there -- Carpenters, Nat King Cole, Stevie Wonder, Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Bing Crosby, and so on --- but no Steamroller. Sadly, Herb's albums are not there either.... at least, not yet.

I didn't even know Billboard was still in print! How was the rest of the issue? These days, it's seems like they're more interested in politics than actual music.
 
Greg Lake's "Father Christmas" is one selection that I truly like. I don't hear it often but I recently got an Emerson, Lake and Palmer cd that has it as the closing song for the disc.
One album track that I used to hear on AM radio played each Christmas for a few years was Roberta Flack's "The 25th of Last December" from her Blue Lights In The Basement album. It is not a Christmas song but it got airtime.
Both great tracks! I don't hear much of either on the FM stations here this time of year, but I enjoy playing them around the home.
I didn't even know Billboard was still in print! How was the rest of the issue? These days, it's seems like they're more interested in politics than actual music.
No kidding! I haven't been a subscriber in a while and don't know how the print publication compares these days to the content on their website, but, judging by the latter, they've become so increasingly obsessed with sociopolitical concerns/commentary over the last half-decade or so that I feel more like I'm just reading a Rolling Stone knock-off but with the occasional addition of a column on the latest chart news.
But, then, even the policies by which they operate their charts aren't even what they used to be. I feel like they keep changing the rules just so that more records can be broken for them to write about. The worst one of all, in my opinion, is that pretty much everything's eligible for the Hot 100 now, regardless whether it's even being marketed or promoted as a "single" per se. Consequently, it's just become the norm for every last track on an album (even right down to minute-long interludes) to pop up on the Hot 100 (or even Top 50) in that album's first week of release, enabling an artist like Taylor Swift or Drake to immediately boost their total of career Top 40 hits by fifteen or twenty in one fell swoop anytime they put out a new record. Drake is now up to a total of well over 300 total career Hot 100 entries, with Swift just behind him for second place. Even lesser-known modern-day artists like YoungBoy Never Broke Again or Lil Baby or Future already have more Hot 100 entries than even Elvis Presley or The Beatles ever had. That just feels like an icky practice to me since artists in prior decades never had that ability and all their old chart records are consequently getting annihilated under the new rules. [I'm also not sure that getting a "featured" credit for singing a line or two on someone else's song should count. I'm suspecting that the overabundance of modern-day pop and hip-hop songs with one or more credited "featured artists" was part of what led Billboard to decide to cease issuing reference books of Top 40 hits like Joel Whitburn used to do, since each new title would have to be listed under three or four different artists and the amount of pages required would have gone through the roof. (LOL)] I realize that hardly anyone is actually releasing singles in tangible form anymore, but, still, I don't think you should allow just any album track to be eligible.
 
I think a lot of it is due to streaming, where listeners cherry-pick what they want vs. listening to or buying albums.
 
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