• AllMyVinyl #163
• Band: The Harry Simeone Chorale
• Album Title: The Little Drummer Boy: A Christmas Festival
• Release Date: ?? 1963
• Date purchased: Unknown, but mid 60’s somewhere
• Location purchased: Unknown
• Color of vinyl: black
• Number of discs: 1
• Links: [ Wikipedia | Discogs | Band Website (N/A) | Complete album on Youtube ]

This one’s reason for being in my collection is a very similar one to another album I’ve written about in this series already.  That one was “Christmas on the Ponderosa” by the Bonanza TV show folks.  Both of these used to belong to my wife’s parents from way WAY back.  They would listen to these at Christmastime at their house, and continued to do so after my wife was born.  So due to various family life events, my wife came into possession of these two albums.  Given they’re her only vinyl, it just made sense to put it in with all the other stuff I have.  Since I’m going down and doing (eventually) all of the vinyl I own, this came up next on the spreadsheet, so here we are.

Unlike the Bonanza one, this one is unknown to me completely.  Oh of course I know the songs on this thing – it is after all a recording of various traditional Christmas songs.  You can’t go to a Christian church for as long as I have and not know these songs – ha.   But the artist’s name on this vinyl is unknown to me.

When my in laws got this, I can’t say.  My wife certainly doesn’t remember is it was always there in her younger days.  The back of it says (c) 1963, and when I looked it up on Discogs, there were quite a few notes on this that say “does not say Original Version”, yet mine does say that.  It’s been my experience that “Original Version” isn’t proof that something is an OG pressing of an album.  In fact, I’m not even sure if this came out in 1963, or was reprinted in 1968.   It’s definitely old, that’s for sure.  It was originally recorded in the late 1950’s and released under another name – but the same music.

When I went to set up this entry for my blog, I went and showed the vinyl to my wife, and she was very surprised to see it.  She didn’t even know (or had forgotten) that we owned that.  She knew about the Bonanza one, but this one had slipped her mind.  She stood there and read the songs on the back, telling me which ones she remembered from her childhood.  That was nice to witness.

But for me, I have ZERO memory of this one, which is kind of why this intro is a bit shorter than they usually are in my series.  I can’t think of much else to add before actually listening to this.  :)

The entire album is roughly 38 minutes long, which is pretty standard album length from something before compact discs came out.  I’m not breaking down each individual track here, because as I said before, it’s a collection of traditional Christmas music.  Most of these have little variant from what lives in people’s minds when they think of songs like “Little Drummer Boy’ or “Oh Holy Night”…   I’ll just list the tracks, and add a few comments from my listen through…

Side One

1. Sing We Now of Christmas
2. Angels We have Heard on High
3. Away in a Manger
4. What Child is This?
5. Joy to the World
6. Go Tell it on the Mountain
7. It Came Upon a Midnight Clear
8. Good King Wencesias
9. We Three Kings
10. Villancico
11. Hark, The Herald Angels Sing
12. Bring a Torch, ISabella
13. Lo, How A Rose E’er Blooking
14. Deck the Halls
15. Christian Men Rejoice
16. Master’s In the Hall
17. O’ Tannebaum

Side Two:

1. O Holy Night
2. The Little Drummer Boy
3. Coventry Carol
4. Rise Up Shepherds
5. God Rest Ye Merry Genterlmen
6. O Little Town of Bethlehem
7. O Come Little Children
8. Ding Dong
9. While Spheres Watched Their Flocks By Night
10. The First Noel
11. The Friendly Beasts
12. Silent Night
13. Adeste Fideles
14. A Christmas Greeting

That is a lot of songs – 31 of them listed.   However, they can mostly all be referred to as “fragments”.  None of them are full 3-4 minute long songs.  Both sides have them grouped into “Bands” (Band 1/2/3, etc)..  Each of those do medleys.  Only three of these 31 songs are listed as “full” – Go Tell It on The Mountain, O Holy Night, & The Little Dummer Boy.

Musically, this sounds like you’re listening to a church choir sing all these songs.  Which given what I read about Simone’s concept here was probably the intended target.   It’s got an extremely strong traditional Christmas sound.  Nothing more modern like a “twist” on things.  It’s right up there in terms of traditional Christmas sound like you’d get from say Bing Crosby, Tony Bennett, or Andy Williams.

This is a bit older now and wildly out of print as far as I can tell.   But if you like traditional Christmas music, and are looking for something new (to you) to play around Christmas, this would work nicely.

A short postscript here.  In 1960 Simone had a different band called “The Harry Simeone Songsters”, and they created a baseball song called “It’s a Beautiful Day for a Ball Game“, which my research says was played in stadiums a lot.  This would have had to have been a 60’s thing, because when I started going to games in 1972, I don’t recall ever hearing this.  Just wanted to mention it, since I’ll never be writing about Simone again in this vinyl series.  :)

To follow up on the story with my wife, when I showed her this, she said she didn’t remember that we had it in our collection – she had forgotten about it.  Told me she wished she knew that we had it as she would have loved to have played it this past Christmas.  The reason was that the version of “Go Tell It On the Mountain” was running through her mind this past Christmas.

As I said with the Bonanza album elsewhere, I love that we have this momento from my wife’s childhood to play.  I fully intend on passing these things on to our daughter for years to come.