‘Tis finally the season for Christmas music. If you were playing it before Thanksgiving, you’re a monster and need to repent.
Now that it’s chronologically appropriate, what should you be listening to? I’m generally a fan of the classics, and I think it’s hard to go wrong with those. (A good list of classic Country albums is available here.) For those handful of you who think that what the world needs is a new Christmas song, here are a few new Country Christmas albums that have been released recently. (For those of you who think what we really need is a great old song with a terrible new song woven into it so a mediocre artist can leech off of success that they’ll never achieve by themselves, we can’t be friends any more.)
- As you’d expect, Reba McEntire’s Ultimate Christmas Collection is at the top of this list. Granted, it’s a compilation album with some of the best–say, even the “ultimate”–from her other Christmas albums drawn into one place. But again, who needs new Christmas music? This is just a great album.
- Girl Named Tom has a new album called One More Christmas that’s something of a mixed bag. The version of “What Child is This?” knocks it out of the part. But the “Jingle Bell Rock/Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” medley would have best been left off the album. The new stuff on there is fine, and the versions of classics otherwise are solid.
- Capitol Records’ Nashville office has put out a compilation album just called Country Christmas Greatest Hits. As with any generic compilation, it’s a mixed-bag that somehow manages to includes some solid numbers and some… others… that are clearly just there to capitalize on the success of an artist in other venues. It also manages to list Mickey Guyton’s “O Holy Night” as “O Holy Time” on the Amazon page for the CD, so clearly they’re just aiming at the seasonal cash flow available. Still, this is an okay-ish effort as these kinds of things go.
- At only four songs, Thomas Rhett’s Merry Christmas Y’All hits high with its modesty. Each of the songs included is a solid, well-performed and well-sung title. They’re also all all songs in that fine-but-utterly-without-religious-substance category, which is not what we should expect from either a Country album or a Christmas album. Still, they are well done and the songs included are among the less eye-rolly of that kind of song (which just means he didn’t include “Baby it’s cold outside”).
Dr. Coyle Neal is co-host of the City of Man Podcast an Amazon Associate (which is linked in this blog), and an Associate Professor of Political Science at Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, MO
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