My Musical Stories: Ray Coniff's "Here We Come A Caroling"

Ah the wonderful sounds of the Christmas season!  The bellringers from the Salvation Army outside the grocery stores, the carolers going from door to door, and the sound of snow piling up on our door stoops.  Whatever other sounds, you may associate with this time of the year, I hope you enjoy the Christmas season whichever way you may celebrate it.

Of course, let's remember the reason for the season (Jesus), and also remember that spending quality time with family and friends holds much more importance than making sure the kids have that wonderful new toy they've been begging for since they saw it on the shelves when the shops started pushing Christmas in September.  It also holds more importance than the Christmas meal.  Food is great, but it's not what would spoil a holiday.

I have two things that would be considered "my favorite things" when it comes to Christmas.  The first is the Christmas lights.  Recommendations if you live in the Northland are the lights in Virginia's Olcott Park and Bentleyville in Duluth.  But if you want to be truly blown away or are looking for something with a smaller down home feel, check out the lights on Park Point, right across the Aerial Lift Bridge.  Owned by Marcia Hale and featured on ABC show The Great Christmas Light Fight last December, this light display will be sure to warm your heart no matter how young/old you are.  Head towards the Hale's if you want to avoid what families are touting as "longer lines" at Bentleyville yet still check out some lights with your little ones.  Both displays are amazing regardless.

My other favorite thing about the Christmas season is easily the music.  There are so many great songs to check out, from "Ding Dong Merrily On High" to "Here's Your Sign Christmas".  All of them encompass a different mood, whether it's expressing dismay at the extended family coming over to the house or perhaps enjoying each other's company while talking over swing jazz music.  There is truly something for everyone when it comes to Christmas music, and the music has been stretched out across so many genres it's amazing.

One of my personal favorite songs from the season is by Ray Coniff, who has a band called "The Ray Coniff Singers".  Together they recorded a song called "Here We Come A Caroling" that was released in 1965.  The song tells the story about a group of people going out and attempting to spread holiday cheer by caroling at people's doorsteps.  They do everything, from announcing that "We are not daily beggars who partake from door to door" to saying "God Bless the master of this house and Bless the mistress too."  The lyrics are really cool, and make you wish you were with this group of merry people running around out in the cold.

The music that accompanies this song is nice too.  Starting out with what sounds like a circus march and slowly evolving into one of those nice little joyous tunes before diving back into the circus march and repeating several times, the song is instantaneously catchy for people of all ages.

The first time I heard this song was when my class preformed it during a Christmas concert in 2007/2008 in Cotton.  That time around it was set to what sounded like an Irish pub tune, and I spent years looking for it on CD's and anything else I could find with music, only getting dismayed to find smooth jazz versions everywhere I looked.

It would be seven to eight years before I finally found the closest thing to the song I heard so long ago for Christmas.

In November of 2015, I was looking to diversify Free Range Sports Radio, and I thought that Christmas music would be a good way to do so, to make it look like we played Holiday music.  It was during the first round of searching that I decided to look up "Here We Come A Caroling" again, in the hopes that I would find the treasure of the ears that I heard so long ago.  And I came close, with the version that you find at the end of this post.  It is by no means Irish pub music, but it is close enough rhythm-wise that it was what I was looking for, instead of another smooth jazz rendition that I finally just gave up and accepted.

This song is a good anthem for the Christmas season, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Have a song you want to hear me talk about in a future "My Musical Stories" blog post?  Shoot me your ideas in the comments! :) Happy Holidays!