Each Friday I pick a song–new, old, borrowed, blue–that’s been on my mind and in my ears, and write a short post about it.
This is “White Christmas” by The Drifters:
Not every protest is a big gesture, not every political engagement need be large, and artists succeed best when they live the art they make. It’s pretty easy to understand the Drifters, looking around in 1954, and thinking about the ironies of a group of black (or, in the parlance of the day, “colored”) men singing about Christmas being white. So Bill Pinkney, singing the bass lead, and Clyde McPhatter singing the tenor lead, give just a little push–just a gentle spin–to that one word, particularly when it ends a line, and Bill drags that last one out before the group cuts in with some Jingle Bells to steal at least a little of the whiteness from Christmas, and just maybe make someone think about whose lives matter. Looking towards tomorrow, whether you’re spending your Christmas white, black, brown, yellow, straight, gay, trans, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Sikh, Hindu, Buddhist, or any other way, let your holidays be merry and bright. The primary message of Christmas, or so I learned from a childhood of Bible stories, is peace, love and understanding, but (also, actually, a lesson of those stories from that book) each of those things requires hard and unceasing work to achieve; where much of the last year has culminated in various momentary victories for forces that hold no understanding of either peace or love, let alone of much else, let us dedicate ourselves to projects that hold those three ideals in the highest esteem for 2017 and beyond.
