Monday, December 24, 2018

A Johnny Cash Christmas to remember

I really wanted to do more cheesy movies, but the Greatest Newspaper in the Northwest™ is in a transitional phase and my workload has been through the roof. So I’m going to wrap up the pre-holiday videos with one of the loveliest Christmas shows I’ve ever seen.

Growing up in the ’70s, I remember seeing these variety show specials pert’ near every night from Thanksgiving to Christmas. Every comedian or musician who was anybody had one. Some of them were pretty good (The Carpenters, for instance) and some of them, well, just didn’t age well. (I subjected my Lovely and Brilliant Wife to a Donny and Marie special, I forget which one, and came out unable to believe we’d ever enjoyed such dreck.) But this 1977 show from Johnny Cash is just jaw-dropping. Roy Clark, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Statler Brothers, they all joined Johnny and June just a few months after their recording buddy Elvis died. Besides the songs that made some of them famous and a few old Christmas standards, the stars all converge for high-energy renditions of the Gospel standards “This Train is Bound for Glory” and “Children Go Where I Send Thee, as well as an absolutely breathtaking performance of “Silent Night.” If you skipped the movies (and who could blame you), you still need to see this.

Merry Christmas to all!


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