FolkWorld #83 11/2024
Dai Woosnam's DAI-SSECTING THE SONG
First Christmas – Stan Rogers
Before I tell you about the song I have selected as the seventeenth one to go under the Dai Woosnam microscope, let me preface this article with what has now become part of the wallpaper in this series: if you like, see the following four bullet points below as being akin to the “small print” in this contract between you the reader, and me the writer. Here goes...
It is a given that I might be talking total balderdash. After all, I have no monopoly on the truth. And even when my insights are proven correct, that does not stop you dear reader, from finding your own views to be totally antithetical to mine. But here is my news for you... we can both be right.
As Bob Dylan famously wrote “You’re right from your side/I’m right from mine”. And (much less famously) exclaimed in a press conference on his first full tour of the UK, when asked the meaning of a particular song... “My songs mean what they mean to YOU... man!”.
So don’t please write in vituperative language to the Editor to tell him that Dai is, to use the familiar English phrase, “barking up the wrong tree”. I might well be. And certainly every line of my views here are not endorsed by the Editorial Board of FolkWorld. Nor should they be.
Why have they hired me? Not sure. But my dear wife Larissa suggests it’s perhaps because they like the sound of my barking. I must say, I cannot top that conclusion...so I will end my preamble here, and get down to business.
Having gone to the USA for my first, second, fourth, fifth, eighth and fourteenth choices, and Ireland for my third and fifteenth, Scotland for my sixth, England for my seventh, ninth, tenth and twelfth, Canada for my eleventh, and Australia for my thirteenth and sixteenth, I choose to go back to the Canada again for my seventeenth.
I could have chosen three songs from the pen of that late great Canadian, Stan Rogers, here: his acclaimed Lock-Keeper, his rousing The Mary Ellen Carter, and the achingly bittersweet First Christmas. I have opted for the last-named.
The first thing my wife and I do every Christmas Day without fail, is to play this Stan Rogers masterpiece...link below lyrics...
First Christmas
words and music by Stan Rogers
This day a year ago, he was rolling in the snow
With a younger brother in his father's yard
Christmas break, a time for touching home,
The heart of all he'd known
And leaving was so hard
Three thousand miles away,
Now he's working Christmas Day
Making double time for the minding of the store
Well he always said, he'd make it on his own
He's spending Christmas Eve alone
First Christmas away from home
She's standing by the train station,
Panhandling for change
Four more dollars buys a decent meal and a room
Looks like the Sally Ann place after all,
In a crowded sleeping hall
That echoes like a tomb
But it's warm and clean and free,
And there are worse places to be
And at least it means no beating from her Dad
And if she cries because it's Christmas Day
She hopes that it won't show
First Christmas away from home
In the apartment stands a tree,
And it looks so small and bare
Not like it was meant to be,
Golden angel on the top
It's not that same old silver star,
You wanted for your own
First Christmas away from home
In the morning, they get prayers,
Then it's crafts and tea downstairs
Then another meal back in his little room
Hoping maybe that "the boys" will think to phone
Before the day is gone
Well, it's best they do it soon
When the "old girl" passed away,
He fell apart more every day
Each had always kept the other pretty well
But the kids all said the nursing home was best
Cause he couldn't live alone
First Christmas away from home
In the common room they've got the biggest tree
And it's huge and cold and lifeless
Not like it ought to be,
And the lit-up flashing Santa Claus on top
It's not that same old silver star,
You once made for your own
First Christmas away from home
First Christmas away from home.
What a song this is… and what a singer…!!
The lyrics need little explanation from me… and they sit so comfortably on the most touching of melodies. The sheer musicianship of his ensemble is top-drawer, with brother Garnett Rogers’ fiddle being so authoritative, and the band’s glorious trademark use of crescendo being oh-so-persuasive.
Suffice to say that the song explores the different Christmas Day experience of three individuals: a young man who has emigrated across The Atlantic; a young runaway girl living in a Salvation Army hostel; and an elderly man recently widowed and basically coerced by his - hopefully well meaning - sons, into going into an old folks home. (Let’s hope they have not sold his house, whilst he is dealing with the trauma of being somewhere one senses he does not want to be: methinks he would sooner be living with one or other of his children.)
Thinking about Stan’s lyrics… I once got into a "debate" with a dear friend when she told me she had changed a word or two of what are to me the sacred lyrics of Stan’s extraordinary song The Mary Ellen Carter... in her public performances of that song.
It wasn't just the fact that she called it Mary Ellen Carter... I am used to that. So many people talk of that song, and yet always forget the title has four words in it: they omit the definite article*.
No... it was her changing "But insurance paid the loss to us so let her rest below"... and striking "us", and inserting "them". I tried to explain that there was no inherent flaw in the logic of what Stan was saying there, but she would not have it... and in the end, I too accepted her change was not a hanging offence. I told her that far greater crimes had occurred with versions of that song I had encountered in my now home county of Lincolnshire: I remember almost losing my marbles when I heard Market Rasen group Da Capo deliver Stan’s powerful words "With smiling bastards lying to you everywhere you go" as... (wait for it...)... "smiling toe-rags" !!!!
At the time, I counted up to ten, and just avoided storming the stage.
Anyway, I tell you all this, because - when it comes to Stan - I have for over 40 years, always done my bit to proselytise and urge people to embrace that Canadian giant.
And so it came to pass that I said to my friend... "listen kid, THE song of Stan's you ought to sing is First Christmas". She was unfamiliar with it, but once I played her his singing of it - and thus she had now heard it for the first time - she became smitten.
Incidentally, there is no surprise that she had not heard it. After all, the Rogers family themselves, in assembling the posthumous Best of Stan Rogers album, did not think it worthy of inclusion.
Astonishing.
But apparently, there is anecdotal evidence at least, that there were no aspersions being cast by the family regarding its intrinsic quality: simply the fact that it was the one song of his that brought home his most tragic loss in that plane disaster, more painfully than any other.
Those of you who might like further biographical details of this colossal talent, might do worse than read my article on him published in
The Living Tradition magazine in 2013.
I hope that First Christmas also becomes an ever-present for you to play on Christmas mornings… wherever you are in the world. It would not be Christmas in our house without it. And that towering voice with gravitas in spades, is the layer-down of the definitive version, alright.
If ever the Stan Rogers versions disappeared from YouTube, I find this version by his fellow Canadian, Jesse Ferguson, the best of the covers…
He is blessed with a true Stan Rogers timbre to the voice, and there is no higher praise. But one wishes he would have tried to inject more of his personality into it, and not so slavishly copy… like he was a tribute act. And his diction could do with some tweaking…
There is a version by the Scots trio The McCalmans on YouTube that takes a lot of unnecessary liberties with the text… changes that improve an already fine lyric not one iota. That said however, I was sad when Ian McCalman and his two colleagues disbanded some 14 years ago… they were a fine band.
* ‘Definite articles’ can be so important. I remember once reviewing a Steve Hicks & Lisa Deaton album and trying to work out what was wrong with their rendition of that magnificent Shaker sacred song, Simple Gifts. It seemed lacking in impact. And then it suddenly came to me…
They were singing... 'tis a gift to be simple, 'tis a gift to be free…
No, no, no...!!!
It is not any old gift. It is not ‘a gift’ at all... but ‘THE gift to be simple’... ‘THE gift to be free’...
That was what was wrong in their rendition. This use of the ‘indefinite article’.
They were building their exquisite musical house on foundations of sand… simply because the tiniest of words was sabotaging it.
And I said so, in my review.
And do you know what? Steve had the good grace to write to me to tell me that henceforth they would ensure that this vital three letter word was inserted in their delivery of that wonderful song... one incidentally that the late Rev. Sydney Carter stole the melody of, for his Lord Of The Dance (hearing it in Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring and thinking it was based on a traditional melody)... and knowing nothing of Joseph Brackett, the Shaker composer of both words and melody.
Photo Credits:
(1) Dai Woosnam,
(2) Stan Rogers,
(3) Jesse Ferguson
(unknown/website);
The McCalmans @
Tønder Festival 2007
(by Walkin' Tom).
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