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Have Yourself a Melancholy ChristmasIn praise of James Taylor's latest.

By Timothy Noah
Posted Monday, Nov. 26, 2001, at 3:29 PM ET

As Richard Turner points out in the Nov. 26 Wall Street Journal, James Taylor's new rendition of that most melancholy of yuletide songs, "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas," seems a lot more appropriate to the current era of post-9/11 grieving and wartime anxiety than the song ever seemed to its original context, the MGM musical Meet Me in St. Louis. In that movie, Judy Garland sang it to soothe little sister Margaret O'Brien's sadness about their daddy Leon Ames' pending transfer to New York, circa 1900. (The movie's improbable happy ending is that he decides to keep his family in Missouri!) On the other hand, as Turner also points out, the song's true context was 1943, the year it was written, when the United States had just entered World War II. Turner reports that even Garland—who subsequently committed suicide—thought "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" too much of a downer. In fact, it's somber but also reassuringly Churchillian, and this listener likes Taylor's version quite a lot. (Hipsters should be forewarned that Chatterbox, as he made clear in this tribute to Paul Simon, does not pretend to have cutting-edge taste in contemporary music.) Alas, Turner's story links only to a snippet of the Taylor rendition (and in any case, you can't get to the Journal Web site without a subscription). You can hear the whole thing by clicking here.

Chatterbox is on record decrying Irving Berlin's "White Christmas" and "Easter Parade" on the grounds that they remove God from religious holidays. As Chatterbox put it earlier, "Berlin's 'White Christmas,' 'Easter Parade,' and 'God Bless America' foster an unhealthy confusion about what to render unto Caesar and what to render unto God." According to this logic, Chatterbox should also dislike "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas." As an atheist, though, Chatterbox feels a limit to how deeply he can take offense, particularly considering that "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" doesn't secularize in order to dumb down a serious topic with gooey sentimentality. The song's title is amazingly bitter, with that condescending "have yourself" where you'd ordinarily expect just "have" and the belittling "little." It's hard to avoid reading the song's cheeriest lines as pure sarcasm: "Here we are as in olden days/
Happy golden days of yore." But they are followed immediately by a simple and moving expression of real feeling: "Precious friends who are dear to us/ Will be near to us once more."

Throughout, the song is a deft balancing act between disillusion about what's bad in life and sincere gratitude for what's good. It bravely assures that the bad times will pass ("In a year our troubles will be out of sight"; "In a year our troubles will be far away"), then backs away from that assurance to acknowledge that they might not ("In a year we all will be together/ If the Fates allow"). Then it concludes, touchingly, that "we'll just have to muddle through somehow." And finally it ends with a return to the sour: "And have ourselves a merry little Christmas now." We will be brave; bravery might not be enough; but we'll just have to grit our teeth and endure; but that doesn't mean we have to like it. That's an amazingly complex sequence of thoughts for a song about the joys of Christmas, even a pagan one that talks about "the Fates." Perhaps it's no accident that Taylor's producer, Russ Titelman, has also worked extensively with Randy Newman, whose own musical career has been a high-wire act to balance the sweet against the sour. Chatterbox wonders whether Newman (whose casting of Taylor as God in his underappreciated rock-opera Faust always struck Chatterbox as mockery) now regrets that Sweet Baby James thought of covering "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" before he got the chance.

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Notes From The Fray Editor:

We are glad to welcome Ray Suarez, of PBS's NewsHour, to The Fray, below. There was much discussion of changes in the lyrics of the song, for example here. Whispers on the Wind says Judy Garland asked for changes. And mfbenson, here, says, "the original lyric was: Have yourself a Merry little Christmas, It may be your last." The Fray team can back up Doodahman: once you have seen The Victors, the song is forever associated with tragedy.

Comments:

I was pleased to read Mr. Noah's piece on "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas." I love the song. You only have to listen to the many singers who've covered it over the years to figure out who understands the words coming out of their own mouths, and who doesn't.

Like the best standards, "Have Yourself…" is easy to sing, and very difficult to sing well. Any song constructed the way it is, with the phrase you're singing undercutting the phrase you just sang, is a challenge. The song allows for a lot of range, from whispering to belting, and sounds dumb when you choose wrong.

The last time I saw it live was in a quickly forgotten Broadway musical, The 1940s Radio Show. It was a paean to radio, Big Band Music, the 40s, and the War. "Have Yourself…" was the end of Act One, with the Band's girl singer (boyfriend in Europe) singing it with all its pretty passages, and all its dark undertones. Terrific, but not enough to save the show.

As for James Taylor, bravo to the choice. It's always nice to hear a grownup sing a hard song. And megadittoes to praise for Taylor's capricious God in Fausta... yes, unfortunately overlooked and underrated... why? Randy Newman wrote beautiful songs with challenging lyrics, sung well by Newman, Taylor, Linda Ronstadt, Bonnie Raitt, and others. Oh well.

Have yourself a merry little Christmas...

--Ray Suarez

(To find or answer this post, click here.)


If anything validates the somber, blow your brains out depression which underlies "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas" it's that it was used as the musical background in the scene in [Carl Foreman's] movie, The Victors, where a U.S. deserter is shot by a firing squad.

--Doodahman

(To find or answer this post, click here.)


Mr. Noah is just a little hard on the song. That it is an essentially positive song but sung in a slow, admittedly dirge-like, tempo has always given it a kind of paradoxical counterpoint that I find appealing. For most of us, Christmas is both a happy time of family and old traditions as well as a hectic, stressful time of busy schedules, monetary outlays, and . . . well, family. I think it is no accident that this is a song coming out of the relatively recent past at a time when the future looked troubled, if not bleak. It seems to look that way most of the time these days. Yeah, yeah--life stinks and for the most part, we have to like it or lump it. Nevertheless, Christmas does provide a respite, no matter how brief or how "merrily little" from our daily grind if we simply allow ourselves to relax and enjoy it. No magic cures, no Churchillian exhortations--just simple gratitude for those small things we tend to overlook during the rest of the year. Leave the disillusionment out altogether--it will take care of itself the other 364 days each year.

--The Bell

(To find or answer this post, click here.)

(11/27)


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