The Average White Guy

The title of this post is also the title of a family Christmas album. I first heard it when I was a baby, and it’s been a big part of my holiday tradition all of my life. If you don’t know me very well, then I will tell you quickly that I left my mother when I was 14. It’s cool though; we’re pretty close now. Just after I moved out, my mother moved from the house in which I grew up, and the christmas tape I loved all my life was gone…

Since the tape I loved went missing, I have spent countless hours, days, weeks, months, and - yes - even years looking for this particular Christmas music. The problem was that nobody (not even my mom) was ever sure it was an album. As far as anyone knew, it was a tape with tracks from the radio, LP albums, and other tapes….or even 8-tracks! Although it was a favorite in my mom’s house growing up, none of her 5 brothers and sisters could remember more than a song or two that was on it, if they remembered this collection at all. And if they did know a song, they had no idea who sang it. Now that wouldn’t be a problem if these were songs like “Ironman”, “Sweet Home Alabama”, or “Stairway to Heaven”. But when you’re talking about Christmas carols, there’s no freakin’ way to find these songs as recorded by a particular artist or band.

So over 13 years I collected a song title here and a song title there….people thought that a particular song was by this guy or that guy, but nobody was sure. With the power and depth of the information on the internet, I thought I might be able to find an album with these tracks on it, and then it wouldn’t matter who sang them; I’d have the album pegged.

Well, the two songs I had the most concrete evidence of was “Deck the Halls” by Vic Damone, and “Ave Maria” by Rosemary Clooney. I looked and looked for the album, cross-referencing these two renditions, but nothing. Now I’m an internet expert, so I know that if information isn’t out there today, it might be out there tomorrow, so I waited. Each fall, I’d get into the search again, and each year, I’d come up empty. Before too long, I began to accept the fact that this particular collection of music was compiled by a family member, and there would be no way to recollect it.

Even though I came to accept the futility of my search, I kept looking. I switched my goal from finding this album to disproving that it was a compilation. I know that’s not really different, but it kept me going.

I guess I started my search in 1993. It began by scouring the boxes and boxes of my mom’s old cassette tapes. I soon graduated to searching the music stores, and vinyl record outlets. I had no idea what I was looking for, and I would go cross-eyed standing in the stores reading tracks off the albums. Of course I didn’t find what I was looking for. When the internet came to my fingertips, I began searching there…again: nothing. That is of course until January of 2006.

This search led me in a direction I hadn’t been in before. At the time I found it, I had three songs on the tracklist:

• Deck the Halls - Vic Damone
• Sleigh Ride - Arthur Fiedler/The Boston Pops
• Ave Maria - Rosemary Clooney

I had the titles of other songs in the list, but no artists, or no certainty that the artist I did have for the other songs were correct. Of course, I was looking for albums with all three. Then, I decided to take a more algorithmic approach. In stead of looking for all three, I’d look for albums with combinations of the songs I did know. When I searched, I found a few albums with one or the other, but none with both or all three. So I decided to search again, only this time without the artists. This time I got a match on “Deck the Halls” and “Ave Maria”. What had me looking without any chance of finding my list was that “Ave Maria” was not done (on this album at least) by Rosemary Clooney. Now don’t get me wrong, Rosemary Clooney is a fine singer, but she’s not part of this collection.

When I found the album with these two songs, I found the entire tracklist familiar to me. I immediately knew I had what I was searching for. “Christmastime in Carol and Song” - RCA 1968. It’s an extremely rare album, and I’m lucky that it’s not so highly sought after that I had a hard time buying the LP’s that I did find. I got two copies from ebaY last year, and one from ebaY this year…I also bought a copy from an online-record album; they should be here any day now. I remember my eyes welled up with tears, and I almost broke down. Not because of the album, but because I found it after all these years, and because I could return a great tradition back to my family; I’m big on family. I also had this sort of “Now What?” feeling. I spent so much time looking for this album, that now I don’t know what to do when the cold weather hits! Well, the answer is to find CD-quality versions of the songs on this album.

My Uncle Jim is going to convert this album to CD and we’ll pass it out to the rest of the family together this Christmas. The more CD-quality tracks I can find, the better the reproduction will be.

Ok, I guess this is a lame story, but I’ll remind you again: this is my site. I’m proud of myself, and I know my family’s gonna love it.