Morgan Daniels delivers his seasonal batch of Christmas songs with a left-wing twist

The Weavers — We Wish You a Merry Christmas (1951)

The meaning of Christmas is not fixed.  It is, of course, the preeminent capitalist festival, a time of rampant consumerism.  Yet the central messages of the Christmas season such as peace and goodwill are antithetical to capitalist society, as is the temporary cessation of normal working hours.  Peace and goodwill might well have been successfully monetised, yet in the annual worldwide celebration of Christmas there is a lingering promise of another world, one organised very differently.  What if, say, time for family and a concern for the most vulnerable in society were not just for Christmas?

On their sweet, clever version of ‘We Wish You a Merry Christmas’, the Weavers strike right at the heart of festive contradictions.  Whilst they sing all the usual stuff about figgy pudding and cups of good cheer, they also break the fourth wall, so to speak: ‘Once in a year, it is not thought amiss / To visit our neighbors and sing out like this / Of friendship and love, good neighbors abound / And peace and goodwill the whole year around.’  All of which leads to a very good question: ‘Why can’t we have Christmas / the whole year around?’

The Kinks — Father Christmas (1977)

This later Kinks single tells the heartwarming tale of some kids kicking the shit out of Santa.  It’s abrasive, punky, and perfectly sincere.  Put otherwise, the violence meted out to Saint Nick isn’t random, but rather a symptom of a sick, unequal society: ‘Father Christmas, give us some money / We got no time for your silly toys / We’ll beat you up if you don’t hand it over / Give all the toys to the little rich boys’.  The Kinks are surely at the peak of their sardonic, class-conscious powers here.

‘I love the humour of it,’ said Dave Davies, ‘and the aggression and bitterness. I could see the faces of my parents when Christmas came around.  They had to struggle to make ends meet.  We kind of got what we needed, but there was something fake about the holiday.’ 

Lady Maisery and Jimmy Aldridge & Sid Goldsmith — Hope is Before Us (2019)

‘Hope is Before Us’ is the closing number on Arise, Awake: A Winter Album, a 2019 collaboration between two very fine contemporary folk acts.  To my mind, it is something of a modern classic.  The song interprets William Morris’s poem ‘The Voice of Toil’, written for his 1885 collection Chants for Socialists.  Morris is an important figure for the all-star trio of Lady Maisery: Hazel Askew explained that the band ‘love the combination of his socialist vision and belief in creating beautiful things that are accessible for all.’

It was Askew who arranged ‘Hope is Before Us’, transforming Morris’s work into a stirring, singalong hymn of revolutionary optimism: ‘But now the seeds of spring are sown / Let wintered hearts be warmed by sun / The joy of people now buds and grows / The birds will sing ere the winter’s done’.  Morris, it turns out, is the perfect tonic for the months of darkness.  ‘Throughout William Morris’s writing,’ Lady Maisery et al note, ‘seasonal imagery is inextricably linked with his messages of unity, hope and the struggle for a better future.  His ideas feel searingly relevant for today.’

Randy Newman — Christmas in Cape Town (1983) 

An ugly song, but how could it be otherwise?  ‘Christmas in Cape Town’ is Randy Newman’s seething take on apartheid, sung from the perspective of an ageing Afrikaner.  Newman has always operated in a highly satirical register, and satire, done well, not infrequently makes one squirm.  So it is with ‘Christmas in Cape Town’, which continues to shock in the present.

There are two things which make this satire work so effectively.  The first is Newman’s unnerving decision to ventriloquise a racist.  He sings, racial epithets and all, in defence of apartheid, telling an English visitor to Cape Town: ‘don’t talk about something / You don’t know anything about / … if you don’t like it here / Go back to your own miserable country.’  The second point is that this attempt to justify segregation is utterly incoherent.  The narrator rambles from subject to subject, until finally he asks: ‘What are we gonna do, blow up / The whole damn country?’

Carlene Davis — Santa Claus (Do You Ever Come to the Ghetto) (1981) 

More than forty years ago, the Jamaican musician Tommy Cowan took a drive through Kingston at Christmastime and noticed a distinct lack of festive cheer.  This dismal journey provided the inspiration for ‘Santa Claus (Do You Ever Come to the Ghetto)’, written by Cowan and performed by his wife, Carlene Davis.  The song is addressed directly to Santa: ‘We see you in the papers / you’re on TV / giving the toys to some pickney / Wondering what′s happening to poor people like we / Is it because we no have no chimney?’

In 2019, Davis felt that ‘Santa Claus’, with its concern for racism and class and poverty, remained as relevant as when it was first released.  ‘The attention it is now getting, clearly there is another generation who is now embracing it and identifying with it’, Davis said.  ‘We were just posing a question as human beings and artistes, and even if you never understood life in the inner-city the song is so prophetic and draws your attention.’

Jona Lewie — Stop the Cavalry (1980)  

The genius of Jona Lewie’s anti-war masterpiece, ‘Stop the Cavalry’, lies in its universality.  Its narrator is not one soldier in one particular war, but rather a figure that runs the historical gamut.  ‘I have had to fight / almost every night / down throughout these centuries.’  Lewie explained: ‘The first lyrics I thought of were actually “can you stop the gallantry”, about the gallant soldiers of the Crimean War and especially the charge of the Light Brigade.  This later became Stop the Cavalry and I widened the perspective of the song to be about all wars and all soldiers.’

Thus, and so, the ‘Stop the Cavalry’ jumps from the First World War to nuclear fallout without skipping a beat.  It’s a surreal protest, for sure, a dreamy patchwork of a song that also manages to be a bona fide hit.  Quite the trick.  What’s more, it is accompanied by a pitch-perfect music video, a wobbly, soft-focus job shot on Hampstead Heath that punches you in the gut.  Rarely indeed do the pop music stars align like this. 

Bob Dylan — Long Ago, Far Away (1962)

If you’re after songs about Christ over the festive period, you could do worse than this early Dylan demo.  Bob’s in full-blown Woody Guthrie mode here, channelling his hero’s Christian socialism: ‘To preach of peace and brotherhood / Oh, what might be the cost / A man, he did it long ago / And they hung him on a cross’.  The song then waltzes through the evils of human history, from the slave trade to world war, with Dylan constantly snarling, wickedly: ‘Long ago, far away / Those things don’t happen nowadays’.  

This doesn’t seem to me some nihilistic portrait of a species bound always towards greed and destruction.  It’s surely much more a warning shot against the notion of linear progress, something ideologically essential to capitalism.  Turns out Dylan knew exactly what he was doing from the very beginning.  

Jester Hairston — Amen (1963)

‘Amen’ was arranged by Jester Hairston for the 1963 Sidney Poitier film Lilies of the Field.  It is something of a gift to the world, an endlessly reinterpretable call-and-response hymn following the story of Jesus from birth to death.  The song caught the attention of the singer Curtis Mayfield, who covered it in 1964 with his group the Impressions.  Harry Belafonte also sang a notable version.

It is not a coincidence that both Mayfield and Belafonte were politically active in the civil rights movement.  Music and resistance are intimately bound together throughout the history of black America, such that songs which are not overtly radical can strike a popular chord and take on a life force of their own.  So it was with ‘Amen’, which was adopted and adapted on the streets in the 1960s, becoming a rallying cry of liberation.  Culture travels.  It is on the move.

Odetta — Poor Little Jesus (1960)

The early-sixties album Christmas Spirituals by the civil rights figurehead Odetta is a case in point.  This stunning collection emphasised songs which were necessarily political by virtue of recent history, in their being plantation staples and thus carriers of the spirit of resistance.  ‘These songs could not have happened in Africa alone, or in the United States alone’ Odetta stressed.  ‘They are a result of the experience of slavery.’

In one of these spirituals, ‘Poor Little Jesus’, Odetta inserted a single line that made its meaning instantly contemporary: ‘Oh poor little Jesus / Mmmm Mmmm / Laid him in a manger / Oh my Lord / Well they couldn’t find no hotel room’.  As Ian Zack observed in his biography of Odetta, she knew that the reference to being turned away from a hotel—which she managed to include in a performance on the Ed Sullivan Show—would connect with anyone involved in the civil rights struggle.  ‘In Jesus’s case, of course, the inn in Bethlehem was booked, not segregated, but the line was lost on no one.’  

Susan, Gordon, Big Bird et al — Keep Christmas With You (All Through the Year) (1975)

First appearing on the 1975 album Merry Christmas from Sesame Street, ‘Keep Christmas With You’ takes an approach to the festive season which very much chimes with that of the Weavers, above: ‘Christmas means the spirit of giving / Peace and joy to you / The goodness of loving / The gladness of living / These are Christmas too / So, keep Christmas with you / All through the year’.  (Note: Pete Seeger, the most famous of the Weavers, appeared on Sesame Street more than a dozen times.)

Keep Christmas with you.  It’s a radical instruction.  It’s a demand for a different world, one which cherishes the values extolled by Children’s Television Workshop.  In fact, I often think that socialist society would look a lot like Sesame Street.  But perhaps I’m getting carried away.  Where’s the sherry gone?