Tim Neely is well known in the world of Christmas Music collecting. And, "well known" is an understatement to the hard core Christmas music collector community. Tim is the author of the indispensable Goldmine Christmas Record Price Guide, published in 1997 and still highly sought after by collectors 26 years later.
Tim is an active member of the online Christmas music collector community, contributing tidbits of recording history to many discussions. Deeper knowledge about the history of Christmas music recordings may not exist (although Stubby might make it a tight race).
Each year since 2014 Tim has graced us with a "Christmas Song of the Day" during the month of December, sharing with his readers a song that has some special meaning to him. We learn all about the song, and why he selected it, which may be a very personal, moving story. I've been introduced to many new artists and songs from Tim, BarlowGirl, Laura Allen, and Nightbirde being three that come to mind. You can follow along Tim's CSOTD at his website, Tim Neely Stuff.
Several months ago I asked Tim if he would mind doing an interview with Merry & Bright, to talk about all things Christmas music. Tim enthusiastically agreed, unaware of just how many questions would be coming his way. Trooper that he his, Tim sent back extraordinarily thoughtful answers to all my questions.
I am very, very grateful for Tim's time. He is a music lover, collector, historian, and gentleman with truly fascinating insights into Christmas music, past and present. So, here on December 1, coinciding with Tim's debut Christmas Song of the Day, I am very proud to present Part 1 of my interview with Tim Neely. Stay tuned to Merry & Bright for Part 2.
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Merry & Bright Interview with Tim Neely part 1
Merry & Bright:
Tim, thank you for spending this time with Merry & Bright. As such a highly respected member of the
Christmas music collector community, I think my readers will really enjoy
hearing your thoughts about Christmas music and related topics.
Tim Neely: Thank you
for thinking of me and asking me.
MB: I’d like to start
by learning a little more about you. My
personal earliest memory of Christmas music is a Bing Crosby album that my
parents had (“Songs of Christmas”, Decca DL 34461, with Bing and Katherine Crosby wrapping
presents on the front cover and Bing advertising for La-Z-Boy on the
back). I played that record year round
in my early childhood, and I still have it in my collection today, over 50
years later. What is one of your
earliest memories of Christmas music?
TN: Just one? I must
have been a Christmas music fan from my pre-kindergarten years, because I
vaguely remember watching three classic Christmas TV specials, if not the year
they first aired, then not long thereafter – Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer, A Charlie Brown Christmas, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas! With
help from my dad, I made a reel-to-reel tape recording of Rudolph off the television one year, but about a third of the way
through, the sound became distorted.
I also remember
looking forward to the Christmas season at church, because they'd pull out
Christmas songs to sing as part of the service, such as "O Come All Ye
Faithful," "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing," and "Angels We
Have Heard on High."
Another early memory
is that my parents bought me a songbook of Christmas music when I was quite
young, and I used it so much that it eventually fell apart. I did a search for
it not too many years ago, and I found that it was called Christmas Carols and was published by Whitman in 1964. (Earlier
editions were printed many times dating back to 1938!) It has a great cover,
with singers standing around what looks like an old-time organ. It would be
neat to have that 1964 songbook again.
Finally, during the
Christmas season of 1967, my parents bought an LP at W.T. Grant, which used to
be a five-and-dime department store chain. Grants was where we went to visit
Santa, probably because it was the closest place to do so from home. Anyway, they
bought an album called A Very Merry
Christmas. That album was the first "grown-up" record that my dad
let me play on his big-people stereo. That is where it all began. I've had
other copies of that album in the years since, but I still have that record that
my folks bought in 1967, complete with my handwriting on the back cover.
MB: How did you
become a collector of Christmas music?
To paraphrase Malcolm Gladwell, was there a ‘tipping point’ after which
your collecting mojo really took off? Or
was it a gradual thing, where one day you suddenly realized you had built up
quite a collection?
TN: It was definitely
a gradual thing. I consider the start of my record collecting as March 1973,
though there had always been records around the house. It wasn't a focus of the
collection for many years, but when (especially) 45s of Christmas songs showed up,
I got them. I had "The Chipmunk Song" by the Chipmunks early on, as
well as Gene Autry's "Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer" and Jimmy
Boyd's "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus," because an early focus of
my 45 collection was songs that hit #1 in Billboard.
Some others I recall
adding to my collection early on were an early-1960s pressing of "The
Christmas Song" by Nat King Cole; the 45 EP with "Blue
Christmas" by Elvis Presley on it; and "The Man with All the
Toys" by the Beach Boys.
The Christmas part of
my collection started to grow in the mid- to late-1980s, to the point where by
1990, I made Christmas mix tapes for my mom's Christmas parties for her friends
from work. By that time, I had dozens of holiday albums and hundreds of 45s. By
the early 1990s, I began to collect Christmas CDs; I also started to collect
various-artists series of albums. I got all eight volumes of A Very Merry Christmas from Grants and
most of the Firestone and Goodyear volumes. Finally, I worked on collecting the
True Value Hardware Happy Holidays series.
By 1997, I had enough Christmas albums that I segregated them from the rest of
my collection. So it was definitely a gradual progression.
MB: Can you estimate
the size of your collection? How many
LPs, singles, CDs? We’ll exclude
downloaded digital music from the count.
TN: At one time, I
had over 10,000 Christmas records, including 45s and LPs, and I think I still
do. I have an entire wall filled with Christmas CDs, including both full-length
and singles; I estimate that I have 4,000 CDs.
MB: I’ve often
thought about what will happen to the collections that our colleagues in the
community own. My collection is pretty
large, but it pales in comparison to some of the true A-Listers like Rob
Martinez, Ernie Haynes, and Tim Sewell.
Where will your collection wind up a few decades down the road? And what would you like to see happen to the
collections from our peers? I hate the
thought of a giant truck backing up to the loading dock at the local thrift
store with pallets of Christmas records from a collector.
TN: It's not
something I've thought about very much, unfortunately.
MB: I’ve wondered
about the utility and feasibility of an International Christmas Music Museum
and Research Center, as a place for these collections to live on in
perpetuity. Maybe someone out there
knows of a rich patron to provide the startup funding.
TN: Or perhaps, one
can find a major research university with a great already existing
music-history department to host such a collection. A large financial donation
or endowment would help, which alas is beyond my meager means. But if that
school already has some infrastructure, adding a Christmas-music component
would simply require storage space and commitment.
MB: What are your
general thoughts about the Christmas music collector community? What role do you think the blogs, message
boards, and sharing of out-of-print vinyl (lovingly transferred to digital)
have had on the world of Christmas music?
TN: I love it! Any
time you discover other people with the same specific interest, it's a godsend.
All the talk by bloggers and enthusiasts has been a positive thing, because I
think it shows that reissues of rare Christmas music, especially by niche
labels, can be commercially viable.
MB: Let’s talk about
the evolution of music media, a topic not exclusive to Christmas music, but one
very important to us as collectors. We’ve seen the distribution of music
transition from vinyl to CDs to digital downloads to streaming (I left out
8-tracks and cassettes, but I suppose we can give them a nod as well). Now vinyl is “in” again, and achieving
significant sales, with more and more new and re-releases every year. What are your thoughts about the evolution of
the media, and the resurrection of vinyl?
TN: It makes me glad
I got off the acquisition treadmill a few years ago! By the 1990s, every new
Christmas album was on CD, and many were still on cassette, but almost none
were on vinyl. With all the LP reissues of the past 10 years, I'd be doing the
opposite of what many music buyers did in the early 1990s. In other words, I'd
be replacing my discs with records, rather than the other way around. But
there's no way I could ever afford to do so today.
Along those same
lines, I know of a Christmas music collector who has at least 40 (!!) vinyl
variations of Vince Guaraldi's A Charlie
Brown Christmas with different colors of records and styles of covers. At
one time, that album was impossible to find! I remember buying the 1988 reissue
version at a store that was clearing out its records in 1990, and I had no idea
it existed at all. Now, it's reissued so frequently that it's darn near
impossible to keep track, or keep up.
MB: Let’s do a quick
focus on digital music – “physical” versions – MP3, WAV, FLAC, etc. – as well as
streaming. I have a huge collection of
digital music stored away on hard drives and internet services, but I
personally lose track of them, and strongly prefer my CDs and records. And I am not yet a convert to streaming. I will stream some music each season, but
it’s a very small part of my listening.
How has digital and streaming music affected the way you listen to
Christmas music?
TN: Frankly, not much
at all. I mostly find it annoying! Going all the way back to Kimberley Locke's
2005 version of "Up on the Housetop," and possibly earlier, record
labels started with digital-only Christmas music. When that song was popular,
the only way to find that song was if you were fortunate enough to find one of
the promo-only CDs containing it – unless you believed in ITunes, where you
could buy the song as a digital download. Two years later, she did an entire
Christmas album, but it was only available digitally; hard copies were
promo-only.
I downloaded a few
one-offs over the years, but only if they were free. One I'm glad I got was
"Fa La La" by Jim Brickman featuring Olivia Jade Archbold, because
Brickman made a WAV (lossless) version available on his website the year it was
sent to radio (2011), and ever since, I don't think it's been on a hard copy.
To this day, I keep a
keen eye for those increasingly rare new Christmas compilations in hopes of
finding songs I've heard in recent years but despair of ever owning because
they aren't on CD or record.
MB: Over the years,
have you seen peaks and valleys in the popularity of Christmas music? To me, although this may be completely a
personal experience bias, it seems like the first Mannheim Steamroller
Christmas album kicked off a bit of a resurgence in Christmas music
popularity. And, then when the first “A
Very Special Christmas” was released, that seemed to contribute to another
boost. If you have seen peaks, what do
you think were the triggers that led to the bumps in popularity? Certain songs or albums? Other influences?
TN: I could write an
entire essay, or even a book, on this subject. But the short answer is yes, I
have seen peaks and valleys in the popularity of Christmas music. I'd argue
that Christmas music, combining both the streaming and playlist-based
phenomenon and the sales of physical media, has never been more popular than it
is today! Admittedly, the CDs are far less numerous today than 15-20 years ago,
but they're still out there. And I really miss the store-brand CDs from such
places as Starbucks, Kohl's, Hallmark Gold Crown, and True Value Hardware. New
records, of course, are much more available today. But it's with radio and
streaming where Christmas music is bigger than ever.
I'd say the lowest
point in Christmas music in the United States was probably the late 1970s to
the mid-1980s. Few artists were recording new Christmas LPs; most new releases
hitting the market were novelties (numerous "Christmas Disco" albums,
for example). And it was considered "uncool" to make Christmas
records by the most popular artists of the day, though the Eagles had a hit
with their version of "Please Come Home for Christmas" in 1978. In
the UK, things were a bit different because of the national obsession with the
Christmas #1 hit, which started in earnest in 1973 and remains a thing to this
day.
Another contributor
to a lull in Christmas-music popularity was Billboard's
decision in 1963 to segregate Christmas music, both singles and albums,
from its main singles and albums charts. Because of that, we don't really know
how big the holiday hits from 1963-73 really were, unless one has access to Cash Box, which never disqualified
Christmas music from its charts.
You mentioned the
Mannheim Steamroller Christmas album. It was released in 1984, and it actually
made the main Billboard Top 200 album
chart the year it came out, peaking at #110. But it didn't really take off until people started buying compact discs later in
the 80s. And yes, A Very Special
Christmas (1987) made it cool for American pop-rock artists to make at
least the occasional Christmas song again.
MB: The fairly recent
history of Christmas music radio is quite interesting in itself. I think that for many, many years commercial
radio stations would work a few Christmas songs into their playlists during the
season, and a very few would make the seasonal switch to all Christmas music in
December. (Side anecdote: another early memory of mine is a Wichita KS
radio station playing “Jingle Bells” by The Singing Dogs every morning during
the season.) A few years ago it seems we
had an eruption in the number of stations switching to an all-Christmas format,
and also there were races to see who could do it first. In my market (Kansas City), Christmas radio
has normalized, and there are only one or two that switch to all
Christmas. What are your thoughts about
the history of Christmas radio, the huge upsurge, and where we are now?
TN: When I was
growing up, the local sunup-to-sundown AM station used to play what it called a
"Christmas Caravan of Music" starting a couple days before Christmas.
It was strictly easy-listening fare; each segment was sponsored by a local
business, and all may have been pre-recorded so the station announcers could
have time off for the holiday. In the 1970s, the Philadelphia stations would
incorporate maybe one Christmas song an hour into the format up until Christmas
Eve, when they would play 24 hours of non-stop holiday music on a loop.
The first station I
remember adapting an all-Christmas format for longer than a week was in
Baltimore, Maryland, in November and December of, I think, 1989. It did so as a
stunt, as it was going to change its format on January 1 of the new year. My
recollection is that the station's ratings saw a significant improvement during
those two months, and a seed was planted.
I think it was Fred
Allen who once said, "Imitation is the sincerest form of television,"
and that's even more true on the radio. The first time I heard a station where
I lived go all-holiday during the Christmas season was in 1997.
Not many years later,
probably in 2003, I was in Grand Rapids, Michigan, visiting family during
Halloween weekend. As I was driving in the area, two adult-contemporary
stations switched to Christmas music within a couple hours of each other.
People were getting ready for trick-or-treating to the sounds of Santa! They
did this for one reason: In any given market, the first station to switch to
Christmas music gets the highest ratings from Thanksgiving to December 25,
regardless how early the change.
During the years I
lived in central Wisconsin, at least one commercial station switched every year
except 2012. That year, the usual all-Christmas station had changed formats to
contemporary hit radio (top 40) and didn't convert, and no other commercial station
took its place. Instead, the only station in the market that played
all-Christmas was a non-commercial Christian station, and its usual minuscule
ratings improved significantly.
Many people complain
about so-called "Christmas creep" and about the onslaught of holiday
songs, but those who aren't complaining, and many who are, are listening. Year
after year, radio ratings prove it.
In my market of
Lynchburg-Roanoke, Va., one commercial station switches to all-holiday
gradually, starting usually with the Delilah show in early November and then on
weekends before going completely all-Christmas the weekend before Thanksgiving.
Three Christian stations also switch to Christmas music, but they wait until
after Thanksgiving.
MB: Now, for a
leading question, what do you think of the quality of the playlists of
commercial radio stations that switch to Christmas music? And, how about the playlists of the satellite
radio stations?
TN: I don't listen to
satellite radio, so I can't comment on that.
As for the usual
playlists on commercial radio, I know that, if I were a program director for a
Christmas radio station, I would do things differently.
Some songs get played
over and over again because, frankly, Christmas wouldn't be Christmas without
them. But I would play the chestnuts less frequently – perhaps four times a day
instead of 10 or 12.
I'd also incorporate
more lesser-known songs, both old and new, that still convey the spirit of the
holiday. One of the more annoying trends in Christmas radio the past five or so
years is to simply add more different versions of the same few dozen famous
songs, but by more current artists. How many versions of these songs do we
really need to hear?
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Tim Neely Interview with Merry & Bright part 2 coming soon!
