My all-time favorite Christmas Carol is O Holy Night.
I grew up listening to Christmas songs on a console stereo the size of a small piano. It had turntable, record changer so you could stack five or six albums at a time and AM/FM radio.
Dad would load it up and during the evenings or on Sunday morning we'd listen to Christian Music before leaving for church. During the holidays we'd listen to Christmas Carols. With grandparents who owned a record store, and for a time after he mustered out of the marines, Dad worked there. Mom grew up working in the store. We had lots of records 45's and LP's.
Of all the Christmas songs, not all are Carols, Frosty the Snowman is a winter song, O Holy Night is by far my favorite. What Child is This comes a close second.
George Beverly Shay and Tennessee Earnie Ford were my favorite singers for a long long time. A lot of women like Karen Carpenter, Anne Murray, Kathy Lee Gifford, Barbra Streisand and others sing it on albums we listen to, but they don't have the deep resonance that the male voice lends to the song, in my not so humble opinion.
That is until we watched on PBS a Christmas presentation of The Lost Christmas Eve. Ozzie Davis narrated the story, and a number of performers sang songs. then Michale Crawford sang O Holy Night.
Bear with me here, my wife is a huge Barbra Streisand fan. We got her duets album where she sang Music of the Night with Michael Crawford. When he hit the highest note in that song I was totally amazed at how pure and effortless it was. Wow! So, I'd heard him sing before and knew just how good he was.
That didn't prepare me for his performance on O Holy Night. I preferred it sung by a base voice, he's a tenor. He left me in slack jaw amazement.
For twenty years I tried to see that show again, and it never came back on, or I missed it. I tried with I-tunes and Amazon music, nada.
I'm now on Spotify and he has an amazing Christmas album with O Holy Night. I tried the U-tube videos of his performance online and they are unavailable, best I could do was a picture.
I also tried to sing along with him. He starts at a low base and rises to the rafters. I just finished a cantata with fairly high notes for bases so I thought I might stay up with him. I did until he went for the rafters on the last few notes. I had to cheat and go falsetto. Somehow sounding like a chipmunk doesn't do the song credit. He is amazing.
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