BILLBOARD'S GREATEST R&B CHRISTMAS HITS

(Rhino)

Christmas albums rarely work as well as you hope because they're built around a concept that exists external to the music. So for years my favorite Christmas music was one side of a tape I'd thrown together for myself. Trying to extend that tape to the other side one recent December, I picked up this 1990 hodgepodge, a totally indefensible mix of the sublime and the ridiculous. The latter includes a psychotic 1949 rendition of "Silent Night" sung by Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and a 1959 Brook Benton hit featuring one of the most inane lyrics ever written: "Christmas always seems to come/At this time of the year." Much of the rest -- the classic "Merry Christmas Baby" by Johnny Moore's Three Blazers, "(It's Gonna Be a) Lonely Christmas" by the Orioles -- fits in with the R&B tradition of Christmas songs that are at once homy, sexy, melancholy, and quietly rapturous, if not just plain rocking. Not only did the album fit my taping needs perfectly, it matched my private sense of what Christmas should be by creating a nostalgia for a past I never even knew.

-- Franklin Soults

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