Playlist

* Bold Orion - Susan McKeown and Lindsey Horner - 3:11

* Every December Sky Beth - Neilson Chapman - 3:55

* Stars Shining - Kathy Reid-Naiman - 1:45

Music notes

Bold Orion was written in 1983 by singer/songwriter and dulcimer player Leo Kretzner under its full name Bold Orion on the Rise. Actually, he is Dr. Kretzner. Besides his music, he earned a PhD in Cellular and Molecular Biology and is now a research scientist at the City of Hope National Medical Center in California. You can hear his version of this song here or on my Dec 14, 2021 post. This is Susan McKeown and bass player Lindsey Horner’s more jazzy version, recorded in 1997 on their album Through the Bitter Frost and Snow.

Orion (the Hunter) is a winter constellation, named after a character in Greek mythology. In the northern hemisphere it does not rise above the horizon in the summer, but its eight most prominent stars dominate the southern sky in wintertime. If your skies are clear, even if you live in the city you can go out tonight and see Orion. Unlike most of the constellations, if you can also see some of the fainter stars it actually looks like what it named after.

I think that Orion is one of the most beautiful and interesting constellations. Two of its stars, orange-red Betelgeuse and ice-blue Rigel, are among the brightest stars in the heavens. And looking around the hunter’s “sword” with a small telescope, or even binoculars, brings the fuzzy Orion Nebula (Messier 42) into view. That is the closest region to us where baby stars are forming, and NASA’s photos of it are some of that agency’s most striking images. If you happen to live in a darker location you get a bonus: Orion is in the Milky Way - a spectacular sight on a cold winter night.

On Dec 4, 2021 I posted a 1500 word essay about enjoying winter stargazing - you don’t need a telescope or even binoculars to find the view stunning on a crisp, cold, clear winter night. Just go to as dark of a place as is conveniently nearby.

When the days are gettin’ shorter, and the nights are growin’ long,And the north wind puts a tear into your eye,If you’re out about ‘round midnight and you look off to the east,There you may see bold Orion on the rise.You may know him by his stance or the starry shield he holds,As he rises silent in a clear cold sky.Young Jack Frost and Old Man Winter, they both beckon to the callOf their master bold Orion on the rise.CHORUS: Bold Orion, mighty hunter, rising in a clear cold sky, See the summer fall before him. Bold Orion’s on the rise.For seven starry ages, he has ruled the winter skiesWith the fires of lost eons in his eyes.He has seen the rise and fall of kings and continents and all,Rising silent, bold Orion on the rise.When he ascends, no hesitation; when he moves, no turnin’ round,Like a soul been called to glory, earthly born but heavenly bound.Now the bird is on the wing, and it’s southward that she flies,Hastened on by bold Orion on the rise. CHORUSOrion had a lover. She’s the goddess of the hunt,And of the forest and the golden moon.Artemis they called her, the fair sister of the sun,But their time together ended all too soon.Apollo took his vengeance on the man his sister loved.An arrow sped him to a painful death;But once a month she visits him, a moon among the stars,Looking down with whispered love upon her breath. CHORUSSummer comes on all too slowly, and it passes far too fast,And you wonder, is there nothin’ that can last?Here today and gone tomorrow as the green leaves turn to red,As the present quickly turns into the past.Cut the wood and stack it high now. Stoke the fires in your home.Burnin’ nightly send the smoke up to the sky.Keep the winter at your door and keep the summer in your heart.Drink a toast to bold Orion on the rise. CHORUS

Every December Sky This song was written by singer/songwriter Mary Beth Chapman, and this track is from her 2002 album Deeper Still. Personally, when I hear this song I do not envision the sparkling star-filled sky of crisp, cold night, but the heavily overcast ones of daytime that are common at this time of year here on Vancouver Island where I live.

After her album Deeper Still was released she told a Nashville interviewer:

“There’s a song on this record called Every December Sky and the day I started it I was actually down at the Gulf, around New Year’s, and I spent three days by myself in silence. I sat down and started playing [the tune for] this song and I got this really strange feeling and I started sobbing.

It was right at that time, within that hour, that I found out that [fellow Nashville songwriter] Kent Robbins died and I always felt like Kent Robbins had a part in the spirit of that song coming through me and all I had was “every December sky blah, blah, blah, and I had this whole strange feeling like what does that mean? I felt there was this sense of connection between that song and Kent. And then it was two more years later before I finished that song.

Then it was another year before I recorded this album. So the song has been around for about three years and then you know, somehow, I knew in the terms of the functioning of writing that song, I knew it had to start with “Every December Sky” and I knew it had to end with “Every December Sky”. I knew it was about letting go and it was about believing that even though it seems like there’s nothing ahead of you, that there is something ahead of you. It’s really a metaphor for death and also a metaphor for life. . . .

It’s like, going through chemotherapy that song gave me the most comfort. It’s all about believing. It’s all about really believing that in the darkest hour, in the darkest coldest day of winter, that the spring is inside the trees. That somehow folded into my psyche, many years before this challenging thing I went through. Even as I finished this song, I felt a connection with Kent. I am just looking forward to the song Harlan [Howard; a Nashville songwriter who had recently died] is going to help us all write. (Laughs)

Here are the lyrics:

Every December skyMust lose its faith in leavesAnd dream of the spring inside the trees.How heavy the empty heart,How light the heart that’s full.Sometimes I have to trust what I can’t know.Sometimes I have to trust what I can’t know.

We walk into Paradise;The angels lend us shoes.‘Cause all that we own,We’ll come to lose,

And Heaven is not so farOutside this womb of words.With every rose that bloomsMy soul is assuredIt’s just like a song I’ve knownYet still unheard.

And every leaf of fire lets go,Melting in the arms of earth and snow.And if I could hold you now,You’d enter like a sigh.

You’d be the wind that blowsThe answer to “why?”You’d be the spring-filled treesOf every December sky.

Stars Shining is an old song from the American South that Ruth Crawford Seeger gathered for her songbook American Folk Songs for Christmas, published in 1953. Ruth had been a music teacher, but after 1936 she got a job at the Library of Congress’ Archive of American Folk Song where her roles included both preserving and teaching American folk music.

Ruth knew that children’s music teachers were expected to hold a pre-Christmas recital every year, and that standard format for such an event was either a pageant based on the Nativity story or a series of unconnected presentations of well-known traditional Christmas carols. She had an idea for a different format – a pageant modeled on a southern American folk tradition called Watch Night. That was an all-night Christmas Eve vigil/party to await the rising of the morning star which would mark the beginning of Christmas Day.

For her project, she wanted to find more authentic American folk songs that would be consistent with the type of songs that might have been sung during such an event. Fortunately, her job at the Library of Congress included working with the noted folk song collector and musicologist Alan Lomax, and her husband was the highly-respected ethno-musicologist Charles Seeger who had also been a folk song collector.

Ruth was therefore well positioned to spread the word among colleagues about the kind of songs she was looking for, and tips began to come in about potentially-useful songs in obscure corners of the folklore literature. It is a boon to me that she identifies her sources in her book. This song is part of a medley called Gospel Train found in a songbook called Befo’ de War Spirituals, compiled by E.A McIlhenny and published in 1933.

Judging by its Introduction, Seeger’s songbook was intended for fellow music teachers as material for them to be able to put together their own Christmas recitals based on the Watch Night tradition. But it ended up getting a lot more usage than that during the late 1950s and early ‘60s folk music revival in the US. At that time, folk singers and groups suddenly needed authentic traditional Christmas songs to meet the demand for folk music Christmas albums from them. Her book continues to be useful for that purpose today, but my use of it is for research into the sources of the Christmas songs that those folksingers have recorded. My copy of her book is one of my most prized reference resources.

This version of the song is sung by Kathy Reid-Naiman, whose song Welcome Here I included in the opening Dec 1 posting of this year’s compilation of seasonal music. It too is from her Sing the Cold Winter Away album, available from Kathy’s website. Usually I avoid having two songs from the same album in the same year, but in this case I couldn’t help myself

You don’t need lyrics for this one. As Kathy says in her liner notes; “This song can go on for as long as you can count the stars!”

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