Pitchfork

Whining shrilly about the commercialization of Christmas may be a tired, stupid pursuit, but nothing speaks more to our contemporary holiday-bastardization than the insane devolution of our Christmas songs. As a genre, "Christmas music" is near-dead and embarrassingly cheap: overwrought, gloppy anthologies litter Pottery Barn checkout counters, get tucked into cereal boxes, and pipe out endlessly from shitty, strip mall speakers, stuffing our list-wielding ears with tinny, impossibly canned sounds. Plenty of "Classic Christmas" anthologies are released and purchased every year (almost always with noble intentions), but if they manage to escape being blankly tossed post-holiday, they usually just end up crammed haphazardly into dented cardboard boxes, left to rub up against plush, sweater-sporting reindeer and dysfunctional strings of tiny white lights. They are accessories, disposable and meaningless, inherently temporary: They are far from sacred.

Where Will You Be Christmas Day?, curated by ace musicologist Dick Spottswood (and based loosely on his Washington, D.C. radio show), is the latest release from Atlanta's fledgling Dust-to-Digital, the same label that produced the mind-blowing Goodbye, Babylon box late last year. And much like Goodbye, Babylon, this record will leave you wondering why the 1960s are the years everyone always gets so mournfully nostalgic for. Charming, challenging, and endlessly captivating, Where Will You Be Christmas Day? is the kind of quasi-seasonal anthology that you'll totally dig out in July, popsicles and all, suddenly craving (if not requiring) its quiet, unmatched grace.

Drawing heavily from early American folk, jazz, and blues (and incorporating classic holiday songs from the Ukraine, Italy, Trinidad, and Puerto Rico), the tracks included here date from 1917 to 1959, and represent an impressive spectrum of vocal styles, stretching from four-note sacred harp hooting to brash, mid-century gospel. Consequently, Where Will You Be Christmas Day? is compelling simply as an anthropological peek, a crackly glimpse at secular traditions-in-the-making-- but all Smithsonian-geekiness aside, the music itself is more than satisfying, loaded with plenty of fresh, regional glee. Delta-blues gurus Lightnin' Hopkins and Lead Belly each contribute tracks, as do The Alabama Sacred Harp Singers, Fiddlin' John Carson and His Virginia Reelers, Butterbeans and Susie, The Cotton Top Mountain Sanctified Singers, Los Jibaros, Kansas City Kitty, Bessie Smith, and 14 others-- even the tracklisting reads like poetry.

Most of these cuts are swimming in tape hiss, and if the songs aren't performed a capella, the instrumentation is modest at best. Still, what's lost via archaic microphones and questionable technology is more than made up for by a complete lack of post-production studio tweakery: voices are wild and occasionally off-key, swinging earnestly from note to note, shining in their full, one-take glory. Ultimately, what's most striking about this collection is how unapologetically warm, triumphant, and giggly the whole thing is: Unlike a lot of heavy, brooding Christmas songs (see the plodding gravity of "Silent Night"), Where Will You Be Christmas Day? is defiantly plucky, far more concerned with celebration than meditation.

Despite Spottswood's liner-note pledge to mix the sacred and secular, the respectable and the rowdy, he seems to concentrate mainly on conveying each performer's joy, regardless of their affiliations. Opener "The Last Month of Year", howled a capella by Vera Hall Ward (and recorded in Tuscaloosa, Ala., in late 1959), is full of vocal cartwheels and semi-possessed yelps, emphatic and jubilant at the very same time. "Holy Babe", a rollicking collaboration between Kelly Pace, Aaron Brown, Joe Green, Paul Hayes, and Matthew Johnson, is a choral masterpiece, their raucous hoots and mmm-mmm's weaving together in unexpected accord. The Alabama Sacred Harp Singers roar through "Sherburne", while Butterbeans and Susie's "Papa Ain't No Santa Claus (and Mama Ain't No Christmas Tree)" is sublimely weird, all talking-blues and rhythmic caterwauling. There's plenty of humor to be found here, too-- Lord Beginner's "Christmas Morning the Rum Had Me Yawning" and Leroy Carr's "Christmas in Jail - Ain't That a Pain" are hilariously heartfelt in their earnest, bad-boy remorse.

So while Where Will You Be Christmas Day? is perfectly wonderful for tree-trimming and Charlie Brown-style dance-hopping, its true triumph is its uncanny longevity: It will last longer than your evergreen.