10 of the bestMusic10 of the best: Christmas soul and funk
Just because it’s Christmas doesn’t mean you have to roll out the Slade. Try these yuletide floorfillers for size
1. Clarence Carter – Back Door Santa
At first glance, the inherent cheesiness of a Christmas record ought not to sit well with funk musicians, typically obsessed (as they tend to be perceived) with making music that is fuelled by passion, intensity and emotion. How are you going to get your audience to believe the sweat and tears if you’re singing about chestnuts roasting on an open fire? Yet soul and funk are also genres that thrive on senses of tradition and humour, and both exist at least as much due to a desire to entertain as they do to a need to communicate with raw, nervous energy. Few records better exemplify this convergence of intentions as Clarence Carter’s gloriously ridiculous Back Door Santa. Against a naggingly insistent, super-slick yet agreeably loose slice of Muscle Shoals soul, Carter taps into the double entendres essayed by Willie Dixon for Howlin’ Wolf’s Back Door Man, and gives them a festive overhaul thus: “I ain’t like old Saint Nick … he don’t come but once a year: ho, ho, ho,” Carter gurgles at the start of the second verse. The beat was so head-snappingly funky it was sampled for the one decent festive rap song (Run-DMC’s Christmas in Hollis) and, despite the brazen nature of its innuendo, proved strong enough to get the record to No 4 in the US pop chart in 1968.
2. Rufus Thomas – I’ll Be Your Santa Baby
Few soul giants have been better suited to the combination of heavy music and broad, crude humour than Rufus Thomas. Coming of age in an era where it wasn’t enough to be just a great singer – you needed to be an all-around entertainer, as adept as a master of ceremonies as you were fronting a stupendously well-drilled band – Thomas was as famed for his comedy chops as for his throaty, gospel-testifying-tinged music. By the early 70s he’d found a formula that allowed him to combine the disparate elements of his career into a single manifestation: and there aren’t many tracks in his discography that better underline why he was often known as “the world’s oldest teenager”. This 1973 B-side ramps up the sniggersome bawdiness to proto Viz comic levels (“I’ll slide down your chimney and bring you lotsa joy / What I got for you, mama, it ain’t just a toy” is the sort of couplet to have Finbarr Saunders fnarring himself blind) but is as chest-beatingly, rip-snortingly funky as any of Thomas’s more feted 45s. Had he still been with us, we could have asked him how he’d pulled it off - but that would have just encouraged him.
3. Ike and Tina Turner – Merry Christmas, Baby
Just before River Deep, Mountain High and a support slot on a Rolling Stones tour turned them into household names – at least in Europe – Ike and Tina made a handful of singles for Warner Brothers, including this terrific take on a Christmas blues with a lengthy history. The song was first released in 1947 in a version credited to co-writer Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers, with Moore playing guitar while Charles Brown took the vocal. Otis Redding had a 20th anniversary crack at it in 1967 while Bruce Springsteen has often performed it live and through the years, everyone from Chuck Berry and Etta James to Christina Aguilara and Jessica Simpson have had a go. Though the contest for most unlikely reading is a toss-up between the Cee-Lo Green and Rod Stewart duet and a version by Muppets character Pépe the King Prawn. The best of the bunch, though, is this one, where the warring duo reimagine the often tepidly slow blues as a rocking soul stomp, the guitar solo replaced by a wailing sax under the watchful eye of legendary producer and arranger Robert “Bumps” Blackwell.
4. Isaac Clark – Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town
This one is easily the most obscure cut on this list – so obscure that we couldn’t actually find it online. However, we’re including it for being probably the most unhinged, disturbed and determinedly single-minded Christmas record of them all. New Orleans singer Clark’s reading of the ubiquitous Christmas song plays fast and loose with Haven Gillespie and J Fred Coots’ original composition: Clark and his producer/arranger – uncredited, but without doubt the Crescent City’s maverick genius Eddie Bo – sound as if they had studied the song’s ingredients, made a list and checked it twice, then thrown it away. The gentle, jaunty melody line is replaced by Clark’s plaintive yowl, with what remains of the lyric no longer an excited promise but a kind of awestruck warning, while a basic line-up (excitable guitar, pounding drums, rubbery bass and a piano being played as if it were a percussion instrument) attack the tune like a demolition crew tearing down an abandoned building. The rhythm, too, is transformed into a madly syncopated funk rifferama, recasting the song’s narrative to erase Santa’s serene progress across the skies and replacing it with mental pictures of parked-up reindeer impatiently pawing at the roof, kicking lumps of snow down on to the cold earth below. It was released on a 1968 45 on the great Seven B label, the imprint’s usual powder blue with black lettering giving way to a festive green and red, the catalogue number reformatted (to the consternation of trainspottery collectors: this should have been Seven B release 7025) into a date-appropriate 1225. Towards the end of part 1 a sleigh bell is introduced, rattling like Marley’s ghost’s chains; even Clark’s echoey “ho, ho, ho” that punctuates part 2 carries elements of threat and danger.
5. James Brown – Santa Claus Go Straight to the Ghetto
Christmas is, of course, a time for remembering those less fortunate than oneself, and in the Salvation Army role for the funk brigade we’re fortunate to have no less a figure than Mr Dynamite. In what is, by his standards, a pretty restrained performance, Brown cajoles, exhorts and generally does his best to persuade St Nick not just to make sure he doesn’t forget about the inner city poor as he’s making his rounds, but to head there before he goes anywhere else. “Tell ’em James Brown sent you,” he suggests at one point, as if this was a conversation taking place before our ears, and Santa was doubting the wisdom of the enterprise. The song was the first track on Brown’s final album of 1968, A Soulful Christmas, which, if there were a chart for records with the greatest disparity between the excellence of the music and the awfulness of the sleeve, would certainly make the all-time top 10. The album, which includes a keyboard instrumental rejoicing in the title Believers Shall Enjoy (Non Believers Shall Suffer), bizarrely features the first appearance on record of the strident political anthem, Say It Loud: I’m Black and I’m Proud, which would go on to become the title track of Brown’s next LP – its early and incongruous release perhaps the Hardest Working Man in Showbusiness’s Christmas present to his fanbase that year.
6. Gary Walker – Santa’s Got a Brand New Bag
Perhaps it was all just a case of keeping the good karma going. Three years before Brown recorded A Soulful Christmas, a Louisiana singer had paid his own entertaining homage to the Godfather of Soul by reworking his breakthrough funk single as a Christmas song. Walker’s record is jokey but never at Brown’s expense: and for a singer whose own work lent more towards the earlier brand of soul that Brown was moving away from, he does a creditable job with the new funk thang. That said, he runs out of good one-liners early on – “he’s so fat, but his beard is pretty keen” being both the first and the best joke on what is otherwise a fairly straight cover. James was properly credited as writer, so would have received whatever minimal stream of royalties the record generated – a Christmas bonus, you could call it.
7. Jimmy Jules and the Nuclear Soul System – Xmas Done Got Funky
No further explanation required.
8. Sonny Boy Williamson – Santa Claus
Tempers starting to fray is as much a part of Christmas as the Queen’s speech, mince pies or an absence of snow. It’s an element of the festive experience that rarely finds its way into the mythology or associated literature, which makes Williamson’s strutting blues all the more remarkable. If we take the song’s narrative at face value – and there’s good reason not to, but we’ve had enough innuendo already – it’s a tale of how Sonny Boy tries so hard to find his Christmas present that something approaching a full-scale riot breaks out. Stymied in his attempts to locate the gift – or possibly a Santa costume Williamson needs, perhaps because it was his turn to do the honours at the Chess Christmas party; the detail remains insufficient to be entirely certain – he begins tearing through his other half’s furniture, causing such a ruckus that the landlady calls the police. The song ends with Williamson, wailing harmonica and all, protesting to the judge that all he’d been doing was impatiently hunting for his “Santy Claus”. Although firmly in the formal traditions of the blues, the relentless, intense repetition of the riff, the bounce and attack the players give the track, and Williamson’s resigned and laid-back yet somehow still near-hysterical performance all bear the requisite hallmarks of funk, hence its inclusion here. There’s never been another Christmas record quite like it, something we should perhaps at once be dismayed about, yet ultimately quite grateful for.
9. The Jive Turkeys – Get Down Santa
It sounds like a forgotten curio from the late 60s, but the Jive Turkeys’ superlative romp through the riffs that Christmas forgot was released in 2010. The Ohio band are a spin-off from a hip-hop outfit, and release their music on bass player Terry Cole’s Colemine label. The band and the imprint fit into today’s retro-nuevo music marketplace alongside the likes of New York’s Truth & Soul or Daptone – a new generation of funk musicians who aren’t so much attempting to recreate the sounds of an earlier era, but to re-inhabit a world where bands put out 7in singles on independent labels as fast as they could manage it, while the ideas are still exciting and the productions so fresh from the mixing board they’re still sizzling hot.
10. Joe Williams – Jingle Bells (Bombay Dub Orchestra mix)
Count Basie cohort Williams may have been more a pop or a jazz singer than a funk or soul man, but the relaxed air he brought to a jauntily syncopated reading of the James Pierpont staple was sufficient to persuade two British musicians to give it a funky overhaul in the mid-2000s. Garry Hughes and Andrew T Mackay’s brassy, squelchy reworking did the rounds of Christmas compilations, but reached an audience to match the pair’s globetrotting MO when it was used in a typically louche suiting-up scene in Iron Man 3. Robert Downey Jr’s gyrations were played for laughs, and the jokes are all on his character – but the choice for the soundtrack was pitched just at the sweet spot where camp meets cool. And if it’s good enough for Tony Stark, it’s good enough for us.
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