Your Daily Dose of Christmas

 For some years now, The Wife’s cars have had Sirius XM radio enabled, in order to make our road trips more pleasurable. One thing I’ve noticed about the Sirius channels–in addition to there simply being VERY MANY of them, enough to satisfy a whole lot of music tastes–is that since their revenue is already built-in, not only are ads minimal, but the channels aren’t limited to small but popular playlists. If you listen to an “oldies” station now, the only Van Morrison you’ll ever hear is “Brown Eyed Girl”, and this despite the man’s very long and prolific recording career. On Sirius you’ll hear obscure deep-cuts, songs that were hits back in the day but which have not stood the test of time, and more.

(I know, that all sounds like a paid ad, but I’m getting somewhere with this, I swear! The Sirius folks have not paid me for any of this.)

So yesterday I’m driving about to run a couple of errands, and I’m in The Wife’s car, so I’m playing one of the Sirius Christmas channels–the one that’s devoted to older songs, so it’s the channel where you’ll hear Roy Coniff’s “White Christmas” and Doris Day’s “Silver Bells”. A song came on that I don’t recall hearing before, or if I did, it’s been a long time and it’s certainly not a Christmas standard. It was called “Pretty Paper”, and after an introduction by a pop-music chorus, the main singer starts in, and I was floored. Did you ever hear a song that you’d never heard by a singer whose voice was unmistakeable? That’s what happened yesterday. This fellow has one of the recognizable voices of all time.

Here’s “Pretty Paper” by Roy Orbison.

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