Jingle Bell Jawn #5: 'A Soulful Christmas' -- James Brown

Tonight’s Jingle Bell Jawn is one of the coolest Christmas albums ever made, James Brown’s 1968 LP, A Soulful Christmas. While this might seem odd, I don’t remember knowing much about James Brown when I was growing up in the 1970s. He was still a huge star with big hits on the soul charts, but those songs weren’t quite scaling the heights of the pop charts (where I was discovering music) as they had been when Brown exploded in the mid-1960s.

I became aware of the James Brown around the time when I was first discovering a lot of soul music, in my early teens. Even then though, I had no idea that the man had made Christmas records! One Brown track on a Christmas compilation released in 1988 was all I needed to know that I was eventually going to need to hear every holiday tune James Brown record.

Jingle Bell Jawn #5: A Soulful Christmas – James Brown (1968, King Records; my vinyl reissue was released in 2014)

How Did I Acquire This Album? I don’t remember where I bought this record but it was more than like a Barnes & Noble.

Does This Album Include a Version of “Jingle Bells”? No, though you might detect a few notes that sound sort of like “Jingle Bells” in some of the instrumentals that are scattered throughout the record.

What’s The Story on This Album? A Soulful Christmas, released in November 1968, was James Brown’s second Christmas album. It followed Christmas Songs (1966) and preceded Hey America (1970) in James Brown’s Christmas canon. All three of these albums are contained on 2010 compilation CD called The Complete James Brown Christmas, which I own, so it could be a potential Jingle Bell Jawns entry. Therefore, I won’t say much about Christmas Songs and Hey America, other than to note that, of the three, Brown seems to have been most enthused about A Soulful Christmas.

(Also, strictly parenthetically, James Brown released a new album of holiday jams, The Merry Christmas Album, in 1999. This album is not included in the 2010 Complete compilation and also does not appear to be on Apple Music. Compounding this confusion, The Merry Christmas Album was re-released, with some track changes, as It’s a Funky Christmas, in 2013. I thought I could ignore The Merry Christmas Album/It’s a Funky Christmas, but, based on the samples on Allmusic, it looks like I’ll be trawling used CD bins and eBay to eventually track it down. Because I’m just that much of a goofball when it comes to James Brown Christmas music.)

Among the four Brown holiday albums, A Soulful Christmas is by far the crowning achievement. This is mostly because of two monumental songs, the socially relevant “Santa Claus Go Straight to the Ghetto”; and “Soulful Christmas”, which is simply a brilliant distillation of James Brown’s revolutionary music in 1968.

The album is filled out with a few other Christmas-themed songs, and some instrumentals that don’t seem to have much to do with Christmas, but sound cool, so, yes, they’re Christmas songs now too.

Finally, for reasons perhaps known just to him, Brown included the uncut “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud) Part 1 & 2”. Oddly, the Christmas album was, for a long time the only place where one could find this lengthier version of what has become one of Brown’s most important songs.  

What Does This Album Mean to Me? My first encounter with any James Brown Christmas music was when “Santa Claus Go Straight to the Ghetto” appeared, late in the track order, on a 1988 Rhino Records CD compilation called Christmas Classics. I was a James Brown fan by the mid-1980s, but discovering that he made Christmas music was a revelation to me. Eventually, I bought a single-disc compilation of Brown’s Christmas music. This ultimately gave way to the Complete collection that I mentioned above and this vinyl copy of A Soulful Christmas.

I think discovering that James Brown made Christmas music was a crucial step in my desire to start tracking down Christmas music that I didn’t grow up. This is a big deal because I think most of us are conditioned to love the holiday music we grow up with, while being blissfully ignorant of any other Christmas records that existed before, during, or after your childhood. But once you hear some Christmas thing not directly related to your own childhood memories, you have the choice to either just pretend you didn’t hear it or to begin to explore the world of Christmas music beyond what you already know. A warning though: once you begin stumbling down the path of unfamiliar Christmas music, there’s no turning back, even while your trusted classics will still always be there for you.

Highlights: “Santa Claus Go Straight to the Ghetto”; “Soulful Christmas” “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud) Part 1 & 2.

Lowlights: There’s nothing on here that I don’t love.

Oddities: Kind of ominous, I suppose to have a song called “Believers Shall Enjoy (Non Believers Shall Suffer)” on a Christmas album, but it’s actually a groovy vibes-laden instrumental that I think both believers and non believers would enjoy, especially when they hear the brief “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” reference.

How Do I Rate This Album, in Strictly Musical Terms, on a Scale of 1 to 5 Jingle Bells? Oh, this is a total 5 outta 5.

How Do I Rate This Album, in Personal Emotional Resonance (P.E.R), on a Scale of 1 to 5 Partridges in a Pear Tree? As mentioned, I didn’t grow up with this album, so there’s not that warm fuzziness for me. But I have JB’s Christmas music in general since I first heard it and this album is a whole of fun to spin, so I’ll give it a 3 out of 5 partridges.