Ramblin' with Roger

Top Country Christmas Hits

Eddy Arnold

From Joel Whitburn’s Christmas in the Charts, 1920 to 2004, Top Country Christmas Hits lists the peak positions these seasonal songs reached on the country charts.

If We Make It Through December– Merle Haggard, from 1973, four weeks at #1 CW, #28 pop

Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer – Gene Autry with the Pinafores from 1949, one week at #1 CW, #1 pop for one week. It eventually sold eight million copies, second only to Bing Crosby’s White Christmas. A new version of the song got to #70 pop in 1957.

Blue Christmas – Ernest Tubb from 1949, one week at #1 CW, #21 pop in 1950. “The song was originally recorded by American country singer, musician, and actor Doye O’Dell in 1948. It was popularized the following year in three separate recordings: one by Tubb, one by musical conductor and arranger Hugo Winterhalter and his orchestra and chorus, and one by bandleader Russ Morgan and his orchestra. Elvis Presley cemented the status of the song as a rock-and-roll holiday classic by recording it for his 1957 LP Elvis’ Christmas Album.

Snow Flake – Jim Reeves from 1966, three weeks at #2 CW, #66 pop

Jason Ritter’s grandfather

Christmas Carols By The Old Corral – Tex Ritter from 1945, one week at #2 CW. Maurice Woodeward Ritter was the star of c. 85 Hollywood westerns from 1935 to 1945. The late John Ritter was his son.

Thank God for Kids – Oak Ridge Boys from 1982, two weeks at #3 CW

Here Comes Santa Claus (Right Down Santa Claus Lane) -Gene Autry from 1948, one week at number 4 CW. It reached #8 pop in 1948 and #24 pop in 1949

Frosty the Snowman – Gene Autry with the Cass County Boys and Carl Cotner’s Orchestra, from 1950, one week at number 4 CW. #7 pop in 1951, #23 pop in 1952

Will Santy Come to Shantytown – Eddy Arnold from 1949, one week at #5 CW

C-H-R-I-S-T-M-A-S – Eddy Arnold from 1949, three weeks at #7 CW, co-written by Arnold

Movie review: Rental Family

emotional entanglement

I loved the premise of the movie Rental Family: “An American actor in Tokyo struggling to find purpose lands an unusual gig: working for a Japanese ‘rental family’ agency, playing stand-in roles for strangers.” Especially around the holidays, an increasing number of my acquaintances are looking for, or grafting onto, family.

Traveling throughout Tokyo, where he’s lived for seven years, the struggling actor Philip (Brendan Fraser) is uncomfortably large. Even the ceiling in his apartment seems too short.

He has moral ambivalence about his first couple of jobs and complains, “I’m messing with people’s lives.” His boss, Tada (Takehiro Hira), the owner of the agency, counters, “We sell emotions.” Another actor in the business is Aiko (Mari Yamamoto), who, among other roles, played a phony paramour of a cheating husband hired to apologize to his wife.

Philip takes on more complicated gigs. A mother (Shino Shinozaki) wants her bright, biracial daughter, Mia (Shannon Mahina Gorman), to get into a prestigious school, but the girl needs a “father.” A fading, but feisty, old actor Kikuo (Akira Emoto) wants to escape his controlling daughter for a brief return to his past. Both of these situations become more complicated than initially conceived.

Rental Family was directed and co-written by Hikari. I’ve learned, after seeing the film with my wife at the Spectrum theater at noontime the day before Thanksgiving, that the final scene was not in the original script.

Reviews

Sarah Vincent wrote: “While some may find ‘Rental Family’ treacly and television fare, others will walk away inspired.” We were in the latter category. “Mia and Kikuo’s stories feel like the real center… and Phillip just feels like a supporting character in their respective movies,” which worked.

The film didn’t explain everything, and that was fine. Roger Moore – no, not THAT Roger Moore – noted: “Hikari… doesn’t judge and doesn’t take sides in a ‘which culture gets it’ sense. There are merits and drawbacks to both the Eastern and Western ways of living.”

Critics were 87% positive, and audiences were 96% positive on Rotten Tomatoes. Many of the negative views complained that there was “little interest in uncovering the causes or conditions of loneliness,” which I thought was both unnecessary to do and somewhat obvious.

Not incidentally, there are real family rental service companies in Japan. As in the movie, “There have been times when the role has led to emotional entanglement.”

My only regret was that my wife and I were the ONLY two people in the theater.

Top R&B Christmas Hits

Sister Rosetta Tharpe

From Joel Whitburn’s Christmas in the Charts, 1920 to 2004, Top R&B Christmas Hits lists the peak positions these seasonal songs reached on the Billboard rhythm and blues charts.

White Christmas – Bing Crosby with the Ken Darby Singers, orchestra conducted by John Scott Trotter (Berlin) from 1942, #1 for three weeks RB, #1 for 11 weeks pop, from the film Holiday Inn. It was the “1947 Bing remake that piled up the majority of the title’s sales from its subsequent reissue throughout the decades on nearly all 78s, 45s, LPs, cassettes, and CDs.”

White Christmas – The Drifters from 1954, #2 for one week RB. Not only is this one of my favorite carols, it’s a wonderful video cartoon by Joshua Held. Featuring Bill Pinkney on lead bass and Clyde McPhatter on tenor.

Let’s Make Christmas, Baby – Amos Milburn from 1949, #3 for four weeks RB. Is it just me, or is this song blue, and I don’t mean sad?

The Christmas Song (Merry Christmas to You) – Nat King Cole from 1946, #3 for three weeks RB, #3 pop. Every year, Mark Evanier shares a story about this song some know as “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire…'”and Mel Tormé, who co-wrote the song

Merry Christmas, Baby – Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers with Charles Brown from 1947, #3 for two weeks RB. Co-writer Moore also is the guitarist; Brown does piano and vocals.

This is rhythm and blues?

The Chipmunk Song – The Chipmunks with David Seville (Ross Bagdasarian) from 1958, #5 for one week RB. #1 for weeks pop in 1958, then #41 pop in 1959, #45 pop in 1960, #39 pop in 1961 and #40 pop in 1962. My house had a copy of this single when I was growing up; the label was greenish.

(It’s Gonna Be A ) Lonely Christmas -The Orioles from 1949, #5 for one week RB

Faraway Blues (Xmas Blues) – Johnny Otis Orchestra with Little Esther and Mel Walker from 1950, #6 for two weeks RB. I wrote about Otis here back in 2008.

Silent Night (Christmas Hymn) – Sister Rosetta Tharpe with the Rosetta Gospel Singers from 1949, #6 for one week RB. She was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2018 as an early influence. “Sister Rosetta was the first guitar heroine of rock & roll. Her heartfelt gospel folksiness gave way to her roaring mastery of her trusty Gibson Les Paul Custom, which she wielded on a level that rivaled the best of her male contemporaries.”

Lonesome Christmas (Part 1 and 2) – Lowell Folson from 1950, #7 for one week RB

Ending the HIV Epidemic in the U.S.

40 million people worldwide were living with HIV in 2024

HIV AIDS On the HIV.gov page is What Is Ending the HIV Epidemic in the U.S.? (EHE) “The initiative aims to substantially reduce HIV infections in the U.S. by focusing resources in the 57 jurisdictions where they’re needed most. It does that by scaling up four science-based strategies: diagnose, treat, prevent, and respond…. The bold plan… aims to end the HIV epidemic in the United States by 2030.”

Here are some statistics. “Approximately 1.2 million people in the U.S. have HIV. About 13 percent of them don’t know it and need testing…

“According to the latest estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), approximately 31,800 people acquired HIV in the United States in 2022. Annual infections in the U.S. have been reduced by more than two-thirds since the height of the epidemic in the mid-1980s. Further, CDC estimates of annual HIV infections in the United States show hopeful signs of progress in recent years.

“The decline [in new infections] was driven by a 30% decrease among young people aged 13-24 years. Increases in pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) prescriptions, viral suppression, and HIV testing likely contributed to the decline.”

Worldwide

In 2024, a “report from UNAIDS showed that the world is at a critical moment that will determine whether world leaders meet their commitment to end AIDS as a public health threat by 2030. The report, The Urgency of Now: AIDS at a Crossroads, brings together new data and case studies which demonstrate that the decisions and policy choices taken by world leaders this year will decide the fate of millions of lives and whether the world’s deadliest pandemic is overcome.”

Worldwide, approximately 40 million people were living with HIV in 2024. Over a million people became newly infected with HIV that year, and over half a million people died from AIDS-related illnesses.

Since the start of the epidemic, more than 75 million people have become infected with HIV, and more than 40 million people have died from AIDS-related illnesses, including my high school friend Vito.

Not “over”

I point this out periodically because occasionally, I run into comments suggesting that HIV/AIDS is “over.” It certainly isn’t the death sentence that it was when first defined in the 1980s. New HIV infections have been reduced by 61% since the peak in 1996, while AIDS-related deaths have decreased by 70% since the peak in 2004.

In July, my old buddy Amy Barlow Liberatore, a/k/a Sharp Little Pencil, posted a song she wrote years ago for World AIDS Day, in memory of her dear friend Jeff French. It’s called “The Day I Saw an Angel Fly.”

I’m reminded that this is the 35th anniversary of the album Red Hot + Blue: A Tribute To Cole Porter, which “raised nearly $1m for the activist group ACT UP. It was the first of a series of compilations designed to fight the scourge of HIV/AIDS. You can hear the album here; I was and am very fond of it.

Sunday Stealing is F.A.B. yet again

More Brilliant Than The Sun

Law and Order Tornto Welcome to Sunday Stealing. Here we will steal all types of questions from every corner of the blogosphere. Our promise to you is that we will work hard to find the most interesting and intelligent questions. Cheers to all of us thieves!

Since it’s Thanksgiving weekend, we’re going to keep this simple. We stole this from a blogger named Idzie, who called this the F.A.B. (film, audio, book) meme.

F.A.B. yet again

F. Film: What movie or TV show are you watching?

I stumbled onto Law and Order Toronto: Criminal Intent. Since 1990, I have watched a representative sampling of most L&O programs, enough to anticipate their beats. But the rhythm of this show, while familiar, is fresh enough with its Canadianisms to enjoy.

Wikipedia: “The series premiered on February 22, 2024, on Citytv, and became the #1 prime-time drama of the year in Canada by attracting 1.1 million views on the first episode. The first season ran for 10 episodes; in June 2024, it was renewed for a second and third season.”

It stars Aden Young as Detective Sergeant Henry Graff, Kathleen Munroe as Detective Sergeant Frankie Bateman, K. C. Collins as Deputy Crown Attorney Theo Forrester, and Karen Robinson as Inspector Vivienne Holness. In the first few episodes, the latter two had far too little to do; that’s been rectified a bit.

In the US, the CW has been broadcasting the first season – I just finished episode 9. Season 2, already completed in Canada, will air in the US in 2026.

Music

A. Audio: What are you listening to?

I have finally allowed myself to listen to Advent/Christmas music. Also, I’ve been playing the CDs of Rebecca Jade, who, as it turns out, is the daughter of my sister Leslie; in other words, the first niece. Check out her videos; I’m particularly fond of Peter Sprague’s and her take on Wichita Lineman.

B. Book: What are you reading?

My daughter borrowed a book from a Western Massachusetts college library and insisted I read it before she has to return it in late January. It is titled More Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction by Kodwo Eshun. Buying the book, which was published in 1998, would cost north of $400.

I can tell you that the Discontents, which you would call the table of contents, namechecks Miles Davis, Grandmaster Flash, Cypress Hill, Funkadelic, Kraftwerk, the Jungle Brothers, Sun Ra, Alice and John Coltrane, and Pharoah Sanders. The index mentions others, such as John Cage, Chic, Queen, Public Enemy, Stevie Wonder, James Brown, and Sly and the Family Stone.

Being an obedient parent, I shall have read it by the deadline.

Thank you for playing! Please come back next week.