Little Big Town: Christmas at the Opry (Den of Thieves, NBC-TV, filmed October 4, 2024; aired December 16, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, December 16) I ended up watching both hours of an extended TV special called Little Big Town’s Christmas at the Opry, meaning the new “Opryland” complex in Nashville, Tennessee that replaced the ancient Ryman Auditorium (actually a converted barn, like most theatres that presented country music in its early days) in which the Grand Ole Opry got its start. (The show’s name came from a bizarre joke made by a radio announcer who got impatient when the Metropolitan Opera broadcast that was supposed to be on before his show ran overtime, and when the opera finally ended he drawled an announcement: “You’ve been listening to grand opera from New York, but now here’s some of our Grand Ole Opry!”). The show’s headliners were Little Big Town, a singing quartet founded when two of the members, Karen Fairchild and Kimberly Schlapman, met at a Christian university called Samford in Homewood, Alabama in 1987. They moved to Nashville and by 1998 had formed a four-person vocal group with two men, Jimi Westbrook and Phillip Sweet. They called themselves Little Big Town and cycled through various record companies before they finally found a home with Monument Records, original label for Roy Orbison and Kris Kristofferson. Monument signed them in 2002 and produced their first album before they left for Equity Music, founded by fellow country singer Clint Black. When Equity went out of business, their releases were picked up by Capitol, where they’ve been ever since. The show began with a Little Big Town original called “Glow” and then segued into Kelsea Ballerini doing a quite good version of “White Christmas.” No, she didn’t come close to the heartfelt eloquence of Bing Crosby’s version (which became the best-selling record of all time and, depending on how these sales charts are reckoned in the “streaming” era, may still be), but she was quite good even though she lost points with me for leaving out the song’s marvelous verse. (I first heard the verse used as a mid-song break, rapped by Darlene Love, on the Phil Spector Christmas album, and it was only years later that I realized this hadn’t been concocted by Spector, Love or his regular songwriters, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, but had actually been an original part of the song by Irving Berlin!)

Then Sheryl Crow came on for a cover of Charles Brown’s “Please Come Home for Christmas,” with a deeper and lower voice than I remembered from her at her commercial peak. Like Ballerini with “White Christmas,” Crow sang with less emotional intensity than the original but still turned in a skillful and soulful job. The next group up was a two-man vocal duo called Dan + Shea (the plus sign instead of an ampersand or the word “and” is officially correct) called “Holiday Party,” written by Dan Smyers (the “Dan” of Dan + Shea) with his usual songwriting partners Jordan Reynolds and Andy Albert. Then Josh Groban came out with Little Big Town as his backing singers on a lovely and quite unornamented cover of “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear” that was one of the best things on the program. After that came one of the worst things on the program: Kirk Franklin doing an atrocious version of “O Come, All Ye Faithful” that consisted of one-third the song we know, one-third sung bits from other songs and one-third rap. The next singer was Kate Hudson, daughter of singer Bill Hudson and actress and comedienne Goldie Hawn, who took on “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” I still think no one is going to outdo Judy Garland (for whom it was written) on this song, but Hudson didn’t even try; instead of singing the plaintive ballad Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane intended, she sang it to a rock backing that really didn’t work. Then Little Big Town did a song called “Christmas Night with You” (co-written, like “Glow,” by group member Karen Fairchild) and Orville Peck, a singer who for some reason wears a Hallowe’en-style mask over the top part of his face, trotted out “Christmas All Over Again,” originally written by Tom Petty for the 1992 Christmas compilation A Very Special Christmas 2. Sheryl Crow came back out to sing Adolphe Adam’s “O Holy Night,” albeit just the first chorus (twice); I was disappointed that I didn’t get to hear her sing the line “The slave is our brother,” but I guess that would be too politically incorrect in the age of Trump 2.0. Then came one of the best numbers of the night: Little Big Town in a plaintive cover of Merle Haggard’s “If We Make It Through December.” They followed it with Amy Grant’s “Tennessee Christmas,” but anything would have sounded like a letdown after Haggard’s soulful lament.

Then Josh Groban came back with the Mel Tormé-Bob Wells “The Christmas Song,” popularized by Nat “King” Cole in the mid-1940’s – you probably know it by its opening line, “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire” – and while Groban’s version is as far removed from Cole’s hit or Tormé’s own as Kelsea Ballerini’s “White Christmas” or Sheryl Crow’s “Please Come Home for Christmas” are from their originals, it was still nice, heartfelt and tastefully done. Afterwards came another Dan + Shay song, “Take Me Home for Christmas,” written by a committee including both Dan Smyers and Shay Mooney themselves. Then came one of the big gimmick numbers of the night, Eartha Kitt’s 1950’s hit “Santa Baby” (an ode to adult greed that comes off as high irony) sung by four women: Kate Hudson, Kelsea Ballerini and the two female members of Little Big Town, Karen Fairchild and Kimberly Schlapman. After that Kirk Franklin did another one of his demolition jobs on a standard carol, this time “Joy to the World,” and Little Big Town did an infectious version of an African-American spiritual, “Children, Go Where I Send Thee.” Ironically, this song is not on Little Big Town’s official Christmas album – though it should have been; I first heard it on the Kingston Trio’s 1960’s Christmas album The Last Month of the Year, and I fell in love with it then and love it still. The show closed with Orville Peck doing a dull ballad called “Happy Trails” – not the song of that title that was the theme song for Roy Rogers’s and Dale Evans’s TV show – and an ensemble performance of “Santa Claus Is Back in Town,” written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller in 1957 for Elvis Presley’s first Christmas album. Once again the version on this show didn’t come close to the incandescent original, but it was good enough to evoke the spirit. Overall, Little Big Town’s Christmas at the Opry was a fun program, even though at two hours it did overstay its welcome a bit. At least director Paul Dugdale, who’d annoyed me so much during the CBS-TV special An Evening with Dua Lipa last Sunday, December 15, was on his best behavior and mostly kept his cameras focused front and center on the performers instead of whipping past them with fast pans.