2020 Country Music Association Christmas (ABC-TV, aired November 30, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I watched what appears to be the first Christmas-themed holiday special of 2020, the CMA Christmas on ABC. It was surprisingly short -- only an hour, with just 10 songs -- but also welcome in its intimacy. Thomas Rhett and his wife, Lauren Akins (“Akins” is actually Rhett’s original family name) co-hosted the show and did so from a set representing their living room -- though in mid-show they ordered the cameras to pull back and reveal that it was a set, not their real living room, and there was a live audience, albeit one with masks on and small enough they could be properly “socially distant” under the iron rule of the SARS-CoV-w2 dictatorship. The show was blessedly and engagingly low-keyed; all the acts performed on sets representing living rooms and there weren’t any big productions, pyrotechnics or Cirque du Soleil-style acrobats twirling on wires above the stage. (I remember on the last Country Music Awards show Keith Urban did a duet with Pink called “One Too Many,” and given Pink’s penchant for singing and doing mid-air acrobatics at the same time, I joked, “I knew I’d had one too many when the girl I’d just gone home with got on her wires and started flying above the bed.”)

The show began with the group formerly known as Lady Antebellum but now just called “Lady A” -- they’ve renamed themselves in the same spirit that is leading to the removal of Confederate war memorials (“Antebellum” literally means “before the war” and is a key reference to the pre-Civil War past of Southern “Lost Cause” mythology, and when I first heard there was a country group called Lady Antebellum I joked, “What are they going to call their album -- Slavery Was Cool?”). They did a cover of Paul McCartney’s novelty Christmas single “Wonderful Christmastime” (it was originally pressed on translucent green vinyl and the flip side was called “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reggae” that was just what you’d guess from the title: a reggae-style instrumental of “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer”) that wasn’t as good as Paul’s original but blessedly featured the group’s female lead singer, Hillary Scott. (She shares lead vocal duties with Charles Kelley, but I’ve always found her voice considerably more interesting than his.)

Afterwards Kelsea Ballerini showed up in a preposterous costume -- a lopsided red dress with only one shoulder strap, a cutaway in the front midsection and a huge bow on the back that made it look like she was a Christmas present -- covered Eartha Kitt’s “Santa Baby,” and while her thin little white girl’s voice hardly has the sensual power of Kitt’s big vibrato she sang well and got the song’s greed-at-all-costs point across. The next performer was Tim McGraw, older and more heavy-set than I remembered him, doing what at least attempted to be the most emotionally wrenching song on the album: “It Wasn’t His Child,” an attempt to get inside the head of Joseph as he realizes he’s going to be the stepfather of the child his wife Mary has (immaculately) conceived with God. I might find this song more moving if I took the Christian mythology more seriously, but even though I’ve retreated from the militant atheism that used to be my attitude towards God, religion and the people who believe in it, the song still rubs my nose in the sheer preposterousness of the story of Christ’s birth from the Bible.

Then the duo Florida Georgia Line (Tyler Hubbard and Brian Kelley) looked cute and sang well on a song called “This Year” which managed to marry the Christmas theme with one of the favorite subjects of country music, drinking; it seems that this year they’ve stuffed the house full of alcoholic potables and proudly proclaim, “The Christmas tree isn’t the only thing getting lit this year.” (Whatever you say, guys.) After that was a version of the first traditional carol on the program, “The First Noel,” hauntingly sung by Gabby Barrett, the runner-up to the awesome Tennille Townes for Best New Female Artist on the last Country Music Awards show (whose producers did her no favors by having her sing her big song, “I’ll Be Your Song,” right after Townes had performed her wrenching “Somebody’s Daughter”), ending the song with an awesome swoop up the scale to that big high note at the end: she didn’t quite have enough breath to make the effect she intended but it was still a pretty astonishing vocal feat.

Then Darius Rucker and violinist/dancer Lindsey Stirling did “What Child Is This?” Rucker sang simply and in a heartfelt manner that reminded me of the second (sacred) side of Johnny Mathis’s first Christmas album, Merry Christmas (I usually can’t stand Mathis but on that record he slowed down his vibrato and sang in a heartfelt, genuinely sincere manner that has moved me since I first heard that album). Stirling played an electric violin and wore a red robe as she danced around the set, though what put me off about her costume was the skin-tight white all-over she was wearing under the robe, which she occasionally opened so she could flash us her crotch. I’d find that distracting in any context, especially in a traditional Christmas song about the miracle of the virgin birth! Then things got back to (relatively) normal with Thomas Rhett’s own rendition of a song called “Christmas in the Country” and Dan + Shea doing a song called “Christmas Isn’t Christmas (If I’m Not with You).” Goodness knows that sentiment has been the subject of much better songs than this -- like Charles Brown’s “Please Come Home for Christmas” and Darlene Love’s awesome “Christmas (Baby, Please Come Home)” -- but I still liked it.

Afterwards the group Little Big Town covered Vince Guaraldi’s “Christmas Time Is Here” from the 1960’s A Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack album, with nice (albeit brief) solos from a Black pianist and a white guitarist bringing the song back to its jazz roots. The show closed with Lady A doing another cover of a Christmas novelty by a major rock star -- Brian Wilson’s “Little Saint Nick,” the big hit from the Beach Boys’ Christmas album, which they took a bit slower than the Beach Boys’ original and didn’t seem to be having as much fun with it, but it was still a nice way to end a show that was low-keyed and charming and didn’t try to overwhelm us the way a lot of modern-day music specials do.