Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood: Garth and Tricia Live (CBS-TV Christmas Special, aired December 20, 2020)

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

Last night the CBS network offered a couple of Christmas-themed music specials, including one featuring Garth Brooks and his wife, Trisha Yearwood, which was a welcome departure from some of Brooks’s previous TV specials. Instead of a gargantuan production in a stadium featuring Garth Brooks flying (he’s not a fat man but he is quite heavy-set and I suspect they have to use cables instead of wires to fly him), it took place in what purported to be Mr. and Mrs. Brooks’ home, including the in-house recording studio where they work, and just featured the two of them gaily bantering back and forth and singing a bunch of low-keyed and often joking renditions of Christmas songs. It actually began with the two of them singing what Brooks introduced as a Thanksgiving song -- he said he was going to start with Thanksgiving and end with New Year’s -- called “There Are Things I’m Thankful For.” The two of them (most of the songs were performed by both singers, though on some of them Trisha was little more than Garth’s backing vocalist -- apparently in his concerts she performs an opening set solo and then becomes one of his backup singers during his set), including “The Little Drummer Boy” and “Silent Night.” Trisha came out with a solo version of Eartha Kitt’s 1950’s novelty “Santa Baby” -- she did it surprisingly well but no one is going to cut Eartha on this song -- and Garth did the most moving song of the evening, “Belleau Wood,” a song about World War I and the fabled “Christmas truce” the soldiers declared against the wishes of their officers.

After that Garth and Trisha sang together on something called “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” which Brooks joked had come about because he wanted to see if he could “tweak” an old (and safely in the public domain!) song into a Christmas theme. The next song was “Ugly Christmas Sweater,” about a man who runs into a woman at an office party and, though he’s never thought of her “that way” before, finds her irresistibly attractive while she’s wearing the titular garment. (I laughed at the song but now it occurs to me that it’s profoundly dated in the era of MeToo! -- though is the MeToo! era over already? Did it get killed because during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic everyone is working from home anyway?) and a quite beautiful solo by Trisha on Adolphe Adam’s classic “O Holy Night.” Garth accompanied her on guitar and later joked about how difficult that song is to play and wondered why the composer wrote it all in minor keys. (Because he was a fully credentialed 19th century classical composer -- besides “O Holy Night” Adam is best known as the composer of the ballet Giselle -- and they did those sorts of things.) After a light-hearted version of “Frosty the Snowman” (unlike other performers on specials like this, Brooks and Yearwood frequently crammed another song -- or at least a bit of one -- in the last minute or so before they had to stop for a commercial break), the two joined each other for Jose Feliciano’s disgustingly unavoidable hot “Feliz Navidad” (one of the nice things about listening to Los Lobos’ Christmas album was to be reminded that there are other Spanish-language Christmas songs besides “Feliz Navidad”), and Brooks spent much of the rest of the show breaking into it and joking about how much he likes it and his wife doesn’t. Trisha came out at this point with a quite good modern song called “Hard Candy Christmas”, which she reprised in response to Garth’s joking reprise of “Feliz Navidad.”

Then came a song that didn’t really have a Christmas connection but which turned out to be one of the highlights of the evening, along with “Belleau Wood” -- “Shallow,” the big duet between Lady Gaga (who can sing) and Bradley Cooper (who can’t) from the latest version of A Star Is Born. It was nice at long last to hear this song done by two people who can sing -- and while the portrayal of the Brooks-Yearwood relationship in this show was a happy, homey, uncomplicated one far removed from the Sturm und Drang of the plot of A Star Is Born. Then there was another unfamiliar (at least to me) recent carol called “Baby Jesus Is Born” which I quite liked, and a song by Dan Fogelberg apparently called “Christmas in the Snow” before they finally rang out the special with “Auld Lang Syne,” nicely harmonized by the couple before Garth ended the show with yet another gag reprise of “Feliz Navidad.” Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood are quite good duet partners -- maybe not at the near-perfect level of Johnny Cash and June Carter but far better than Waylon Jennings and Jessi Colter, who during their marriage tried to be the new Johnny and June and failed miserably because their voices didn’t blend for shit. This show was a nice, comfortable run-through, and if Garth and Trisha were trying to tell us that their relationship is perfectly harmonious (literally and figuratively), they certainly made it look that way!