Customer Reviews

Country Christmas

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Cash's post-sun, pre-american recordings career has truckloads of great cuts, but too often, especially with 80s-early 90s recordings his voice is stuck into what feels like a casio keyboard preset. This is my problem with this Christmas CD. Cash's voice is cluttered up by hokey background music and there's way too much female chorus on every song. It's like putting Marlon Brando in the middle of a Kathy Lee christmas special skit. Johnny always gets 5 stars. Rest of the CD: one or none. I wish sun would have let him kick out a Christmas LP with just the Tennessee two playing a sparse background.

I'd like to know what the one reviewer thought he was going to hear when he got this CD. Not "classic Cash"? I think it's very much classic Cash... just doing Christmas songs. The words "Johnny Cash Country Christmas" on the cover should be a clue to this.

For the most part they perform the songs in a 'traditional' style. The only exception is "Figgy Pudding", which I actually find to be rather annoying as a screeching woman continues to ask for her snack. On a couple of the songs Cash performs very little or not at all, letting the womens' group take control. Not that that's a bad thing, though.

If you love Cash's bass and want a nice, simple Christmas CD this would probably be a good buy for you.

If you like Cash, you'll like this alblum. Surprisingly introspective with the same great down-to-earth bass.

As usual, Johnny Cash provides a very satifying album. You know what you are going to get when you purchase a Cash disc and he does not let down here.

This album is simply a masterpiece. It contains 13 beautiful Christmas songs, which are sung wonderfully by Johnny Cash and the Carter Family. Johnny's voice is so strong, emotional, and bold on this album. Not only did Johnny and the Carter Family do great, but Jack Hale, Jr. and His Nashville All-Star Band & Singers sounds great too! Not to mention the song selection is great. This is definitely one of my favorite CASH albums. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

I got this for a friend that loves Johnny Cash and seems to have all of his music. She and her husband were really surprised to see that I had found it and thought it to be a very special gift! Enjoy this for yourself or for someone that loves the 'Man in Black'!

This is one of Cash's finest. A must have!!!

I'm not really a big Cash fan, but when I heard this LaserLight Masterpeice--I want to hear it again and again. (Even when it is not Christmas!!!)

The background vocals are awesome and Cash's voice is in its prime!

My family and I enjoy Johnny Cash's music throughout his career, and Christmas music is a seasonal pleasure for us, even though we celebrate Yule--it still all works. This album, however, is too far into the realm of sermon-and-Christmas-service to be palatable. Beyond that, the Carter-Cash clan singing backup, or rather, trying to sing, doubtless make this a jewel for their immediate family, but is too "rough" and discordant (honestly, these folks can't carry a tune in a dump truck) to be what I'd call "pleasant Christmas music" for general listening.

I like the fact that COUNTRY CHRISTMAS by Johnny Cash is a studio album, recorded in June and August of 1991, as opposed to an album collected over many years or decades between songs. But, unfortunately, many of the songs are just not done very well at all.

About a third of this album is listenable, and you can grab those songs and burn them to a blank CD, (after you buy this CD, of course); but I cannot just plop this entire CD in the player and enjoy it for the entire 45 minutes, at all.

The best songs are the very famous classics, such as "Blue Christmas," "Silent Night," "O Little Town of Bethlehem," "Away in a Manger," and "O Come All Ye Faithful." If you think maybe owning these songs will be worth the very low price, then you will probably get your money's worth, I think.

The worst song comes early on, "Figgy Pudding," which has what sounds like a drunken old lady cackling throughout the last half of the song! Perhaps this was an inside joke, but the performance grates on my nerves and seems very uncharacteristically disrespectful for a Christmas album to celebrate the birth of Jesus! So this true clunker of a song really ruins the mood and destroys my attitude for the rest of the album.

Actually, I have this album on cassette tape from a few years ago which is 52 minutes long, and the cassette tape has two more songs, "White Christmas" and "I'll Be Home for Christmas" which do NOT appear on this CD version, (though the CD is only 45 minutes long and could have easily held those two songs), but I wish they had omitted "Figgy Pudding" instead of these other songs, which would have saved the CD for me.

Many of the songs on this Christmas album have little or no Johnny Cash vocals at all!? Other songs have Johnny stretching too hard to have the wide vocal range required for the tunes.

This is a bare bones CD from an off brand record company, LaserLight, so the cover photo is the only photo, and there is no CD booklet, just a worthless insert listing other CDs for sale from LaserLight.

Johnny Cash and his friends and family have done many really nice Gospel projects, so I am surprised at how weak this album turned out. His best Gospel album is GOSPEL GLORY. I can also highly recommend his movie about Jesus called THE GOSPEL ROAD, and the best Gospel project from Johnny Cash has to be his 16 CD spoken word reading of the entire NEW TESTAMENT of the HOLY BIBLE, which is very reasonably priced on amazon.com! Get any of these items instead of COUNTRY CHRISTMAS, and you will likely enjoy the performances much better!

If you are new to listening to Johnny Cash, then I think you should start with the collection called THE LEGEND OF JOHNNY CASH, which has a great selection of famous songs from his entire career, and sounds noticeably terrific, especially for his earliest recordings from a half century ago!

Digitally recorded at Germantown Studio in Nashville in June and August of 1991, this includes some seasonal classic carols as well as the Hayes-Johnson composition Blue Christmas. First done by Ernest Tubb back in 1949, it has become more closely associated with Elvis following the release of his Christmas album in 1957. In giving it his unique interpretation here, however, Johnny stakes a claim to making it his own.

I also like June Carter and The Carter Family's happy and joyous presentation of Figgy Pudding, a take on We Wish You A Merry Christmas written by June and Jack Hale, Jr., who arranged this album and backs up the artists with his Nashville All-Star Band.

June and the family are also solo on tracks 8 and 10, with the latter just a marvelously warm, down-home country rendition of O Christmas Tree. Johnny's narration on Here Was A Man from the pens of Tex Ritter and Johnny Bond is vintage Cash, and on Away In A Manger the haunting fiddle reminds you of the background music heard on the Ken Burns TV documentary The Civil War.

Some liner notes would have been welcome [there are none other than a listing of other Christmas CDs available from LaserLight] if only to fill us in on the background surrounding the creation of the album, and who exactly performs on each track, including the musicians in Hale's band. It also would have been nice had they added just one track from the past to make it an even 14 - his 1959 rendition of The Little Drummer Boy which made both the Country and pop charts.

But hey, for the price asked you cannot go wrong with this offering from an American musical icon.