VA – Time-Life Music – A Fabulous Fifties Christmas

This is a fantastic way to start a small Christmas CD collection that will get you through almost 2 hours of Classic Christmas songs, all from the 1950’s.  The 1950’s was just after the Classic Christmas Music Era started to take off, (1946 – 1976).  By the end of the fifties, Christmas music was a huge seller every year for the major record labels.  Sure, there are great Christmas songs from the late 70’s, 80’s and later.  But a lot of the songs that are still played on the radio every year at Christmas come from the 1950’s.  Singers like Perry Como, Johnny Mathis, Doris Day, Rosemary Clooney, they’re all here.  Andy Williams, Eartha Kitt, Brenda Lee and Bobby Helms, they’re all here too.

This is a Time-Life Music product.  A 3-disc set titled A Fabulous Fifties Christmas, with each disc having its own subtitle.  Time-Life does a great job of packaging the biggest hits into their reissue sets.  I have The Hit Parade collection as well.  It’s a 40+ CD set that covers the Billboard hits of Pop singers from 1940 to 1969.

A little side note:  Each of these CDs can be purchased separately, which tempted me to review each CD individually, especially since there are twelve songs on each CD, more than most budget CDs that only contain 10.  But as a service to my readers, I thought it was better to review the collection as a whole.  Just be informed, if you go to purchase this 3 CD set, you will probably have to buy each CD separately.

The CD artwork that comes with this set, and most Time-Life sets, is very good.  I can always count on getting the information I want from their liner notes.  Each CD has its own title and cover photo.  The back of the CDs features a numerical track listing with performing artists under the song titles.  The top of the back of the CD has the series title.  Also included is a little information about Time-Life Music collections.

The good stuff is inside.  Each CD cover opens to a double fold-out, with 4 pages that are printed on both sides, giving you 8 pages of information.  Each starts with a large paragraph of almost every song, including how the singer came to record it.  The middle part of the fold-out has a numerical list of the songs including the performing artist, writers, original single release catalog numbers, year of release and Billboard chart position.  Also publishing information.  That’s the kind of information I seek.

The last page features all the top personnel at Time-Life Music, and release credits and copywrites.  The back of the artwork has a small ad for other Time-Life Music Christmas collections.

Another great feature of this Time-Life Music series is there are no repeats.  With 12 songs on each CD, you get 36 unique, great Classic Christmas songs.  Almost all these songs appear in my Top 500 Classic Christmas Recordings, a list of my 500 favorite Christmas songs; what I feel is the best of the best.

Almost everyone hears most of these songs during the Christmas season every year.  Whether that be on the radio, at a friend’s house or even in your own Christmas collections.  Another great thing about this collection is… what you expect to hear when you buy a set like this, is here.  It would be hard to list the standout songs on here because I would end up listing all 36 songs.

The only negative would be the fact that there are only 12 songs on each CD.  That’s only about 35 minutes each.  I have other collections that are a full 76 minutes long.  That’s almost 30 songs.  But the quality is here, and the liner notes are fantastic.

While trying to put this last paragraph together, I was thinking of whether young people would still be interested in hearing these Christmas classics from 60 years ago.  They are familiar with the songs, but probably by newer artists.  But they’re only familiar with them because of the ones included in this collection.  These are the originals, so to speak.

If you don’t already have a collection like this, then you should consider getting this Time-Life Music – A Fabulous Fifties Christmas collection, or The Time-Life Treasury Of Christmas collection.  (Look for a review of that sometime in this blog’s future).  This collection has a lot of the songs you want when having friends and family over during the holidays.

I give this CD set :

****