Shane MacGowan Photo: screengrab
The Christmas song is not a genre that normally lends itself to social realism.
It is where songwriting comes closest to the sentimental lingo of greeting cards or advertising slogans.
So hearing The Pogues’ perennial ‘Fairytale Of New York’ pealing out of radios as Christmastime approaches has always been a welcome breath of foul alcoholic air.
There have been calls for its censorship; not because of its depiction of Christmas as a time of debauchery but because one of the two drunken protagonists in the song calls the other a ‘faggot’.
Shane MacGowan, the song’s co-author, explained that “the word was used by the character because it fitted with the way she would speak...
“She is not supposed to be a nice person or even a wholesome person. She is a woman of a certain generation at a certain time in history and she is down on her luck and desperate.
"She is just supposed to be an authentic character and not all characters in songs and stories are angels or even decent and respectable, sometimes characters in songs and stories have to be evil or nasty in order to tell the story effectively.”
He added that in spite of this he was “absolutely fine” with the word being bleeped out.
But ‘Fairytale Of New York’ was never my favourite Christmas song anyway.
That would be ‘Santa Claus’ by Sonny Boy Williamson.
I’m not sure what they would bleep out in this song, should it ever be played on radio, which as far as I know it never has. They might even have to bleep the whole thing.
The Sonny Boy Williamson who wrote and recorded this song in April 1960 – eight months before Christmas – was one of two musicians who recorded at different times under that name.
The first was John Lee Williamson, who was born in Tennessee in 1914 and moved to Chicago in the 1930s where he had some big hits in the blues field before being murdered on his way home from a gig in 1948.
Sonny Boy Williamson Photo: supplied
The second – the one who recorded ‘Santa Claus’ – was actually named Aleck Ford and born in Mississippi, possibly few years before Williamson, though he only made his first record in 1951 after the first Sonny Boy was dead.
It has been suggested that Ford – who also sometimes went by the name Rice Miller - took the name to capitalise on the reputation of the earlier Sonny Boy. It was certainly audacious, if not outright identity theft.
This story inspired Randy Newman to write a song, ‘Sonny Boy’, which appeared on Dark Matter, his excellent album from last year. In Newman’s telling, the original Sonny Boy, wandering one night in Chicago, stumbles upon the interloper playing to a massive crowd and to add insult to injury, performing the original Sonny Boy’s hits.
So upset is he by this travesty that he runs into the street, only to find himself in the midst of a robbery where he is shot dead. Pathetically, Newman portrays him singing the song from beyond the grave, “the only bluesman in heaven” who “died so young, didn't have the time to do nothing bad.”
Newman’s song is not historically accurate but is bitterly funny.
Rogue though he may have been, Ford/Miller was a great bluesman who wrote wry personal songs of his own and sung them in a sly conversational style, interspersing vocal lines with sharp expressive squalls on his harmonica. A few of his tunes – ‘Help Me’, ‘Don’t Start Me Talking’ – have become blues standards. If ‘Santa Claus’ is not in that category it is only because it is hard to imagine anyone else would be capable of singing it.
In the opening verse, Sonny Boy is being farewelled by a girlfriend who tells him she has bought him ‘what you need for Santa Claus’ and that he will be able to find it in her chest of drawers.
The listener may assume the gift is not in fact for Santa, but a Christmas present for Sonny Boy; this certainly appears to be Sonny Boy’s understanding. But it’s this ambiguity from which the rest of this tale of confusion seems to spiral.
By the second verse, Sonny has ‘started to rambling, looking in all her chest of drawers’ for the unspecified present, which he cannot find. By the time he’s ransacked the bottom drawer, the landlady has appeared and, in alarm, summoned the police.
Chico and Groucho in A Night At The Opera Photo: supplied
When Santa Claus and the law get mixed up, absurdity is never far away.
I’m reminded of the Marx Brothers classic film A Night At The Opera, in which Groucho as shonky businessman Otis B. Driftwood tries to get Chico as Fiorello the illiterate manager of an Italian tenor, to sign his artist to a contract.
After a lot of ridiculous haggling during which the pair tear up all but the last page of the document, Chico asks: “Hey wait. What does this say here?”
“Oh, that?” Groucho replies. “That's the usual clause, that's in every contract. That just says, 'If any of the parties participating in this contract are shown not to be in their right mind, the entire agreement is automatically nullified.' That's what they call a sanity clause.”
“You can't fool me,” Chico tells Groucho. “There ain't no Sanity Clause.”
This punchline inspired at least one Christmas song, The Damned’s ‘There Ain’t No Sanity Clause’, a seasonal flop in 1980.
It also finds an echo in Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band’s ‘There Ain’t No Santa Claus On The Evening Stage’ in which the Captain (Don Van Vliet) combines grim images of poverty and enslavement with bloodcurdling moans of ‘ho ho ho’.
Meanwhile back at his girlfriend’s apartment, Sonny Boy is beginning to doubt the existence of a Santa Claus, too.
What happens in the final verse of his song is ambiguous. One can assume Sonny has been charged with trespass, or something worse.
There is no sign of the gift. However as a parting gesture one of the policemen, displaying a glimmer of humanity or perhaps just a fine appreciation of absurdity, hands the bluesman a letter to give to the judge.
It reads: ‘The boy’s just trying to find his Santa Claus’.
And in a way, aren’t we all?