Tidings of Comfort and Joy (Roger Whittaker album)

Tidings of Comfort and Joy

Vinyl - Canada - 1st edition.

Artist	Roger Whittaker
Published	1984-??-??
Type	Studio
Genre	Hymn, Ballad, Synthpop
Themes	Christmas

Tidings of Comfort and Joy is a Christmas album by Roger Whittaker released on vinyl in 1984. The album consists of a variety of traditional Christmas songs all sung in Whittaker's baritone with a backup choir. Despite the traditional song selection, the music makes heavy use of early-1980s synthesizers for lead instruments which had a then modern sound.

The publication of the album was quite varied. A number of different companies published the album under different titles with different songs and in different orders, even within the same country in the same year. Because of this, it's difficult to determine what the original release was, though the title I'm using here is from the most widely published release. A total of 23 unique songs were mastered, as indicated by the same synthesizer used in all of them, but no single album includes all 23. Several other compilations using tracks from the 23 songs have also been released, each time with new albums titles and new song orders. Most releases begin with Ding! Dong! Merrily on High with the chiming of the bells and end with Silent Night which finishes with a brief medley of previous songs from the album and the same chiming of bells, though a few were haphazardly thrown together without this in mind.

A few of the songs on this album were also recorded in German for the album Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht.

Personal

In the late 1980s, my mother had the World's Most Beautiful Christmas Songs version of this album on vinyl and frequently played the album around Christmas time. In the early 1990s, when I was really getting into Christianity, I especially loved this album due to the religious nature of most of the songs, and Whittaker's powerful voice helped strengthen my emotional attachment to the religion's beliefs. After I moved out of my parent's house, I went over a decade without hearing the album and also deconverted in the process (the two are unrelated). Feeling nostalgic one December, I went searching for the album online and found The Christmas Song. Because it had the songs I remembered, I assumed it was the same album my mother had, although I didn't realize at the time, it was missing a few tracks, and had one new song which, I wasn't sure why I didn't recognize. When I heard the songs again after such a long gap in time I was surprised at how awful the synthesizers sounded. Somehow, I wasn't bothered by them when they were more common in pop music. However, I still appreciated the familiarity of Whittaker's amazing vocals and quickly regained an appreciation for them. While researching for this page, I discovered that the CD version I had found was only a partial compilation release of the more complete version. When I saw the cover art for World's Most Beautiful Christmas Songs, it jogged my memory, so I looked up the missing tracks and heard them, now with a gap of about 25 years, and was again awash in nostalgia over them. Although I now find the religious songs to be obnoxiously preachy, due to the nostalgia it induces, I still love the album, and it's one of the few Christmas albums I can tolerate. To this day, it's the only work of Roger Whittaker's that I'm familiar with.

Track Listing

This track listing is from the World's Most Beautiful Christmas Songs release which was the first US release.

Track	Title	Composers	Rank
A01	Ding! Dong! Merrily on High	Jehan Tabourot, George Ratcliffe Woodward	2
A02	God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen	Traditional	4
A03	O Come, All Ye Faithful	Traditional	13
A04	The Twelve Days of Christmas	Traditional, Frederic Austin	18
A05	The Christmas Song	Robert Wells, Mel Tormé	3
A06	Angels from the Realms of Glory	James Montgomery, Edward Shippen Barnes	15
A07	Mary's Boy Child	Jester Hairston	9
A08	Away in a Manger	Traditional, James R. Murray, William J. Kirkpatrick	16
A09	Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas	Hugh Martin, Ralph Blane	8
A10	The Holly and the Ivy	Traditional	1
B01	White Christmas	Irving Berlin	6
B02	The First Noël	Traditional	7
B03	The Little Drummer Boy	Katherine Kennicott Davis	19
B04	Hark! The Herald Angels Sing	Traditional, Felix Mendelssohn, Charles Wesley, George Whitefield	11
B05	Infant Holy, Infant Lowly	Traditional	14
B06	O Tannenbaum	Melchior Franck, Ernst Anschütz	17
B07	Winter Wonderland	Felix Bernard, Richard Bernhard Smith	10
B08	Past Three O'Clock	Traditional, George Ratcliffe Woodward	12
B09	We Wish You a Merry Christmas	Traditional	20
B10	Silent Night	Franz Xaver Gruber, Joseph Mohr	5