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The adults sitting around a table on the back porch, some with beer, some with coffee. They’re swapping wisecracks and stories while the kids are upstairs. Coats are tossed in a corner, and the Christmas lights are strung with semi-deliberation in one of the rooms of the house. It could be Christmas, but it isn’t. The house is Susan Cowsill and Russ Broussard’s home on the West Bank, and it has become the studio where A Very Threadhead Holiday is being recorded. Mike Mayeaux’s mobile recording unit is out front; there’s an amp in the hallway with producer Paul Sanchez’ hat on it. The lights are hanging from Broussard’s drum kit.
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For Susan Cowsill, Christmas songs speak to her on a musical level. The Carpenters’ “Merry Christmas Darling” is one of her favorites because “it’s got beautiful harmonies,” she says. “And I think I was having a good year.” One of her earliest Christmas music memories is of listening to the melody and countermelody of “Do You Hear What I Hear” as a child in Rhode Island. “It blew my mind when I was little,” she says, “I liked all the different things that could fit into this one simple melody,” she says. “I can remember laying in front of our hi-fi, that was warm – it even smelled like it was burning – and thinking of all those parts.” For her “The World at Christmas Time,” figuring out the harmonies was the easy part. She and Debbie Davis took turns thinking of harmony parts to add; the musical challenge was for her as a pop songwriter to put the song in Christmas musical vocabulary. “The mystery of Christmas is often expressed through non-your-average chords; I think you’ve got to have some sharps and minors in there.”
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The intersection of tradition and invention that Christmas songs mark make them songs that many musicians enjoy returning to, at least for the season. Cowsill recalls a Christmas concert at St. Louis Cathedral that she did with Jim McCormick and Skeet Hanks. “I was in heaven as a vocalist,” she says. “There’s nothing like it.” Davis and Perrine have found kindred spirits that pay on their Christmas sessions. “We throw them a little money when we can, but it’s basically done for the freakish joy of playing these songs that it’s only sanctioned to play once a year,” Davis says.
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For Cowsill, who admits she has likely worked snow and Christmas into more non-seasonal songs than most, the fear of screwing up a Christmas song was daunting. “That would have been the height of failure for me,” she says. Cowsill’s not typically a fast writer, but got the first verses and chorus of “The World at Christmas Time” out easily, and she knew how it ended. It was the parts in-between that challenged her. “The main thought was ‘I feel this way all year long; at Christmas time the world feels the same way.’ How to get there and how to discuss the unpleasantries of life, that was tough.”
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Ruffins’ vision is one that unifies New Orleanians, and it’s the thing good Christmas music does. “As you get older, which I am really fast, people become more important than everything,” Charlie Miller says. “Christ time is a time when people are coming together in a joyous way, so from that aspect, [the songs] are very much fun to play because people like them.” Cowsill echoes that thought. It brings people to a place where our core exists anyway – you and goodness,” she says.
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