12.06.2017

Christmas at TFTP: "Johnny Cash Christmas Special" from CBS (Dec. 6, 1976)



Posted to YouTube by user 'PeterRabbit59'
Length - 50:24

Johnny Cash was a veteran at television as well as music by the mid-1970s, having starred in his own weekly TV show for two years from 1969 to 1971. This Christmas special from 1976 is the first of a series of annual Johnny Cash Christmas specials that lasted for the remainder of the decade.

The special is divided in to two distinct parts: The first part is a series of vignettes that are almost proto-music video in nature as Cash, sometimes alone, sometimes with others (including Roy Clark and Tony Orlando), wanders his farm and homestead, stopping for musical numbers that are highly visual and edited in nature. (There are quite a few Seventies-ish shots of nature and trees.) The second part is a gathering of Cash and family members, joined by the Reverend Billy Graham and select musical guests Merle Travis and Barbara Mandrell, in the Cash "home" (obviously a set on a soundstage), where they trade off performing musical numbers of various kinds.

This Christmas special is very light on Christmas music. Cash and guests instead opt for things like a medley of Stephen Foster-composed songs by Cash, Clark, and Orlando; instrumental guitar rags performed by Travis and Mandrell; and because Tony Orlando is a guest, a performance of "Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree" (because in the 1970s, any time Tony Orlando was a guest he was going to sing "Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree"). The only two Christmas songs are a version of "The Christmas Song" (the "chestnuts roasting on an open fire" song) by Roy Clark and a duet between Cash and his brother Tommy on a catchy but obscure tune called "That Christmasy Feeling". The show ends with Billy Graham telling a Christmas-related story about how a child can change everything.

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