Press play. Leave it on.
The Christmas playlist for people who actually love music.
Not the eleven songs the mall plays on a loop. The soul sides, the blues sides, the jazz trios, the country records, the church recordings and the strange beautiful ones nobody remembers to put on.
Hit play and go do something else. That's the whole idea — a holiday season's worth of music that doesn't need managing.
Most holiday playlists are built by an algorithm from the same short list. This one was built by hand, record by record.
The famous versions are here — but so are the ones that got buried. Same songs, different hands, and the difference is the whole pleasure of it.
Soul, blues, jazz, country, gospel, rock and roll, and the old orchestral sides. It moves the way a good evening moves, instead of sitting in one mood for six hours.
Built for a whole season, not a dinner party. Put it on the first weekend of December and it'll still be finding you new things by New Year's.
Where the records came from, who actually wrote them, and what got lost along the way.
A Jewish songwriter from Siberia wrote the best-selling record in history about a Christmas he never had.
Read the story → Coming soonA jazz trio, a network that hated it, and a children's special nobody expected to air twice.
Read the story → Coming soonHow a holiday standard written to comfort soldiers ended up too bleak to sing as written.
Read the story →Somebody had to. Might as well be someone who cared how the songs got here.
This started the same way the big one did — as a personal playlist that got out of hand. Every December the same problem: you want music on for six weeks, and every service hands you the same twenty tracks with a different sleeve on them.
So this is the other version. The one where Charles Brown and Vince Guaraldi and a church choir and a steel guitar all get to be part of Christmas, because they always were.
Free to listen. Free to follow. No ads, no sign-up, no gate. If you find something in here you'd forgotten about, that's the whole point.
When a new story goes up or the playlist gets its December refresh, you'll hear about it. Nothing else, ever.
Who Loaded the Jukebox? is the year-round companion to this one — 300+ hours of blues, southern rock, jam band, classic country and the whole American roots continuum.