Elvis Presley & Martina McBride - Blue Christmas
Blue Christmas is a Christmas song written by Billy Hayes and Jay W. Johnson. Its tale of unrequited love during the holidays and is a longstanding staple of Christmas music, especially in the country genre.
Elvis Presley cemented the status of "Blue Christmas" as a rock-and-roll holiday classic by deleting one verse from Tubb's version and recording the remainder on his 1957 LP Elvis' Christmas Album. Presley's version is notable musicologically as well as culturally in that its backing vocalists (especially in the soprano line) replace many major and just minor thirds with neutral and septimal minor thirds, respectively.
In addition to contributing to the overall tone of the song, the resulting "blue notes" constitute a musical play on words that provides an "inside joke" or "Easter egg" to trained ears.
Presley's original 1957 version was released as a commercially-available single for the first time in 1964. This single was a hit in the U.K., making No.11 during the week of 26th December 1964 on the British singles chart, although it didn't achieve chart success in Presley's native U.S.
Elvis and Martina McBride spend a Blue Christmas together.
Martina McBride was just shy of 2 when Elvis Presley filmed his 1968 "comeback" TV special. This year, the country singer steps back in time 40 years to join the King of Rock 'n' Roll in a video for Blue Christmas.
The effect is similar to Celine Dion's American Idol duet with Presley on If I Can Dream in 2007, but producer George Flanigen says the process used for the illusion was entirely different.
"They took Elvis out of the '68 special and put him on the Idol stage," he says. "We were taking Martina to the '68 special."
The posthumous collaboration also appears on Elvis Presley Christmas Duets, a new album that pairs Presley with singers such as Carrie Underwood, Amy Grant and Olivia Newton-John.
In the original footage — the only existing video of Elvis performing a Christmas song — a leather-clad Presley appears with his band on a small stage at the center of a studio audience. In the video, McBride walks out of the audience and sits next to him.
"There's a spot between (guitarist) Scotty Moore and Elvis that's open, like somebody should have been sitting there," says Flanigen. "We're like, 'We could probably figure a way to put her with Elvis.'
"We scoured the footage and picked shots of Elvis throughout the whole special to be able to put them together. There are shots where he and Martina share the frame, where he looks over at her, where she looks back at him and sings and smiles."
McBride filmed her parts in front of a green screen. "It took four weeks" to piece together, Flanigen says.
The lyrics:
I'll have a blue Christmas without you
I'll be so blue just thinking about you
Decorations of red on a green Christmas tree
Won't be the same, dear, if you're not here with me
And when those blue snowflakes start falling
That's when those blue memories start calling
You'll be doing all right with your Christmas of white
But I'll have a blue, blue, blue, blue Christmas
You'll be doing all right with your Christmas of white
But I'll have a blue, blue, blue, blue Christmas
You'll be doing all right with your Christmas of white
But I'll have a blue, blue, blue, blue Christmas
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