In tune with the season, and that traditional English Christmas song, I (and your true love) continue bringing to you musical gift suggestions for the 12 days of Christmas, resuming with the Third Day of Christnas, which today is.
It’s the second of four deliveries he/she and I will be making. But, unlike the traditional song, this won’t be cumulative — you won’t be getting a partridge and a pear tree all 12 days. Not to mention all those geese and hens and swans, etc.
Three French Hens
On the Third Day, the easy way out would be bringing albums by Brigitte Bardot (yes, she had other attributes), Celine Dion and Edith Piaf — but that would be implying that those French (-Canadian, in one case) singers are hens. One of my favorite Little Feat songs is “Dixie Chicken,” but the lyrics imply that the bird’s a dude. Instead, your true love may have to deliver “Cluck Old Hen” by the Wayfaring Strangers, the Meters’ “Chicken Strut” and “I Like My Chicken Fryin’ Size” by Merle Travis. (The last of those might be considered suggestive, but this is your true love!)
Four Calling Birds
On the Fourth Day of Christmas, your true love could just mail (or UPS) it in, and deliver the 1966-67 music of Michael Clarke, David Crosby, Chris Hillman and Jim McGuinn. But the Byrds took liberties with the spelling, and were only four for that short time period. It’s a Beautiful Day’s “White Bird” just sits in its cage, so you may receive the aforementioned “Yellow Bird,” “Mockingbird” by Carly Simon and James Taylor, "The Birds and the Bees “ by Jewel Akens and “Snowbird” by Anne Murray. (Kind of depressing, so you may want to sneak a snort of “Surfin’ Bird” by the Trashmen, or Dee Dee Sharp’s “Do the Bird.”)
Five Golden Rings
On the Fifth Day, your true love shouldn’t have trouble finding (pun alert) bands, for instance Golden Earring (an album other than “Moontan,” because you’ve heard “Radar Love” way too many times already);”Wear My Ring Around Your Neck,” Elvis Presley; "Ring of Fire,” Johnny Cash; “Rings” by Lobo; and “Band of Gold,” Fred Payne.
Six Geese a Laying
Waterfowl of the tribe Anserini, of the family Anatidae, aren’t a popular theme in song or album titles, or artists’ names. So, on the Sixth Day, he or she will have to stick out his or her neck, starting with “Lucille,” by Leo Kottke, the acoustic 12-string guitar wizard who did mostly instrumentals because, in his own words, his voice sounded like “goose flatus.”
Less of a stretch would be “Country Comfort,” a twofer, as the Elton John single and on Rod Stewart’s “Gasoline Alley,” because its lyrics include “Now the old fat goose is flying cross the sticks”; and the Band’s self-titled second album, for “Jemimah Surrender,” and its classic “There’s a bird on my head/And his mouth won’t talk … You know he laughs just like a goose/But looks like a hawk” (perhaps a reference to the band’s original name). Then we'll fill out your six-peck with a couple from the pack of wild geese Bob Dylan’s chasing (he more properly should be going after a gaggle) on “When I Paint My Masterpiece.”