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Rockin' Bethlehem is a 1989 compilation album. It has 14 Christmas songs recorded by independent Australian bands. The songs are mostly original while others are well known Christmas carols. It was created by Timberyard Records to support the Camperdown Children's Hospital. [1] It received a 1990 ARIA Award nomination for Best Independent Release.
Band Aid is the oldest collective name of a charity supergroup featuring mainly British and Irish musicians and recording artists. It was founded in 1984 by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure to raise money for anti-famine efforts in Ethiopia by releasing the song "Do They Know It's Christmas?" for the Christmas market that year. On 25 November 1984, the song was recorded at Sarm West Studios in Notting Hill, London, and was released in the UK on Monday 3 December. The single surpassed the hopes of the producers to become the Christmas number one on that release. Three re-recordings of the song to raise further money for charity also topped the charts, first the Band Aid II version in 1989, the Band Aid 20 version in 2004 and finally the Band Aid 30 version in 2014. Band Aid II and Band Aid 20 were also Christmas number one. The original was produced by Ure. The 12" version was mixed by Trevor Horn.
Christmas music comprises a variety of genres of music regularly performed or heard around the Christmas season. Music associated with Christmas may be purely instrumental, or in the case of carols, may employ lyrics about the nativity of Jesus Christ, traditions such as gift-giving and merrymaking, cultural figures such as Santa Claus, or other topics. Many songs simply have a winter or seasonal theme, or have been adopted into the canon for other reasons.
David Walter Foster is a Canadian record producer, film composer, and music executive. He has won 16 Grammy Awards from 47 nominations. Foster's career began as a keyboardist for the pop group Skylark in the early 1970s before focusing largely on composing and production. Often in tandem with songwriter Diane Warren, Foster has contributed to material for prominent music industry artists in various genres since then, and is credited with production on over 40 pop hits on the Billboard Hot 100. He has also chaired Verve Records from 2012 to 2016.
"Do They Know It's Christmas?" is a charity song written in 1984 by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure to raise money for the 1983–1985 famine in Ethiopia. It was first recorded by Band Aid, a supergroup assembled by Geldof and Ure consisting of popular British and Irish musical acts. It was recorded in a single day at Sarm West Studios in Notting Hill, London, in November 1984.
Geoff Moore is an American contemporary Christian music singer. He began recording as a solo artist in 1984. In 1987, he formed Geoff Moore and The Distance, his touring band, which released eight albums generating a string of No. 1 radio hits throughout their 10+-year tenure. In 1998, Geoff retired the band from full-time touring. After a "farewell tour", Moore has continued as a solo artist, releasing eight more records between 1999 and 2015. The Next Thing was released in April 2016, making it his 25th album to date.
"Frosty the Snowman" is a song written by Walter "Jack" Rollins and Steve Nelson, and first recorded by Gene Autry and the Cass County Boys in 1950 and later recorded by Jimmy Durante in that year. It was written after the success of Autry's recording of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" the previous year. Rollins and Nelson shopped the new song to Autry, who recorded "Frosty" in search of another seasonal hit. Like "Rudolph", "Frosty" was subsequently adapted to other media including a popular television special.
"The Little Drummer Boy" is a popular Christmas song written by American composer Katherine Kennicott Davis in 1941. First recorded in 1951 by the Austrian Trapp Family, the song was further popularized by a 1958 recording by the Harry Simeone Chorale; the Simeone version was re-released successfully for several years, and the song has been recorded many times since.
"Fairytale of New York" is a song written by Jem Finer and Shane MacGowan and recorded by their London-based band the Pogues, featuring English singer-songwriter Kirsty MacColl on vocals. The song is an Irish folk-style ballad and was written as a duet, with the Pogues' singer MacGowan taking the role of the male character and MacColl playing the female character. It was originally released as a single on 23 November 1987 and later featured on the Pogues' 1988 album If I Should Fall from Grace with God.
Stephanie Dorthea Mills is an American singer and songwriter. She rose to stardom as "Dorothy" in the original seven-time Tony Award winning Broadway run of the musical The Wiz from 1974 to 1979. The song "Home" from the show later became a Number 1 U.S. R&B hit and her signature song.
Riki Michele started her musical career as a female Christian alternative rock artist. Best known as one of the vocalists for Adam Again, she has also recorded four eclectic solo albums.
Children's music or kids' music is music composed and performed for children. In European-influenced contexts this means music, usually songs, written specifically for a juvenile audience. The composers are usually adults. Children's music has historically held both entertainment and educational functions. Children's music is often designed to provide an entertaining means of teaching children about their culture, other cultures, good behavior, facts and skills. Many are folk songs, but there is a whole genre of educational music that has become increasingly popular.
Jose Mari Lim Chan, born José Mari Chan y Lim, is a Filipino singer, songwriter, businessman and TV presenter. Regarded as one of the country’s most renowned balladeers and composers, he is popularly dubbed as the "King of Philippine Christmas Carols". As of 2001, Chan's repertoire has sold two million albums and has garnered 37 platinum records to his credit, becoming one of the best-selling Filipino recording artist of all time. He is best-known for his signature song "Christmas in Our Hearts", which is the biggest selling Filipino Christmas song in history, including hits such as "A Perfect Christmas", "Beautiful Girl" and "Please Be Careful with My Heart".
In traditional Western festive legend and popular culture, Santa Claus's reindeer are said to pull a sleigh through the night sky to help Santa Claus deliver gifts to children on Christmas Eve.
"I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday", sometimes written as "I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day", is a Christmas song recorded by English glam rock band Wizzard. It was first released in December 1973 and, as with most Wizzard songs, was written and produced by the band's frontman Roy Wood—formerly of The Move and a founding member of Electric Light Orchestra. Despite the song's strong, long-lasting popularity, it has reached no higher than number four on the UK Singles Chart, a position it occupied for four consecutive weeks from December 1973 to January 1974. The song was beaten to the 1973 Christmas Number 1 spot by Slade's "Merry Xmas Everybody", which remained at the top of the charts for five weeks, from December 1973 to January 1974.
"Grown-Up Christmas List" is a Christmas song written by David Foster (music) and Linda Thompson-Jenner (lyrics). Originally written by Foster for the 1989 CBC Christmas program A David Foster Christmas Card, the song was recorded as a duet with David Foster and Natalie Cole. In 1990, a Cole-only version of the song appeared on David Foster's River of Love album. The song was planned to be released as a single, but only a very small number of copies were sold in a limited region. In 1992, Amy Grant recorded the first cover version of the song for her second Christmas album Home for Christmas. This was the beginning of a series of cover versions by many artists, and it has become a standard Christmas song in the 21st century. It is one of Foster's most widely sung songs.
The Animals' Christmas is the sixth solo studio album and the first Christmas album by vocalist Art Garfunkel, and is a collaborative album with Amy Grant, released in October 1986 by Columbia Records. The album was written by Jimmy Webb and features vocals by Garfunkel, Grant, and Wimbledon King's College Choir. The Animals' Christmas tells the story of the Nativity of Jesus from the perspective of the animals present. The album received positive reviews, with one writer calling it "one of the best Christmas albums of the '80s." The album failed to chart.
A Child's Christmas in Wales is a piece of prose by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas recorded by Thomas in 1952. Emerging from an earlier piece he wrote for BBC Radio, the work is an anecdotal reminiscence of a Christmas from the viewpoint of a young boy, portraying a nostalgic and simpler time. It is one of Thomas's most popular works.
"Christmas Time Is Here" is a popular Christmas standard written by Vince Guaraldi and Lee Mendelson for the 1965 CBS television special A Charlie Brown Christmas, one of the first animated Christmas specials produced for network television in the United States.
"One Child" is a song by American singer and songwriter Mariah Carey from her second Christmas album/thirteenth studio album, Merry Christmas II You (2010). It was written and produced by Carey in collaboration with Broadway composer Marc Shaiman. Backed by a children's choir, the lyrics are about the birth of Jesus. "One Child" received a mixed to negative response from critics, many of whom disapproved of the overbearing sentiment. In the United States, the track peaked at number 12 on the Billboard Gospel Digital Chart, and on the lower regions of the South Korea international single's charts. Carey performed the song at the Christmas in Washington event in November 2010.