Elvis' Christmas Album Review

It is a Christmas album, and most Christmas albums are furniture. This one caused a small national argument because of Blue Christmas and Santa Claus Is Back in Town, the second of which is a twelve bar blues with a horn section and a vocal that is openly leering, and putting that next to Silent Night struck a lot of people as indecent. They had a point and the record is better for it. Blue Christmas has outlived every other version of the song.

The traditional carols are sung straight and reverently, and the gospel quartet material at the end is where his real feeling for the form shows. There is not much here in the way of arrangement risk, the running time is short, and half of it exists because December was coming. But the two blues numbers are properly good and the sincerity of the sacred side is not in question. Judged as a seasonal record it is the best of its era. Judged against his own catalogue it is a footnote with one immortal track.