Biography

Old Christmas Day (Release day 11/18/2022)

©2022 Tim O’Brien and Thomm Jutz / No Bad Ham Music / ASCAP / Thomm Songs / SEASAC

Mike Bub / bass
Jamie Dick / drums
Shad Cobb / harmony vocal
Jan Fabricius / mandolin, harmony vocal
Thomm Jutz / guitar
Russ Pahl – steel guitar
Tim O’Brien / banjo, fiddle, vocal
Produced by Tim O’Brien
Recorded and mixed by Sean Sullivan at Cowboy Arms and the Butcher Shack, Nashville



The new and more scientifically accurate Gregorian calendar was introduced by Pope Gregory in 1582. Eleven days shorter than the previous Julian calendar, it still labeled December 25th as Christmas, but the day that had been December 25th was now labeled January 6th.

(Of course, for most of the past 2 years, January 6th means something else. I even have a song about that - https://youtu.be/vObJv__H6yE - but let’s not go into that here.)

Britain and its colonies adopted the new calendar officially in 1752, but Protestants in America and elsewhere generally rejected anything to do with the Catholic church. Appalachia was especially slow to adopt the new system but started calling January 6th “Old Christmas”.

In remote mountain communities, a lot of Christmas folklore remained attached to January 6th. There were various beliefs – don’t throw out the ashes from the Old Christmas day fire until the next day; water turns into wine that day but it’s bad luck to taste it (drink beer or whiskey instead?); and a child born on Old Christmas day can heal the sick. It’s also good luck to eat a piece of pie or cake made by another person on Old Christmas day. So, bake stuff and try to get others to eat it and hope they offer you something that came from their oven. (The tradition of eating mince pies and fruit cakes made with whiskey came to America with the Scots Irish.) The calendar change also gave birth to the idea of “the twelve days of Christmas”, and in Appalachia, a tradition called “breakin’ up Christmas” emerged with people visiting family and friends for several days at a time.

One belief was that at midnight on Old Christmas Eve, the elder bushes bloom and animals talk to each other. The legend had to do with those animals’ presence at Jesus’s birth, and their being filled with the Holy Spirit once a year on that night. Thomm Jutz and I got together to write a song on January 5th, and this is the result. Thanks to Thomm for uncovering this bit of folklore. They say it’s bad luck to hear the animals talk on Old Christmas Eve, but we can still imagine what they might say!

Jan and I here at Howdy Skies Records world headquarters wish you a warm and peaceful Christmas and a prosperous New Year. One last thing, it’s good luck to keep your tree up until January 6th, but bad luck to leave it up past that date.

www.timobrien.net


Born in Wheeling, West Virginia in 1954, the Grammy-winning singer-songwriter (and West Virginia Music Hall of Famer) absorbed a broad range of American music growing up, from country and rockabilly icons like Jerry Reed and Jerry Lee Lewis backed by local ringers at the famous Grand Ole Opry-style Wheeling Radio Jamboree to Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Dave Brubeck at summer concerts in the part. His parents had season tickets to the Wheeling Symphony and brought along the young O'Brien and his sister Mollie, who would become his first bandmate; they also saw Ray Charles and the Beatles when they came through town. O'Brien took it all in, but something clicked when he first caught Doc Watson on TV as a teenager: that versatility, and the distillation of so much into the framework of traditional sounds, would be one of his biggest inspirations.

"Doc Watson's a great roadmap for anybody, really, because he played all kinds of music and made it sound like Doc Watson music," said O'Brien. "Of course, people put him in a bluegrass-folk music pigeonhole, but he really brought all of it together, and that's kind of what I was interested in."

O'Brien found a simpatico musical community in Boulder, Colorado, where he moved in 1974 and became a leading figure in the world of contemporary or progressive bluegrass – most notably in the quartet Hot Rize, which toured nationally over its 40-year tenure and earned a Grammy nomination for its 1989 album "Take it Home." In the mid-'90s, O'Brien decamped to Nashville, where he became a first-call mandolin, guitar, fiddle and banjo player on Music City sessions, and collaborated with artists like Steve Earle, Sturgill Simpson and Dan Auerbach; Kathy Mattea, Garth Brooks and the Dixie Chicks cut his compositions, and in 2015 he won a Grammy as a member of the bluegrass supergroup the Earls of Leicester, a nice companion for O'Brien's 2005 Best Traditional Folk Grammy for his album Fiddler's Green.