Last week I heard my buddy Michael Conniff talking about all the traffic on Aspen Post about Colorado Christmas. I called him up and told him how happy I was that people still heard some love in that old song. Michael hadn’t read any of the blogs about this wonderful Steve Goodman song that I had sung lead on. He had never heard the song. He just read the title of the string of blogs, over the air. John Denver had us sing it on one of his Christmas TV Specials. We were set up around the campfire at T-Lazy 7. He ended up recording it.

The week before everyone from Sue Gray to total strangers related what hearing the song had meant to them. Well, let me tell you how it came into being. Our manager, Chuck Morris wanted us to have a Christmas song for business reasons. His parents were born in Russia and they didn’t have a Christmas tree while he was growing up. But, he fell in love with Johnny Cash and The Carter Family and convinced us to record the gospel-flavored Will the Circle Be Unbroken, Vol. II. He liked a good song about faith and family, whether or not the faith was that of his fathers’

He used to book Steve Goodman in his clubs in Boulder and Denver. He arranged several co-writing tasks for Steve and the singers from my band. He got the idea that Steve should write our Christmas song. Steve didn’t get it, at first. Why should two New York Jews conspire with the goyem to sing about the birth of another Jew. Our band was recording something else in Nashville while Steve was resisting on the other end of the phone. He agreed to write a song that started, “Hey Santa, this year I want a (common, two-word phrase that describes oral sex on a man.)” It was my job to soften this sarcastic human up enough to write what we wanted. I told him stories about here and there and Christmas with my family in the hills of eastern PA. We mixed and matched and once he got the idea, he wrote the song in a couple of days.

He’d call me like a kid at Christmas to unwrap his new lyrics.

The band was changing labels when we recorded it with Emylou Harris. It turned out to be our stepping stone to Warner Brothers, where we had our biggest success. But, not knowing what to do with the holiday single, we gave it to Children’s Hospital of Denver in a package that included our friends in Nashville. Once the 15,000 LPs were sold, they never printed any more. So, for 10 years, you had to be listening to one of the radio stations that we serviced with the song.

Years later, in order to get control of A Colorado Christmas, we re-recorded it with Alyson Krause. She sang and fiddled and sang a solo on NGDB’s Christmas Album. We filled it up with finger picked traditional songs and a few new originals. It’s out of print, too.

Just thought you’d like to know.