Well, I hope you’re not sick of hearing about the late John McLaughlin Higgins, because I’m going to keep talking about him. He was important to me and important to this blog.
Mostly, he was important to me.
As I post this, it’s been exactly one week since I heard that he had died. Every day there’s something I want to discuss with him.
We disagreed on much. We were in synch often.
As Johnny Cash put it:
Well, you ask me if I’ll forget my baby.
I guess I will, someday.
I don’t like it, but I guess things happen that way.
You ask me if I’ll get along.
I guess I will, someway.
I don’t like it, but I guess things happen that way.
If you were here last year, you know that I posted 44 Christmas songs in 27 days, plus Hannukah tunes and ones for New Year’s. I won’t be going that hard this year, but I will be dedicating this year’s effort to Higgins.
I take some small pride in the fact that I introduced him to the hobby of collecting Christmas music. My brother David and I started the practice in the early Eighties. I think it was after John encountered our collections that he got into the act. Working in New York City, home to used CD shops and lots of great music, he quickly built a fine stash of his own. I had been making the occasional holiday mix tape, but Higgins developed a reputation for making great mix tapes and CDs during Christmas and some people depended on him for their holiday fix.
I now have his Christmas CDs in my possession. I will attempt to work strictly from them for this year’s series.
Let the merriment commence. If you are the lucky owner of one of Higgins’ mix CDs, you may consider this a poor substitute for what he might have created for this year. And if you’d never met Higgins, this series will give you a glimpse of the man.
Tags: John M. Higgins, Christmas music
2 Responses
-
The Pop View » A Vintage Holiday Mixtape Says:
[...] of the late, great John M. Higgins may be the proud possessor of one of his Christmas mixes. See this post for background, but collecting Christmas music was one of the many things we [...]
-
The Pop View » Smokey Goes Underground for the Holidays Says:
[...] background, read this post (or this one), but the short version is that I’ve been collecting holiday music for decades and at this [...]