The Beach Boys' "Blue Christmas"

A few days ago, I listened to a Beach Boys Christmas album, and I noticed something about their version of "Blue Christmas."  At about 2:00, some brass instruments (I think French horns) quote a phrase from George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue.  I can't find a score of the Rhapsody in Blue in order to look up the notation, and the phrase is too complex for my novice notation skills, but in "Blue Christmas," the phrase is D, Eb, F, and then an F an octave lower.  In the Rhapsody in Blue, it's G#, A, B, and then a B an octave lower.  (In the recording of Rhapsody in Blue I have by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, it's at about 11:31.)  It's the same phrase, just transposed down for "Blue Christmas."  (For what it's worth, it's also the phrase that starts "Rhapsody in Blue (Reprise)" on Brian Wilson's Reimagines Gershwin album, although that's E, F, G, and then a G an octave lower).

I did some research and discovered (in the entry for 18 June 1964 in Keith Badman's The Beach Boys: The Definitive Diary of America's Greatest Band on Stage and in the Studio) that the Beach Boys' version of "Blue Christmas" was arranged by Dick Reynolds.  While Wilson didn't arrange it himself, he probably had a hand in putting in that quotation because he's acknowledged Gershwin's influence and mentioned Rhapsody in Blue in particular.  The Reimagines Gershwin album provides ample evidence.

Purely as a reference, it's also interesting because "blue" is in the title of both works (and in the lyrics of "Blue Christmas").  To some degree, quoting Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue gives more depth to "Blue Christmas."  There's the feeling of "Blue Christmas" itself, but then - because of that quotation - there's an injection of the feeling of the Rhapsody in Blue too.

I transcribed "Blue Christmas" when I listened to the album a second time, and I found something interesting about the song itself, not just the Beach Boys' version.  The lines in the first verse all have line-ending rhymes ("without you" rhymes with "about you," and "tree" rhymes with "me"), but that same structure isn't in the second verse.  The first two lines rhyme ("certain" with "hurtin'"), but not "You'll be doin' alright with your Christmas of white / But I'll have a blue, blue Christmas."  Instead of line-ending rhymes, there's internal rhyme in the third line ("alright" and "white") and no rhyme at all in the fourth line, either within the line itself or with any other line.  That surfeit of rhyme in the third line and the lack of rhyme in the fourth poetically mirror the lyrics themselves.  "You'll be doin' alright" with internal rhyme, "But I'll have a blue, blue Christmas" with no rhyme at all.

Delicious Pastries' Pretty Please

I got Delicious Pastries' album Pretty Please shortly after it came out, and even though they're not that famous of a band, that album became my favorite new album at the time.  I hadn't listened to it for a while, but I recently got back into it and noticed lots of things I'd been oblivious to.

"safe & sound"

The couplet "and I will do all those things / that I would have done unto me" seems to be a reference to the Golden Rule.  "So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets" - Matthew 7:12.

"dad"

This is where most my re-sparked interest lay, specifically in the line "you never gave us stones, we only ate bread."  I'd always thought that, following the Matthew 7 reference in "safe & sound," this was based on Matthew 7:9-10:  "Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone?  Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent?"  But then while reading Lord Byron's Don Juan, I came across a reference to Saturn:

One system eats another up, and this
Much as old Saturn ate his progeny;
For when his pious consort gave him stones
In lieu of sons, of these he made no bones (Canto 14, stanza 1, lines 5-8)

I also looked up Saturn in Edith Hamilton's Mythology.  She explains that

Cronos [the Greek name for Saturn] had learned that one of his children was destined some day to dethrone him and he thought to go against fate by swallowing them as soon as they were born.  But when Rhea [his wife] bore Zeus, her sixth child, she succeeded in having him secretly carried off to Crete, while she gave her husband a great stone wrapped in swaddling clothes which he supposed was the baby and swallowed down accordingly.

Later in "dad," there's the line "you'd have to eat the veins and arteries too," which seems more relevant to the story of Saturn than the Matthew text.  I still can't seem to make much sense of it, but running across that reference to Saturn in Don Juan has at least showed me that there's more to "dad" than I originally thought.

At the very end of the song, there's the sound of a train, which I'm fairly certain is a reference to "Caroline, No," the last track on the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, which also ends with the sound of a train.

"marian"

The book-related metaphors ("you're no open book" and "I'd dog-ear a couple of your pages") made me realize that this might be a reference to Marian Paroo, the librarian in The Music Man.  The names are spelt the same, and there are those book references.