Christmas at K-Mart with Mark Davis

Mark Davis has turned the in-store music cassettes he pocketed
while working at a K-Mart in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s into
“Attention K-Mart Shoppers,” a digitized collection of that
background music at the Internet Archive (archive.org, not
archive.com as I announced on the show). 


Others have since contributed parts of the K-Mart and Kresge’s
lore, augmenting his collection with tapes and vinyl records
distributed 10 to 15 years earlier than Davis’ time with the
one-time retail giant. Oddly, where Christmas music is concerned,
it changed very little from decade to decade, and while Christmas
1990 has nods to modernity, there were still easy listening
favorites including The Living Strings and Perry Como. 


The episode deals with the enduring legacy of a formal, lightly
orchestral musical ideal and the way certain musical values were
assumed to be immutable. That’s a subject for future
conversations, but we start it here.


In this episode, I played a number of songs without identifying
them. Frequently, the artist or song is obvious, but that’s not
the case this week. You hear in order:


1. “Let It Snow” - Ferrante & Teicher 


2. “Winter Wonderland” - Frank DeVol and the Rainbow Strings


3. “The Christmas Song” - Al Hirt (from an amazing Christmas
album, The Sound of Christmas)


4. “This Christmas” - The Jets


5. “Christmas Tree” - The Glad Singers


This episode also has information on JD McPherson’s Christmas
tour this year. McPherson’s Socks is one of my favorite modern
Christmas albums, and we had a good conversation about it on the
podcast in 2019.


Finally, we ended with The Weather Girls’ “Dear Santa (Bring Me a
Man This Christmas).” The song benefits from the video
treatment.