Do you?

When I want to hear music when I'm on the computer, and none of the 2,381 songs on my iTunes is getting it done, I go to iTunes Radio and flip around.  There's a channel for most every artist you could name...Sammy Davis, Jr. Radio, Perry Como Radio, Bing Crosby radio, and so forth.  They also have stations for people who have been popular in the current century, but I don't care for them.

Bing

But while I was listening to Bing Crosby Radio the other day, here just after Memorial Day in the merry, merry month of May, they started playing Christmas songs!  It sounds incongruous, but then when they played my favorite holiday song ever by der Bingle, it gave me hope, and these days, you can't get enough of that.

The song is "Do You Hear What I Hear?" and it wasn't really written as a Christmas song at all, although it was first made a hit by the Harry Simeone Chorale, the people who made that "Little Drummer Boy" a holiday evergreen.  Back in October, 1962, at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the world was playing a dangerous game with its new nuclear weapons, and we came awfully close to an awful close, as America and Russia bickered over Russian missile sites aimed at us from 90 miles away in Cuba. That's when the song was written. For those who only know of the missile crisis from history books, let me assure you, it was a terrifically scary time, wondering if the world was about to blow itself up.   

Noël Regney wrote the words to the song, with music by his wife, Gloria Shayne Baker.  Regney had set out to write a Christmas song on an autumn day, but events in Washington and Moscow made him, along with millions of others, wonder if there would be a December that year, so he expressed his feelings in words and his wife's music: 

Said the king to the people everywhere

Listen to what I say

Pray for peace people everywhere

Listen to what I say

The child, the child

Sleeping in the night

He will bring us goodness and light

He will bring us goodness and light

Riots and disharmony all across the country. Texas wants to secede from the nation, and claims that the Federal government is set to storm in and take their state away, and then a storm storms in and takes a large portion of the state, and the state begs the Federal government for help.  ISIL and other enemies proliferate, and as if we don't have enough external enemies, we have our own homegrown hate, and drugs, and tormented souls running around.

So I say, May is not a bad time to hear this song, and whether you are Christian or Jewish or Muslim or whatever, or atheist or agnostic or whatever you are or are not, if you have an interest in being around for a while longer, can you at least hope for someone to bring us goodness and light?