North Carolina Rabbit Hole

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Let's create a North Carolina Christmas song, one line at a time

www.ncrabbithole.com

Let's create a North Carolina Christmas song, one line at a time

Jeremy Markovich
Dec 13, 2022
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Let's create a North Carolina Christmas song, one line at a time

www.ncrabbithole.com
Singer John Loudermilk with North Carolina governor Luther Hodges, sometime in the 1950s.

Here is the opening verse of Kenny Rogers’s “Kentucky Homemade Christmas”:

They shut down the mine last summer. We're gettin' by on welfare
It's Christmas Eve, I'm walkin' home, not a dollar to my name
Night is almost on me. A night I'm almost dreading
No store bought gifts to open, but there'll be Christmas just the same

Folks, Christmas songs set in Kentucky are bleak. Phil Ochs’s “Christmas in Kentucky” coldly notes that “jingle bells don't jingle when you're poor,” and Kinsey Rose’s “Blue Kentucky Christmas” notes that “Mama’s burning biscuits, grandma’s drunk again.”

Yes, I know we’re not Kentucky. Yes, I know this state has a rich musical tradition, along with several artists like Charlie Daniels, the Marshall Tucker Band, and Squirrel Nut Zippers that have written songs specifically about Christmas in North Carolina. Still though, we don’t have a holiday song that evokes as much raw emotion as a tune written about a Kentucky coal mining family.

So, let’s write one.

Here’s how (I hope) this will work: In the comments below, please write one single line that you think should be in a song about North Carolina. Then the next person will come along and write the next line, and so on. Will this work? Will this devolve into complete crowdsourced chaos? Yes? No? In any event, let’s see if the hivemind can write us a Christmas song.

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