Album Review: Loretta Lynn’s ‘White Christmas Blue’

If you love your Christmas country style, Loretta Lynn's White Christmas Blue may very well be the album for you!

Written by Chuck Dauphin
Album Review: Loretta Lynn’s ‘White Christmas Blue’
Photo courtesy Sony Legacy

Loretta Lynn’s 1966 album Country Christmas has long been a favorite of Country fans while celebrating the holiday season. Five decades later, the singer releases her second Yuletide album, and if you love your Christmas country style, this may very well be the album for you!

The disc kicks off with the title cut, which was written by Lynn and current hitmaker Shawn Camp. It sounds like something she would have recorded back in 1966, and has that lonesome feel to it, similar to some of the Christmas music recorded by her one-time duet partner, Ernest Tubb. Speaking of “The Texas Troubadour,” she brings back his 1949 hit “Blue Christmas,” keeping the Country element firmly in place, but also acknowledging the iconic 1957 Elvis Presley version with a little bit of tempo.

Basically, for the most part, this is a fun album. There are a few tear-jerkers, but children of any age will light up to Lynn’s versions of such time-honored classics as “Jingle Bells,” “Frosty The Snowman,” and “Winter Wonderland.” If these songs don’t manage to get you in the spirit, nothing will. She also resurrects a pair of favorites from that first Christmas album from fifty years ago – the feisty “To Heck With Ole Santa Claus” and the down-home “Country Christmas.” While I have to say I still prefer the originals – I am a sentimentalist after all – the “Coal Miners’ Daughter” is in fine form throughout both tracks, just as she is on the entire album.

At the end of the album is perhaps my favorite cut, a recitation of “Twas’ The Night Before Christmas.” Loretta’s homespun personality makes this work, and conjures up images of what the holidays must have been like in Butcher Hollow circa 1945 or Hurricane Mills 1969. It’s all about the memories, and I think White Christmas Blue, with its’ simple approach, will definitely make several memories for fans this Christmas season!