Christmas mp3 Blogging with FaLaLaLaLa.com's King of Jingaling
Starting in the mid-2000s, mp3 blogs were a way to share a musical passion and find the community that shares it. I wrote about two such mp3 bloggers who share their love of Louisiana music for 64 Parishes, and this week on the show I talk to Brad Ross-MacLeod, also known online as the King of Jingaling at FaLaLaLaLa.com.
He has shared his love of Christmas music since 2004, for much of that time digitizing old Christmas albums that were never released on CD or in digital form. For the most part, he focused on albums that come with a heavy side of nostalgia, or those where the holiday marketplace led to such improbable projects as strings or vocal groups adapted for the season to the trappings of pop music.
Ross-MacLeod's interests aren't simply retro though, as he shows in our conversation. He makes some unlikely connections and embraces a lot of music, not only the offbeat and mercenary.
In keeping with the mp3 blog mode, I also feature today a song I found on an mp3 blog on African funk from the 1970s. "A Groovy Christmas and New Years" by Ghana's Pee Pee Dynamite is awesome, and I'll let the blog that led me to him tell what story there is to know.
In the episode, I mention that there are other Christmas music mp3 blogs that I like. Since copyright holders began cracking down on mp3 blogs, I haven't visited them much in recent years and can't vouch for what you'll find there these days--a quick scan says YouTube videos have replaced the downloadable tracks in a lot of cases--but since these people's work helped me find a lot of Christmas music, I want to recognize them and share their sites in case you want to go digging too.