The Abominable “O Holy Night”: Revealed

When we finished, Kevin and I played it back so he could make a cassette copy of it for me. We had DAT machines at that point, but I wasn’t thinking of making this a master tape, so cassette was fine. I took it home and played it for my wife Deborah, and she was not all that amused. I played it for Landy and Joy (the music directors at CC) and they politely laughed but were not rolling in the floor. I stuck the tape in a box with other keepsake tapes from my career.

JG: Do you think your wife’s reaction, and the reaction of the music directors at CC, have something to do with the fact you butchered such a beautiful, almost sacred, song?

SM: I think it’s the fact they all knew it was me that made it less funny. The same reaction may come from the general public when they find out the true story. Will it still be funny if they know it is a studio professional singing? I don’t know. My wife specifically thinks it is a shame that the most famous recording I am on is something showing off my worse feature, my voice. Out of the thousands of records I have made, this fluke is the most widely heard thing I have done and that ticks her off a little.

JG: How’d you find out the recording got out?

SM: I received a phone call from my brother who is also a producer/arranger in Nashville. My brother Russell asked, “Have you ever sang ‘O Holy Night’ and really screwed it up?” My reply was, “Yes I have, how did you know that?” He said, “Somebody just e-mailed me a copy of O Holy Night with what I immediately recognized as you singing.”

I explained to him it was impossible for somebody to e-mail me singing “O Holy Night” because I had the only copy on a cassette tape. In 1990, the general recording population was still on analog tape, and the “O Holy Night” project was recorded on 2” tape and had never made it to the digital world. His reply was, “Well it’s you, I’ll send it to you.”

When I downloaded the song, it was indeed me singing. So I conferred to my brother as to who sent the song to him and he told me it was one of his engineer friends and that he had heard several other people talking about hearing the song. This is a common occurrence in the recording world. We get a copy of somebody screwing up or misspeaking or being a jerk reading jingle copy and we pass them around.

So my brother and I decided not to tell anybody it was me singing but to always ask, “Who is this singing and what is the circumstance.” The stories were never the same and they grew and grew with each subsequent e-mail.

JG: What’s the best story you’ve heard?

SM: My personal two favorites were: “This is the audition demo for a college student trying to get a scholarship to a university, and he really thinks he is good.” My top pick is “This is a guy from East Tennessee who mortgaged his house and made this record thinking it would be a big hit because he needed to use the money to pay for his mother’s cancer surgery.” NONE OF THESE STORIES ARE TRUE. There is not even a seed of truth to anything I have read online.

JG: So if you had the only copy, how did this get out?

SM: All we can figure out is this: the original company that released the CC record went out of business and sold everything to another company, who later was purchased by a big, worldwide secular company. It is standard procedure for the master tapes purchased by such companies to be archived onto whatever the most recent format is of the day. I would guess some low dollar engineer was transferring the 2” analog tapes into some form of digital media such as ADAT or Digital 32 track before committing the masters to the storage vault and found my special performance. I have tried to trace the recording backward and no one can seem to find the master tapes or where the master 2” analog tape is. It is a dead end. I can only guess as to how it reached digital domain and who sent it out over the Internet, I know it wasn’t me and I was as shocked as anybody to hear my voice over the radio.

JG: Have you made any money from this recording?

SM: Not a dime! There has never been product such as CDs or cassettes with this version of the song on it. It was studio guys having fun, never meant for public release. I have been to ASCAP to see if we could collect from radio play, but there are two problems. First of all, radio stations do not log funny stuff that they play, especially at Christmas. If they don’t log the play then there is no revenue from it. Secondly, even if ASCAP tried to follow up and collect from airplay, Public Domain songs only get 1/10 of normal royalties, so they say it is not worthwhile to fool with it. If everybody that has down loaded this song sent me $.50 I would be able to pay off my house, pay my kid’s college bills in cash, but I’m not going to hold my breath until that happens! I don’t think I can sell something on iTunes that is so readily available for free download unless I use my tracks to clean it up a bit.

JG: And cleaning it up would be such a shame. So why now? Why come forward and claim responsibility?