All throughout my life I have always been very fortunate to be home with the ones I love on Christmas Day. I am blessed. I have never had to report for duty on December 25th because I was a police officer or someone who works in a hospital or a soldier on duty in a foreign land. I have never been sick and in need of medical care on Christmas day. Nor have I ever been stuck in an airport or train station due to a storm while trying to come home for the holidays. I have always spent the day right where I was supposed to, with those I was supposed to be with. I am truly lucky, indeed.
Jose Feliciano is a musician who has enjoyed a career that has spanned over sixty years as I write these words. He was born in Puerto Rico in 1945. Blind from birth, Feliciano was always drawn to the world of sound and quickly showed an affinity for playing music. Initially he played percussion-style instruments and kept the beat as he listened to relatives playing live or from his parents collection of Spanish-influenced records. At the age of five, Feliciano and his family moved to the Spanish Harlem region of New York City where he spent the rest of his childhood. By the age of nine, Feliciano learned how to play the accordion. As a young teenager, he was given an acoustic guitar. He attended the Lighthouse School for the Blind in NYC where he received guitar lessons from a man named Harold Morris. His education at the hands of Morris had a profound influence on Feliciano’s life because Morris, in turn, had been taught by a man named Andres Segovia. Segovia is someone worthy of his own post but for now, it will have to be enough to state that he was one of the most influential guitarists in the world. Andres Segovia performed through the 1900s and is credited with transforming how the world viewed acoustic guitar playing. Segovia wrote symphonies and concertos featuring his guitar. He reinterpreted the works of Debussy and Bach for guitar. He also worked tirelessly to preserve the Spanish art of flamenco music and is generally regarded as a virtuoso performer and composer of Spanish music who helped popularize it around the world. Segovia was also a master teacher. The Segovian style of teaching guitar is regarded as one of the most thorough and artistic in the world. So it was that at one time, Andres Segovia taught his techniques to a young musician named Harold Morris who, in turn, passed them on down to a talented blind teenage boy named Jose Feliciano.
If you were to ask random people on the street to name any song at all by Jose Feliciano, it would probably be the Christmas classic “Feliz Navidad”. While “Feliz Navidad” is certainly a huge hit that is known and sung by millions of people around the world, to say that this song is all that there is to know about Jose Feliciano or that he is a one-hit wonder because of it, is to do the man a disservice. Jose Feliciano is so much more talented and accomplished than this one simple holiday tune would lead you to believe. In much the same way that Andres Segovia can be said to be responsible for popularizing the use of guitars as a serious musical instrument and of promoting flamenco music as a elegant, passion-fuelled genre of music, Jose Feliciano can be said to be one of the first and most important performers to bring Spanish-style music into the mainstream of North American culture. Feliciano, with his distinct Segovian style of playing, gained notoriety in the coffee house circuit in Greenwich Village in NYC at the same time that Bob Dylan was there. In fact, there is much to link the two performers together such as Feliciano making a star turn at the same Newport Folk Festival that saw Dylan famously/infamously “go electric”, much to the chagrin of the purists in attendance. It takes courage to be different. It takes a very resolute disposition to do what Bob Dylan did that day, which was to defy expectation and introduce something completely unheard of while on a big stage with the eyes of the music world upon you. On that same stage that same day, Jose Feliciano played some folk tunes, intermingled with some Spanish flamenco-inspired music and generally impressed the audience in attendance. But what impressed Feliciano that day was the courage and talent of Bob Dylan. Today we regard Bob Dylan as someone worthy of the highest accolades that music lovers can bestow upon him but, it is instructive to know that for years afterward, Dylan was met with hostility and heaped upon with scorn for daring to be audacious in a music genre that was happily carved into stone. To people like Jose Feliciano, watching Bob Dylan turn the world of folk music upside down with a single performance decision was a life-altering moment *(I desperately want to use the word “electrifying” here but, you know….).
By the time 1968 came around, Jose Feliciano had released several highly acclaimed albums. He was gaining a reputation for his excellent guitar playing, as well as his ability to introduce Spanish speaking songs to American audiences in ways that seemed natural to all involved. He was definitely a rising star in the American music scene when he became involved in his own Dylanesque moment that haunted him for years, too. Feliciano had become acquainted with a man named Ernie Harwell who was well known as a broadcaster and home announcer for the Detroit Tigers baseball team. Harwell’s Tigers were set to face the St. Louis Cardinals in the 1968 World Series Championship. The first game of the series was scheduled to take place in Detroit. Harwell pulled some strings and arranged for Jose Feliciano to sing the national anthem at the start of the game. The eyes of the sporting world were on Feliciano as he was introduced by Harwell over the stadium speakers. Feliciano confidently launched into one of the most beautiful reinterpretations I have ever heard of “The Star Spangled Banner”. He played and sang without accompaniment and managed to totally change the pacing and rhythms of the anthem in a way that made it sound more like a song than an anthem. He ended to a smattering of applause. At the same time, a wave of indignation swept over the nation. How dare someone think they could change something as historically American as “The Star Spangled Banner”?! Americans were outraged….at least the loud vexatious ones were. Jose Feliciano had managed a truly difficult feat which was to totally take an established piece of music and make it seem fresh and original and completely his own. But yet, just like Bob Dylan, Feliciano’s career was beset with anger and hostility and, as a result, he was forced to lay low for the next couple of years that followed.
This brings us to 1970. In an effort to reinvent himself as a musician, Feliciano was convinced that recording a Christmas album would be a novel, harmless way to go. So he traveled to Chicago and began work recording some traditional tunes, along with some Spanish songs of the season. While the recording process unfolded, the suggestion was made that perhaps Feliciano should try his hand at writing an original song that could be included on the album. At the time, the anger over his singing of the national anthem had not yet subsided. Feliciano was feeling like an outsider in a world that he had always had to work hard at in order to fit in. It was because of this mindset that he turned to the comforting thoughts of what it was like to be surrounded by those who shared his Puerto Rican culture. He reminded himself of the food and the family gatherings of his early childhood before he moved to New York City. Most of all, he longed for that welcoming sense of the familiar. He missed his family. He missed being wrapped in his cultural heritage. In essence, he missed his personal version of being home. So, he decided to jot down his feelings in the form of simple song lyrics just to get himself started. As he began rehearsing the nineteen words that make up “Feliz Navidad”, he did so with much passion and longing in his heart. The emotions he was able to convey by simply repeating the same two short verses over and over again were felt by everybody in the studio that day. They convinced him that no more modifications were necessary. Feliciano simply recorded his two simple verses on repeat and the song “Feliz Navidad” was born.
In the more than half a century since “Feliz Navidad” was first recorded and released, it has gone on to become one of the top ten most successful Christmas songs of all time. It is also one of the most successful multi-lingual songs of all time, too, switching back and forth between Spanish and English as it so effortlessly does. “Feliz Navidad”, which means “Merry Christmas” in Spanish, is so ingrained in our holiday traditions that many children today don’t even realize that they are singing in Spanish when they sing this song at concerts and during carol sings at school each December.
“Feliz Navidad” is easily one of the simplest, most basic songs ever to make it to the top of the charts. That it did speaks to the power of the passion that comes from the heart and how it can change the way words come across to others. Using his voice and his guitar stylings, Jose Feliciano was able to bridge cultures between the Spanish and English speaking worlds. His simple yet profoundly sincere wish in differing languages for peace on earth and the best of the holidays for everyone is something that is almost universal in nature. We all want to be loved and to be living in harmony with the world in which we find ourselves. It is important to be home and to experience all that being home entails. But, as Bob Dylan proved and Jose Feliciano reaffirmed four years later, it is also important to have the courage of your own convictions and to follow your own path in life regardless of how many feathers might become ruffled along the way. It is my contention that neither man set out to court outrage on purpose. Instead, I believe that they both saw the need to expand the parameters of their craft for their own sake, as well as the sake of the craft itself. Both men did so, to much abuse and criticism at the time but, as we know, history has been kind to them in the end. It just goes to prove that sometimes in life the comfort and safety of home is precisely what is not required in order for progress to be measured.
With that in mind, I dedicate this post to all those who are willingly away from their homes on Christmas day so that others can be warm and safe in theirs. Growing up, my mother was a registered nurse at our local hospital. I keenly remember the discussions that used to take place around our dinner table as to whether or not she would get to be home with us on Christmas day or whether she would have to go to work. As a child at the time, I remember listening with bated breath to my mother and father talking about this. Every child wants to spend Christmas with their mother at home. What ended up happening was, according to my mother, the nurses came to an agreement among themselves that saw those with families get Christmas Day off and nurses who were unmarried would get to have New Years Eve and New Years Day off. I can’t say how happy everyone was with that arrangement but, to my young ears, the news that my mother would be home with us on Christmas morning was especially welcome. Many of my most cherished childhood holiday memories revolve around the sights, sounds and smells that my mother provided for my sister and for me. She would not have been there if not for the selflessness of others who went to work in her place so she and the other mothers could be at home with their families.
I was only six years old when “Feliz Navidad” was first released but I can distinctly remember it being played in our home in the years that followed. It may be a simple song in structure but its message is timeless and profound.
Muchas gracias Sr. Feliciano por recordarnos la calidez de las fiestas y el coraje de ser nosotros mismos en cualquier otro momento del año.
Thank you very much Mr. Feliciano for reminding us about the warmth of the holidays and the courage to be ourselves at all other times throughout the year.
The link to the video for the song “Feliz Navidad” by Jose Feliciano can be found here. ***The lyrics version is here.
The link to the official website for Jose Feliciano can be found here.
The link to the video for Jose Feliciano’s rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” from the 1968 World Series opener between the Detroit Tigers and the St. Louis Cardinals can be found here. For my money, I think it is simply a lovely version of the traditional anthem. Well done.
The link to the official website for Andres Segovia can be found here.
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