Our Kind of Spirituals, No. 66: Jim Campilongo Trio, “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear”

In Ireland, I think, it’s customary to go to the public house on Christmas night: after a long day with family, at church and in the living room and at the dinner table, you go and stand in a noisy room of friends.

Well, if that were my custom, this Christmas night I would go to the Living Room in Williamsburg to hear Jim Campilongo – to hear him process Christmas songs like “It Came Upon A Midnight Clear” through his ‘59 Telecaster and his guitarist’s bag of tricks.

I heard Campilongo play there a couple of weeks ago – a command performance of a kind – and a little essay of mine about the experience went up the other day on The New Yorker's website.

His “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear” inks a dotted line between the dusty outskirts of Bethlehem and the highway-traversed wide-open spaces of the old, weird America. In this country, the Christ child would have been born someplace set back from a two-lane county route that the interstate turned into a backroad – in a shed with a ‘59 Oldsmobile and a John Deere tractor rusting in the front.

Here’s to your Christmas night custom, wherever your here is.