Gold City

Christmas
Doug Riley

Finally, there’s Gold City’s new Christmas release, simply titled “Christmas.”

There’s some fine quartet singing — Christmas-style — on here, but even beyond that, it’s a truly enjoyable listening experience, whether you like quartets or not.

This recording is loaded down with many of your all-time favorite Christmas songs, with the right amount of production mixed with some super-tight vocals.

This thing is a winner from the first note to the last bar. After all, how could it not be good when it includes such songs as “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” “Noel, Noel,” “Winter Wonderland,” “I Have Seen the Light,” “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas,” “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas,” “If Every day Could Be Just Like Christ- mas,” “Let it Snow” and more?

Make sure there’s room in your CD player for this one.

Daughter of a prominent white Birmingham family, McWhorter brilliantly describes the opposite sides of this issue, exposing the strong segregationist agenda and tells the story of her family “which was on the wrong side of the Civil Rights movement.”

The other work, produced by a history professor at Samford University, focuses on the eight white moderate leaders who advanced a “peaceful” approach to this issue. As we know, they were “crucified” by both sides. One of them was Earl Stallings, pastor of Birmingham’s First Baptist Church, who was basically forced out as pastor because of his stand.

These events in the early 1960s in Alabama paint a dark picture of which we are not proud, but the story needs to be told. Both authors leave us in their debt.