A Few Holiday Tunes: The Little Drummer Boy

This was my mom’s favorite Christmas song. It always brought a few tears to her eyes.

The Christmas after my father’s death, we traveled to Rhode Island to be with my mom’s family for the holidays.

On Christmas Eve, we went and had dinner at the inn at Sturbridge Village, a tourist attraction in Sturbridge, MA. It’s a magnificent mock-up of what an early 1600’s village looked like in that area: smithy, cooper, meetinghouse.

There was also an Inn. I think there were hotel rooms. There was, however, a restaurant that had a feel of the time.

The night we went, they had a man and woman in period costume going around from table to table singing carols (they took requests).

When they got to our table, my mother requested “The Little Drummer Boy”. The song came from a man playing a guitar-like instrument and the woman’s voice. That was it. No big orchestration — only a string instrument and a beautiful contralto voice.

It was a magical few minutes.

I couldn’t tell you when my mom’s tears started flowing. It was no more than a minute into the song.

By the end of the song, she was bawling. Not polite weeping. She was ugly crying. Not only because of the song. but also the performance. A string instrument and a voice (no percussion in a song whose theme is about percussion). It was perfection.

Even I had tears.

It was the most beautiful version I’d heard. Even 40 years later, I can still feel the emotion of the song, even if I can’t hear the instrument and voice.

Many years later, driving in the car, Christmas music coming from the radio, this version of the song came on. My mom, not a fan of “the modern carols”, as she called them, listened to this version on Bob Seger singing “The Little Drummer Boy” and was crying as intensely as she was that night in Sturbridge Village.

She often asked me to play it after that. It always left her in tears. Good tears, healing tears, tears that in some way gave her some extra faith

Thank you, Bob Seger for giving me a song I love and, more importantly, giving my mom a song that touched her soul.