One of my favorites that hasn’t been mentioned is the Ann-Margret and Al Hirt version.
I’m speechless.
Hear, hear!
I like the version by Karen Morrow and Charles Nelson Reilly on the Hollywood Christmas CD.
Interestingly enough, Charles Nelson Reilly sings what is ordinarily the woman’s part. < Insert jokes here. >
Hard to sing when you’re being hung upside down in the scorpion pit. The Patrician got that right…
I’m not sure how it got on my iPod, but the version by Royal Crown Revue is quite nice. The female part is sung by Vicky Tafoya, whoever that is, she’s good.
The shower scene version from Elf is great, too.
Holy crap, she does that predatory don’t-bother-putting-up-a-fight-I’m-going-to-have-you-eventually thing really well, doesn’t she? Nice reversal of the gender roles in that one.
Yeah - I came into post this. I didn’t realize there was any question. I gotta check out Ella and Louis Jordan, but Brother Ray and Betty are amazing…
None of them.
I hate this song.
I have to admit it’s hard to choose between Ray Charles, Dean Martin and Ella. I’d also like to throw in Buster Poindexter’s tribute to the Louis Armstrong. I like it better than the one it riffed on.
You know, I really want to like that one. I do.
Ray is awesome. No question. But Betty’s voice just sounds thin and whiny to me – it lacks a certain suppressed naughtiness that the song needs.
Second this motion.
Here’s where we disagree. I don’t think the woman is supposed to be naughty. The man is trying to corrupt her. And Brother Ray is very good at conveying that.
This is my favorite.
Maybe y’all can help me figure out who did a version of this that I used to have on a mix tape an ex made. It was off an album by a female singer (I think singer/songwriter) who I remember being known well enough, but she wasn’t massively popular in the mainstream. This was off an album she put out in the mid 90s of older cuts she’d recorded but never polished completely or released, I think. (In the liner notes, I remember her suggesting that the listener eat potato chips to cover up some of the production sounds on the recordings.)
Anyway, the version was between her and a male singer who sort of mumbled the whole thing. You could hear her trying not to laugh at certain points, since he was definitely playing it for chuckles. He sounded older, using sort of a New York Jewish radio comedian style if I remember correctly.
Anybody? Ring any bells? This is driving me nuts.
Here’s a version I just recorded at the Hagen Family Christmas Concert. And here’s a slightly higher quality version.
Wild guess: Blossom Dearie and Bob Dorough?
Of course she’s supposed to be naughty. She’s not getting up and leaving; she’s not even moving away from him; she’s not slapping his face. She’s not trying to change his mind or get away from him. She’s making up all these bogus reasons why she shouldn’t stay . . . and she’s making sure she sticks with the bogus reasons, because she really wants to stay as much as he wants her to. But she has to be “lady-like” and at least give the impression of resisting. If she really wanted to leave, she would have.
This appears to be the version on the radio. I could never get into this song, there’s only a handful of Christmas songs I actively don’t like and this is one of them. It always just seems so, sloppy.
(The other songs are the Muppet version of 12 Days of Christmas but that’s just because from my office all I can here is Miss Piggy saying “5 golden rings” every three seconds and the Hippopotamus song, which, oddly, I didn’t hear once this year.)
Thanks, but I don’t think so. This was a younger singer than that. In her late 30s/early 40s at the end of the 90s?