All I Want for Christmas is You

This song illustrates how weird memories can be. I recall playing this song for years on radio, and just took it for granted that it was a one-hit wonder from the 1960s that was in rotation with all the other Christmas music. That was years before YouTube, and I didn't have cable TV. But I finally saw the video recently, and it looks very 1980s. I looked up "All I Want for Christmas is You" at Wikipedia and found out it was recorded in 1989! Didn't I play it at Christmas in the early 1980s? I guess not. I was also surprised to see that the singer is a woman. I guess I assumed it was a guy singing falsetto because of the band name. Another thing that surprised me was that it is considered to be a country song. Really? Sure, I was mostly on country radio from 1993 on, but this song sounds like a do-wop to me.

But the real kicker is that Mariah Carey's song of the same name came out in 1994, and I didn't pay much attention to it. We didn't play it on country radio because Mariah Carey is not a country artist. I assumed at the time that it was a remake of the Vince Vance & the Valiants song! In fact, it was only a couple of years ago that I found out they are indeed different songs, and that Carey's is an original. But knowledge is like that. When you reach a certain age, you have to pick and choose what's important to learn and remember and what's not, because you don't have the bandwidth to fit it all in.