Country music has a long, chequered history with the world of Christmas. Some of country music's biggest stars (Tex Ritter, Red Foley, Eddy Arnold) recorded Christmas songs in the 1940's, and Gene Autry waxed some of the earliest, best, and biggest Christmas hits of any genre. But, country music's treatment of the holiday has often since proved cursory in the extreme. Nashville's best and brightest would be parked in front of the Mitch Miller Orchestra to genuflect through a few hoary old holiday chestnuts. After posing for a cover photo with a stuffed horse, stage-prop sleigh, and fake snow, they'd punch the clock and pick up their check. In other cases (say, Loretta Lynn's 1966 album Country Christmas), the star would record a couple of topnotch original songs (like Lynn's "To Heck With Ole Santa Claus"), then fill out the album with dull, traditional covers. To make matters worse, it is inevitably the latter sort of song that is chosen to populate the dozens of "Country Christmas" compilations released every year - perpetuating the impression that Christmas in the country is tantamount to watching paint dry.

Emmylou Harris' Light Of The Stable is a bracing exception to this sad legacy. Exuding a warm Christmas glow, Light Of The Stable is a brilliant meeting of traditional mountain music and hippie country hoedown. Most great Christmas records evoke a curious combination of melancholy and joy, mirroring the odd commingling of loss and hope, dread and anticipation that the holiday often brings - particularly as we mature and accumulate psychic baggage. Harris' album captures this feeling perfectly. Younger readers should think of the music from O Brother Where Art Thou? - that's the sort of deeply traditional and heartfelt music we're talking about here, just translated into modern vernacular.

Emmylou Harris released "Light Of The Stable" as a single in 1975. It's a simple song celebrating the birth of Christ, and producer Brian Ahern gives it the perfect arrangement - simple, spare, swelling to a rousing, if restrained, finale. "Light Of The Stable," in fact, marked the coalescing of Harris' acclaimed Hot Band, including Ricky Skaggs, Emory Gordy Jr., Hank DeVito, Rodney Crowell, James Burton, Glen D. Hardin, and the Whites (plus cameos by Neil Young, Linda Ronstadt, and Dolly Parton). When Harris and Ahern recorded the rest of Light Of The Stable in 1979, they brought the same passion and sense of history to the record that Harris did to her other brilliant, influential records of the day (such as Luxury Liner and Quarter Moon in a Ten Cent Town), as well as the same cast of up-and-coming pickers that helped make those records so great.

Harris' talented crew weaves a steady, acoustic-based sound through a varied line-up of songs - originals (Crowell's "Angel Eyes"), country classics (Tex Logan's "Christmas Time's A-Coming"), and carols both traditional ("Beautiful Star of Bethlehem") and modern ("Little Drummer Boy"). The diversity of the repertoire, the consistency of Ahern's production, and Harris' indelible voice combine to make Light Of The Stable a strikingly original, instantly memorable record. All told, it is perhaps the best country Christmas album ever made - or at least the best since Gene Autry bestowed "Here Comes Santa Claus" upon us in 1947. Certainly, no one's cut a better one since (though Dwight Yoakam came close).

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