Editorial Review:

Amazon.com:
American Folk Songs for Christmas amounts to an extraordinary and large collection of unvarnished American folk songs sung and played by the Seeger family with help from British friends and folksinger-playwright Ewan MacColl and daughter Kitty. Unassuming and full of old-fashioned good times, this CD's simple pleasures are derived from gospel music and lost carols, mountain hymns, a sprinkling of popular standards, spirituals, and such "earthy" instruments as the concertina, fiddle, piano, dulcimer, banjo, jaw harp, whistle and plain-singing human voices and joyous handclaps. The disc's panoramic look into Christmas from another time and place is just right for those caught up in today's "simplicity" movement where less is definitely more--or for anyone wanting to get out from under the oppressive weight of so much commercialized product. Recommended. --Martin Keller

Rating: - My favorite Christmas recording -- ever.
In the 1940s composer/folklorist Ruth Crawford Seeger assembled a collection of traditional American Christmas songs from Library of Congress field recordings, old manuscripts and WPA collections into a landmark book, "American Folk Songs for Christmas". There weren't the carols you hear in the shopping mall, but the songs found deep in Anglo- and African-American traditions, and they were wondrous. In the 1980s Seeger's children, Mike, Peggy and Penny Seeger, all accomplished performers of traditional ... Read More

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Rating: - As traditional as you get these days
Ruth Crawford Seeger was a folk music fanatic who compiled a series of books, one of which was devoted to Christmas songs. It is from that book that the album title and all but two of the tracks are taken (the liner notes do not say which two), although some of the tracks are not performed exactly as Ruth described.

Three of Ruth's children (Mike, Peggy and Penny Seeger), four of her grandchildren (Sonya Cohen, Calum MacColl, Kitty MacColl and Kim Seeger) and Ewan MacColl, father of Calum and ... Read More

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Rating: - The best of American folk songs for Christmas
This album contains 53 American folk songs for Christmas from Ruth Crawford Seeger's work as performed by her children Mike, Penny and Penny Seeger and their families. (Yes, these are half siblings to Pete Seeger). The children have taken liberties in the sense of not trying to recreate traditional performances or replicate the piano version of their mother on other instruments. However, all of them are primarily folk musicians so the album is definately "folk".

Instrumentation varies - piano, ... Read More