‘This Christmas’ song enshrined as ‘black Christmas anthem’

In the game of “Christmas music trivia,” can you make the Chicago connection between singer-songwriter Donny Hathaway and lyricist Nadine McKinnor? 

The duo collaborated in 1970 to create the tune “This Christmas.”

 

The song is remembered as the first “black-authored, ‘for us, by us’ production – a celebration not just of a season but of a people,” according to Dr. Emily Lordi, an English professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., who wrote the book “Donny Hathaway Live” (2016).

 

Music producer Ric Powell, who first teamed up with Hathaway when they were students in the early 1960s at Howard University in Washington, D.C., said: “Donny wanted ‘This Christmas’ to be the first pointedly black Christmas song – a perpetual black standard.” 

Hathaway was a rising star in the music industry in 1970, earning good money at Curtis Mayfield’s recording studio in Chicago – serving as in-house producer/arranger/composer/songwriter/musician/vocalist. 

But, Nadine McKinnor, a fellow Chicagoan, had never heard of Donny Hathaway. She was working for the U.S. Postal Service. “Nadine kept a spiral notebook; she would jot down potential song lyrics as they came to her,” wrote Christopher Borrelli of the Chicago Tribune. 

“‘This Christmas’ was written during the Great Blizzard of 1967,” he said. “Nadine McKinnor, with Nat King Cole on the brain, was singing to herself and her co-workers to pass the time, while sorting the mail.” 

A friend arranged a meeting for McKinnor to sing songs from her notebook to Hathaway. “I sang him maybe five songs; it was ‘This Christmas’ that caught Hathaway’s ear,” McKinnor said. “I tore the page out to give him, and I never got it back.” 

“Watching Donny work was like watching a designer,” McKinnor told Dr. Lordi. Instead of weaving threads and colors, though, he wove sounds and chord changes. “He put the magic in it.” 

McKinnor once told Jet magazine that she felt “blessed to have written lyrics that celebrate the possibilities, the expectations and the anticipation of Christmas and the good fun and happy loving times. The creation of the song was God’s plan.” 

Dr. Lordi commented: “The song, like an intricate snow globe, suspends several musical elements in a dreamy display of Hathaway’s gifts – at its center is a barrelhouse acoustic piano solo christened by elegant strings.” 

McKinnor added: “It’s gospel, it’s country, it’s blues. It’s everything good, in a Christmas stew. Donny’s Christmas stew. My favorite part is that thumping bass drum. That’s not reindeer! That’s not even reindeer with boots on. Your roof is gonna cave in with those up there. African drumming is what that is.” 

Hathaway enjoyed success throughout the 1970s, recording several duets with Roberta Flack, who was also a Howard classmate. Through it all, he suffered from mental illness.

 

Dr. Claudrena N. Harold, a history professor at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, said that Donny Hathaway’s body was discovered late at night on Jan. 13, 1979, below his 15th floor window at his hotel overlooking New York’s Central Park. “It appeared that Hathaway jumped or fell to his death (at age 33),” Dr. Harold said. 

In delivering the eulogy at Hathaway’s funeral, the Rev. Jesse Jackson remarked that “geniuses die young but…their impact penetrates, goes deeper.”

 

McKinnor spoke for millions of music lovers when she said: “I am eternally grateful because Donny gave ‘This Christmas’ eternal life. People are still singing it in schools, in churches, in different languages. It keeps going and going. There’s a lot of Energizer Bunny in it.”

“This Christmas” has been covered by numerous artists across diverse musical genres. The version recorded by Christina Aguilera is riveting.

Christopher Borrelli said: “The John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John cover of ‘This Christmas’ brings tears.”