The Simon Sisters Sing

Here's something that I bet wasn't on your Christmas playlist: Carly and Lucy Simon, as the Simon Sisters, singing Lucy's setting of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem "Christmas Bells."

It's from a very unusual children's album first released in 1973. This is one that I did not have growing up, but when I was a child I once heard one of the songs on it, Lucy Simon's setting of William Blake's poem "The Lamb," at a neighbor's house, and never forgot its haunting, chant-like melody (unfortunately, there's no Youtube of it, but you can listen to an excerpt on Amazon), in spite of the fact that I never heard it again and didn't know whose song it was. Then one day last year the Daedalus Books catalogue came in the mail -- I'm a hopeless addict -- and I saw the Simon Sisters' re-released CD advertised in it, with a little blurb describing some of the songs, one of which was a setting of Blake's poem. Could this be the song? I took a chance and ordered the CD, and yes, it was.

The album is outstanding. Lucy, who wrote all the music, was long overshadowed by her younger sister, but would later gain recognition as the composer of the Broadway musical The Secret Garden. Although the songs on the album are arranged for the full gamut of instruments used in 1960s pop to suggest whimsy and the fantastical -- flute, organ, glockenspiel -- the squareness of the sisters' singing has a kind of rectitude to it -- indeed, almost an austere quality, echoed in this undated performance from the "Hootenanny" television show:

Aren't they beautiful, too? Their older sister, Joanna, was also a singer, a mezzo-soprano who had a moderately big career in opera (yes, that's what most big careers in opera look like -- I had never heard of her, either).

Everything about the Simon Sisters, from their singing to their dresses to the songs themselves, evokes a more innocent time, a kind of lost paradise that cannot ever have really existed.

The Way I've Always Heard it Should Be

More from Girls Like Us:

In 1973, shortly after their wedding (the first between two rock stars), James Taylor and Carly Simon gave an interview to to Rolling Stone, in which James said of Carly that "[she's] a piece of ass . . . if she looks at another man, I'll kill her," and Carly said that she was "addicted to James."

In 1972, after waiting in vain one night for her current lover, Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell attempted suicide by taking pills, "[cutting] herself up," and throwing herself against a wall. She then repaired to a residential treatment institution (she would write the nervous "Car on a Hill" about the night she waited for Browne, and the sedated-sounding "Trouble Child" about her psychiatric treatment, both of which appeared on her great 1973 album Court and Spark).

Carole King's 1972 album, Rhymes & Reasons, includes a song,"Feeling Sad Tonight," that sums up the post-1960s emotional landscape that her generation of women -- and all subsequent ones, I would add -- have had to face: the experience of "always feeling half right and half safe." (Carole, the mother of four children from her first two marriages, would soon find herself married to an abusive, drug-addicted ex-con, who on more than one occasion "took his fist to his wife's mouth").