“Holiday greetings and gay happy meetings” not quite your thing? Are your family Yuletide gatherings more Clark Griswold than Ward Cleaver? If you answered yes to both, you can probably already sing Robert Earl Keen’s “Merry Christmas From the Family” by heart. Growing up in Houston, Texas, Keen wanted to pen a holiday song that more closely resembled the humidity-drenched, 80-degree Christmases of his youth. “Merry Christmas From the Family” quickly became a much-cherished Yuletide anthem for many a blue-collar family. However, not everyone in the alt-country singer-songwriter’s own family felt the same way.
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Some of Keen’s Family “Didn’t Talk to Me For a Year” After Release
We first met this dysfunctional cast of characters on Robert Earl Keen’s 1994 album, Gringo Honeymoon. The womanizing Brother Ken, his chain-smoking new wife Kay, Fred and Rita from Harlingen—each one has a real-life counterpart.
“The names have been changed to protect the guilty, but everybody in that song knew who they were,” Keen recently told Texas Monthly. “Some of them got a big kick out of it and felt honored that I put them in a song. And some of them got really mad and didn’t talk to me for a year.”
The singer-songwriter’s mother, Juanita, fell into the latter category. “She called my Uncle Joe, who’s also made a cameo appearance in one of my songs, and said, ‘Uncle Joe, Robert has written the most horrible song that you’ve ever heard,’” Keen recalled. (To be fair, he does kick off the song with this line: Mom got drunk and Dad got drunk / At our Christmas party.)
The song’s overnight success shocked Keen, who never expected it to make the album. However, “[My producer, Garry Velletri] was laughing as hard as I was,” he said. “I said, ‘We’re not gonna use this are we?’ And he said ‘Oh, we’ve got to use it. It’s one of the best songs.’ ”
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Robert Earl Keen’s One Rule for Performing “Merry Christmas From the Family”
So absurdly high is the demand for “Merry Christmas From the Family” that its creator had to establish parameters around performing it live.
“I call it the ‘Linen Rule’, where we don’t play the song as long as you can wear linen,” Robert Earl Keen said in a 2002 interview with NPR. “So it saves it and makes it fresh for the holiday season. So we start playing it around Labor Day and we play it on through the holidays. It’s the big number particularly in December that we close with.”
Featured image by Scott Moore/Shutterstock
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