Musical Giftstravaganza Day 16. Today's song is Mary's Boy Child/Oh My Lord, by Boney M. →[More:]This song came out in 1978, and while it only reached 85 on the U.S. charts, the people who listened to my local radio station in Virginia (WRVA, now unhappily given over to endless news and dreadful talk radio) went absolutely crazy for it. The station could not play it often enough, and eventually they took to announcing things like, "Hey, we'll be playing Mary's Boy Child again just after 3:00, so please stop calling."

They apparently had a lot of promotional 45s of the song, because they began giving them away as prizes in their WRVA Funline call-in contests (usually you had to answer a trivia question or be a certain number caller to win). I tried and tried and tried to win a record, because I (age 14) was just as nuts about this song as everybody else, but I never got through -- curse you rotary phone!! I was reduced to getting the song off the radio with my tape recorder, microphone held close to the speaker.

Three years later I met one of my lifelong best friends, and it turned out she'd won a copy, and gave it to me. I still have it. I wanted to make an MP3 of that specific record, but my USB turntable doesn't seem to like 45s. So, here's a boughten copy from Amazon.

Listening now, I don't really quite understand the frenzy -- it's catchy, sure, and has lovely harmonies, but I can't quite recapture that old feeling of bliss when I used to hear it on WRVA. Sometimes in these Internet times I miss the days when things were rare or hard to get.