Though largely forgotten today, Mac Davis had a pretty good entertainment career from the 60s through the 90s. He started out as a songwriter, including writing such songs as "In the Ghetto" and "A Little Less Conversation" for Elvis. He would then move into recording his own music, mostly country and easy listening. While he never became a superstar, he did score a #1 hit in 1972 with "Baby, Don't Get Hooked on Me" and another top ten song in 1974 with "Stop and Smell the Roses". He dabbled in acting, most prominently in the 1979 football comedy North Dallas Forty and in the early 90s spent over two years playing the title character in the musical The Will Rogers Follies, both on Broadway and in the national tour. But, outside of music, his biggest impact was from TV. He hosted his own variety show for two seasons in the mid-70s, and after that, still hosted variety specials, including an annual Christmas special, through 1983. His 1978 entry, Christmas Odyssey 2010, sounds utterly bizarre, as he played a guy longing to celebrate Christmas in that far-off year 32 years into the future, even though the holiday had been replaced by Commerce Day. Co-starring Bernadette Peters and Ted Knight, it sounds like it could give The Star Wars Holiday Special a run for its money as the weirdest Christmas special of 1978. Alas, other than the print ad, there's nothing of this one online. So I settled for his far more conventional special from the next year.
A Christmas Special...With Love, Mac Davis was a completely standard-issue 70s variety special. Mac and his three guests sang numerous songs (very few of which had anything to do with Christmas), but outside of the intro and finale, not all together. Instead, each of his guests had one segment where Mac and them would trade off solos and duets.
His third guest was Robert Urich, at the time starring in Vega$. Urich was known for starring on a large number of shows, mostly action-oriented, and was definitely not known for his singing voice. However, he has a pretty good one, which he was able to put to professional use about twenty years after this, when he played Billy Flynn in Chicago, both on Broadway and on tour a couple of years before his untimely death from cancer in 2002. However, as surprising as Urich's voice is, he still pales in comparison with Davis's other two guests, arguably the biggest names in country music at the time and still legendary superstars today: Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton.
At the time, Rogers was having the most mainstream success, having scored big crossover hits earlier that year with "She Believes in Me", "You Decorated My Life" and "Coward of the County". He would get his first Billboard #1 in 1980 with "Lady". Parton had had only one real crossover hit at the time, 1977's "Here You Come Again", but she would explode intot he mainstream a year later, thanks to her co-starring role in the smash hit comedy 9 to 5, and its title song, which would get her an Oscar nomination and be her first Billboard #1. The two, however, would spend very little time together on stage, which serves as a reminder that their big hit duet, "Islands in the Stream" is still nearly four years into the future, and their Christmas album (and Christmas special) is still five years away.
After singing a solo about how wonderful love is (while going from an empty stage to one packed with people watching him) and assuring the audience that he does indeed believe in Christmas, music, and love, he introduces Rogers, Parton, and Urich, who all briefly pontificate on the nature of love and sing a few bars of songs about love. Just in case you haven't caught onto the theme yet, we then see the first of a series of filmed segments in which Davis visited an elementary school and asks kids questions about love.
The first segment was with Rogers, where the two bantered about disastrous Christmas gifts before rather randomly launching into a medley of Sam Cooke and Buddy Holly hits. Rogers then sings a solo of the Davis-written "Kids" while sitting on a spinning set being swooped past an audience of kids (this is the first actual Christmas song of the Christmas special).
After another brief segment with Davis and a couple of kids from that elementary school, it's Parton's turn, and she sings a solo of "To Daddy", a song she wrote but which had been a big country hit for Emmylou Harris. She then does her bantering with Davis, before they launch into another melody, this time of 70s hits.
Davis gets another solo, this time his mawkish 1970 hit "Whoever Finds This, I Love You", before it's Urich's time to banter with him. This leads to the most surprising aspect of the special--that Urich sings Slovak Christmas carols--in Slovakian. Urich's segment is, understandably the shortest, but still, as one of the only parts of the Christmas special that included Christmas music, I wish it had gone a bit longer.
After one final segment at the school, it's time to wrap up the special, whose final number starts oddly with Davis hand-jiving with a kid, before the two of them go trotting around the huge, huge set, singing a gospel song and picking up Rogers, Parton, Urich, and various backup singers along the way, before everyone ends up in the audience (which, like Rogers's solo earlier, is on a spinning platform) as the credits roll.
Speaking of that set, there appear to be at least four different stages, all of which seem to consist of levels and platforms and stairs and bridges that can rise up and come down. I have no idea why the sets had to be so elaborate, but there it is. Maybe NBC had some extra money they had to spend before the end of the year.
Despite the relative lack of Christmas in this Christmas special (not exactly unusual in this era), NBC aired this on Christmas Eve. At the time, the night wasn't yet a dead zone, as all three networks ran new episodes of their normal lineups all through the night. Indeed, ABC and CBS counterprogrammed this with new episodes of Family and Lou Grant, respectively.
I'm not sure exactly how I feel about A Christmas Special...With Love, Mac Davis. Like most Christmas specials that spend big chunks of time ignoring the holiday, I wonder if a melody of "Bridge Over Troubled Water", "Your Song", and "Then Came You" (among others) was truly the best use of Davis's and Parton's time. And for modern audiences who would probably rather see Parton and Rogers duet with each other instead of Mac Davis, it can be a bit frustrating. Still, other than the segments at the school, this largely remains high tempo and fun. If you're looking for a sampler as to what country music was like at the end of the 70s, this might be good way to catch up.
Next time: Prior to winning an Oscar, this nepo baby starred in a televised Christmas panto
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