Ken Tucker

This jaunty Nashville-based string band has a clever original song called December 26th.

Whether you're anxiously awaiting Christmas or already wishing the holidays would be over, here's a lot of music that lets you know you're not alone.

Runnin' and searchin', fallin' fine

I

Valerie June deserves a much bigger audience.

Fifty years on, Patti Smith's Horses still sounds like nothing else before or since its arrival in 1975.

At the time, Smith had one foot in poetry, the other in rock and roll.

Her spirit animals were the French surrealist Arthur Rimbaud and the Doors demigod Jim Morrison.

both bad boys who died young, they inspired Patty as self-mythologizing, rebellious innovators.

But they also served as warning lessons in the self-control and discipline necessary to be a long-lasting, prolific artist, which the 78-year-old Smith has indeed become.

Consider, however, what it was like to see for the first time the 28-year-old Smith as she struck an androgynous pose in a white shirt and black tie cover photo by pal Robert Mapplethorpe.

and consider what it must have been like to first hear her tremulous croon on a song like Free Money.

Music critics write about 1970s downtown Manhattan Patti Smith performing at CBGB's at Max's Kansas City, but they ignore or aren't aware of the true crucible of her talent, St.

Mark's in the Bowery, the Lower East Side Church, and Ground Zero for the New York School of Poetry.

This was the site of open readings, where Patti could rub shoulders with key influences like Allen Ginsberg, John Giorno, and Ann Waldman.

Patti's print poetry was flatly derivative, but Smith's creative breakthrough came in collaboration with guitarist Lenny Kay.

Together, they set her poems to music, with Lenny plugging in to accompany her words at readings.

Very quickly, they were welding electric guitar to epic creations, as in this nine-minutes-plus opus combining one of her poems with a cover of Chris Kenner's Land of a Thousand Dances.

It's the song that gave the album its name.

Patty quickly went full-on rock star, getting signed to Clive Davis' then-new Arista Records alongside unlikely label mates such as Barry Manilow and Lou Rawls.