Seems like a natural day for square dancers to celebrate, since we solve puzzles in real-time all the time. Maybe this woud be a good day to have a “MS with a challenge attitude” tip to do a little focus on puzzle-solving at the Mainstream level.

Ray Stevens is a C&W comedy singer.

The only Ray Stevens’ song I know that’s been turned into a singing call is “The Mississippi Squirrel Revival”.

Doug Kershaw is a Cajun singer and fiddler.

There’s a singing call version of “Louisiana Man”, an autobiographical song about Doug Kershaw. You could also do other Cajun songs: Jambalaya, Colinda, Louisiana Saturday Night, and Toot Toot (all of which Doug covers on his most recent album)

Relevant Records

• Louisiana Man (Royal 214)
• Jambalaya (Global 308)

Neil Diamond is a pop singer and songwriter.

There are probably several Neil Diamond songs published as singing calls, but the only one I know for sure is “Beautiful Noise”.

Relevant Records

• Beautiful Noise (Cross Country 509)

Can’t think of any real square dance relevance, but as a long-time Mac cult…I mean user, I can’t let the day go by without noting it.

January is:

• National Hot Tea Month
• National Soup Month
• National Wheat Bread Month
• National Egg Month
• National Candy Month
• National Oatmeal Month
• National Prune Breakfast Month
• National Prune the Fat Month
• January Diet Month

Looks like we’ll need Prune the Fat month after celebrating National Candy Month…

For Candy Month, there are the songs “Lollipop”, and “Ice Cream Sodas and Lollipops”, and “Candy” (a patter record on Red Boot).

For Egg Month, you could do Sausage and Egg formations.

For Meat Month, there’s “Burgers and Fries”.

Relevant Records

• Lollipop (Silver Sounds 149)
• Burgers and Fries (Diamond Records 4000)
• Ice Cream Sodas and Lollipops (Blue Star 2268)
• Candy (Red Boot 301A)

Chuck Berry is a major figure in old rock and roll.

Johnny B. Goode is a classic Chuck Berry tune. There might be a version of Rock and Roll Music done by Al Stevens (???…doesn’t seem his type of thing), but I can’t listen to it at the Hanhurst site, so I don’t know.

Relevant Records

• Johnny B. Goode (Red Boot 1340)

Longest night, shortest day of the year. After the solstice, the days start getting longer.

Could do songs about “light” or “sun”, since we celebrate the return of daylight.

Barry Gordon had a hit around Christmas 1955 with “Nuttin’ for Christmas”. In the 90’s, he was the voice for Donatello, one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. How’s that for a career?

How appropriate that his hit was a Christmas song that’s out as a singing call: “Nuttin’ for Christmas” on C-Bar-C.

There are a couple of singing call versions of this. I’ve heard Bill Eyler sing this as “And may all your politically-correct holidays be white…”