Once upon a time, I ran as fast as I could to get away from Holiday Muzak at the shopping mall. One of my earliest newspaper columns railed against the psychotropic effects of hearing Jingle Bell Rock twenty times a day. I risk convulsions and catatonia even now after brief exposure to that one. About a decade ago, something changed. I was searching for something. I began to hear clues in some of the schmaltziest songs. The grace notes were taking me somewhere. Every December I listened for it to come around again -- not the sight but the sound of that transcendent Star spinning in the silent night. That's how the AltXmas playlist began.

Early in the journey, I realized the path was taking me back to the music of my childhood. My beacon was Mahalia Jackson's Go Tell It On The Mountain. A lifelong love of gospel music, one of the most enduring gifts my parents gave me, began with this song. Had the Sunday School Methodists sung out as Mahalia sang, jubilantly, straight from the heart, this little lamb might not have strayed so far from the fold. Mahalia recorded several versions of the song. I think my playlist track is the one from my parents' stack of 33 rpm lp's. When I listen to it now, I'm drawn to the understated duet by organ and piano behind Mahalia's canonic, Rock-of-Ages voice.

The duet carries me back to the earliest musicians of my childhood, my father and his mother, Ona. Neither of them could walk past a piano without sitting down to play a song. Both played the organ, too. I know I heard them play four-handed boogie-woogie once. Fifty years later, I hear them playing a duet on a hymn like Go Tell It On The Mountain.

Before Mahalia, there was Ona. I can see her sitting at the piano, a cigarette dangling from her lip, a cold cup of coffee perched somewhere in arm's reach. Conjure Hoagy Carmichael in a floral print house dress and you get the picture. See the four-year-old boy snuggled next to her on the piano bench? That's me, mesmerized by her deft hands making such an effortless stream of music. She played it all by ear. Ona and my dad read and wrote music on paper, but they really cut loose when they played without a score. From them I began to learn what it means to listen, remember, and improvise this way. None of us knew then how I would need that knowledge about playing by ear, throughout a life of letting go of sight.

Ona played piano and organ for the Salvation Army. How this came to be is a story that carries the power of myth for me. It was Christmas Eve in 1944. All three of Ona's sons were fighting in the war overseas. The news was full of stories about the German counter-offensive known as the Battle of the Bulge. Ona knew my dad was somewhere in northern France, and she feared the worst.

Anxious and depressed, Ona walked the streets aimlessly that night. She stopped in front of a Salvation Army Hall when she heard people singing. She listened a long time before mustering the resolve to go in. She stood just inside the door, ready to slip back into the night. When the hymn ended, the Salvation Army Captain at the front of the hall noticed her.

"Lady," he said in a booming voice, 'do you know how to play the piano?"

She did.

"Praise the Lord! We've been praying for a piano player, and here you are!"

The Salvation Army gave Ona refuge that Christmas Eve, and she made music for them every Wednesday night and Sunday morning for 30 years. She played all the stalwart hymns. She wrote several, but the scores are lost to the world. What I remember now - I can still hear it - is her jubilation as she marched through the major chords until she made them swing.