On Christmas Eve 1992, a guy called Brad Krantz played a song on Asheboro's WKRR called Sammy the Christmas Snake, on his morning talkshow.
It just so happened that my brother had several boom boxes recording the content of a few local radio stations to capture the esence of a Carolina Christmas, and recorded Sammy the Christmas snake.
As I was 8 years old at the time, and my brother and I liked the song so much, we decided to make it tradition to play it every Christmas morning before going upstairs for the "good stuff".
Unfortunately, however, in 1994, my brother went off to college, and the tape was lost somewhere between here and there.
Sometime after that, Brad was fired from WKRR, and I lost track of him. I emailed one of the guys at the station a couple of years ago to see if they knew where Sammy the Christmas Snake might be. I was told that Brad took their only copy with him when he went to Charlotte, and they had no idea who actually wrote the song, only that Brad got it from some guy in Boston.
In the summer of 2004, WZTK, a new FM talk station owned and operated by Curtis Media was launched. And guess what? Brad Krantz is back with the Brad and Brit show.
I emailed him in August of 2004 just to politely ask if he still had Sammy the Christmas Snake, and asked if he would play it on his show over the holiday season. He said he would, that it was apparently widely requested, and said "thank you for remembering Sammy".
So, I started my recording scheduler on December first to try and record Sammy the Christmas Snake for my own personal amusement, seeing as how I have been looking for it for 12 years. Apparently, Brad had expected this, and made sure to talk or play IDs at every possible opening in the song, which as you can imagine, infuriated me.
I kept the recording scheduler going all the way through December 21, 2004, to see if he would slip and forget to play an ID in the same places.
I ended up running seven different copies of the song through my favorite audio editor, taking the best parts from each, to get the straight, un-mutilated copy of Sammy the Christmas Snake.
Here is a tipical example of what Brad and Brit did to it to try and keep it exclusive to their show.
This is one of the worst ones I had to deal with, so you can have an idea what I went through to extract the whole un-cut song. Listen to this one first for best effect.
Note: these files were encoded using ogg vorbis. If your media player does not support Ogg playback, consider trying Winamp.
Sammy the Christmas Snake is here because I don't like Brad Krantz very much, and he is greedy and generally bad. He does not deserve exclusive rights to this song in any case!
Copyright 2004/2007, someone who lives in North Carolina