Roots Music Report

Liner Notes:

About the Album

"Marty Falle’s Christmas Bluegrass Stories lives up to its name in every possible way. These songs feel like snow falling on quiet country roads, like memories you haven’t visited in years suddenly returning home. And because I know the kind of person Marty is — thoughtful, genuine, a storyteller down to his bones — this album feels like a window into his heart. It’s Christmas, comfort, and pure bluegrass truth"
- Debbie Howson "Sunday Grass" Ontario, Canada November 22, 2025

Marty Falle and the Gospel of the Holler – Bluegrass Christmas Stories from a Master Songwriter
By Sarah Johnson for Country Music News International Magazine November 17, 2025

Most bluegrass Christmas albums lean on the familiar—well-worn carols, gospel standards, and holiday favorites wrapped in banjo and fiddle. Marty Falle went the other way.

With Bluegrass Christmas Stories, his first-ever Christmas record, Falle doesn’t decorate the season so much as excavate it.

He digs into the coalfields, tobacco farms, red-clay roads, and one-room schoolhouses of Appalachia and asks a simple, rare question: What did Christmas really look like in these mountains—when there was no money, no mall, no safety net—only snow, scripture, and stubborn hope?

The result is a cycle of original songs that feel less like a holiday project and more like a collection of short stories set to high-lonesome melody. It’s also the clearest proof yet that Marty Falle is becoming one of bluegrass music’s most important songwriters of historical, roots-based storytelling.

A Songwriter Obsessed with Place, History, and Truth

Long before Bluegrass Christmas Stories, Falle had already carved out a lane of his own. Across albums like My Farm, My Bluegrass, Appalachia Rust, Wanted in Kentucky, and Hillbilly Irish, he’s built his catalog around real places, real people, and real events.

He doesn’t just use Appalachia as a backdrop; he treats it like a primary source. Blood feuds, coal camps, breaker boys, lost brides, strip-mined hills, Civil War ghosts, and Kentucky farm life all show up in his songs—not as props, but as the central subject matter.

Falle likes to say he’s “deeply affected by Appalachian history and by all that has happened in and around my farm,” and he writes like a man proving it. The stories often begin with something tangible: an old chimney still standing on a long-gone homestead, a photograph of coal-mining children, a derelict tobacco barn, a train line that once carried both coal and hope.

That same approach lies at the heart of Bluegrass Christmas Stories. These songs aren’t sentimental postcards. They’re field reports from the holler—set at Christmastime.

“Santa Claus Special”: Turning a Train into Bethlehem

The album’s centerpiece, “Santa Claus Special,” springs from one of the most cherished traditions in Appalachian memory: the Santa Train that began running through the Eastern Kentucky coalfields in 1943. For generations of families battered by mine closures, wartime scarcity, and long winters, that train wasn’t just a novelty; it was a lifeline.

Falle takes that history and renders it as a living, breathing ballad.

The song opens: “Through the mist of a Pikeville mornin’, where the coal dust kisses snow, A whistle moans like a mountain prayer, from a hundred years ago.”
In a few lines, he places us on the platform—coal dust floating in the cold air, families gathered in their Sunday best and work clothes alike, listening for the sound of a whistle that meant food, toys, and a kind of mercy.

He turns the Clinchfield line into a rolling sanctuary:
- Miners lay their shovels down and let the rails become their pews.
- No preacher stands in the pulpit, yet the people feel “the hand of God reach out upon the Santa Train.”
- The red-suited rider isn’t just Santa; he’s a stand-in for grace itself, tipping his hat as coal smoke rises like incense.

By the final verse, Falle has transformed the Santa Train into “a moving Bethlehem—where sorrow meets joy, poverty meets promise.” The refrain of “Hey Hey! Hallelujah!”—sung over steam, steel, and children’s shouts—feels less like a hook and more like a holler-wide altar call.

This is what makes Falle different as a songwriter: he doesn’t romanticize the coalfields. He dignifies them. The joy in “Santa Claus Special” is earned, not assumed.

“The Snow Sang Hallelujah”: A Christmas Hymn for the Broke and Brave

If “Santa Claus Special” brings the community to the trackside, “The Snow Sang Hallelujah” brings us inside one cabin in Jackson County, Kentucky—and lets us stay long enough to feel the floorboards.

Eli, the father at the center of the song, is a tobacco farmer crushed by a ruined crop and an early frost:
Ol’ Eli watched the hillside, not a stalk of leaf grew there “Lord, this year my crop is lost.”

He has no money, no gifts, and a heavy sense of having failed his family. It’s a story that played out in countless farmhouses across the Appalachian South: the weather turned, the harvest died, and Christmas suddenly felt like a bill that couldn’t be paid.

But Falle doesn’t leave the family in despair. Inside that cabin:
- Mama holds the Bible; the babies hold her hymn.
- She reads, “Unto us a child is born,” and Eli finds his place not as a failure, but as a father standing in the glow of something bigger than himself.
- The snow outside becomes a choir—“the snow sang Hallelujah”—as if creation itself is joining the family’s whispered prayers.

Musically, the song leans into a Gospel-infused Bluegrass waltz, with Carly Greer’s voice weaving through the melody like lamplight through rough-hewn logs. High-lonesome harmonies, Jonathan Yudkin’s fiddle, Josh Metheny’s dobro, and the rhythmic pulse of Mike Bub (bass) and Matt Menefee (banjo) turn this into a full-bodied Christmas hymn for poor but unbroken families.

What makes the song unforgettable is its theological center: the miracle isn’t that the family suddenly gets rich. It’s that they realize they already have what they need—faith, love, and survival. The snow doesn’t bring presents. It brings perspective.

“The Shepherd and The Star”: Judea by Way of Eastern Kentucky

With “The Shepherd and The Star,” Falle pulls off something quiet and daring. He takes the Nativity story—arguably the most told story in Western culture—and filters it through both Scripture and Appalachia.

The shepherd at the center of the song is no stained-glass saint. He’s an outlaw-turned-shepherd, a man with “old stains,” scars, and a history of theft and survival. He’s fought wolves and Roman blades. He’s robbed just to stay alive. The world has written him off.

Then the sky explodes in light. The shepherd expects wrath and judgment, but instead, he hears a message that tears through his shame:
“Then GOD CHOSE ME! God chose me. God chose me.”

That repeated line is one of Falle’s most powerful writerly moves. It’s not just a theological declaration—it’s the emotional pivot. Suddenly this rough-cut man, untrusted and uninvited, finds himself standing in front of the Christ child, watching cattle bow their heads and every lie he’s ever told fall “silent, cold, and dead.”

The song becomes a kind of Appalachian testimony, delivered over rolling banjo, mandolin, and accordion. It’s easy to imagine an Eastern Kentucky farmer or ex-miner hearing this and thinking: If God chose him, maybe He hasn’t forgotten me either.

Falle’s genius here is in connecting shepherds in Judea to miners, farmers, and drifters in the hollers. In both places, the message is the same: God chooses the unlikely.

“A Coal Camp Christmas”: Handmade Joy in Hard Times

Where many Christmas albums lean toward fantasy, “A Coal Camp Christmas” insists on reality—but a hopeful one.
Set in a Kentucky coal town, the song recalls a holiday where nobody had money, but everyone had each other.

Snow falls on the hillside. Miners bow their knees. Mothers and fathers stay up late stitching, carving, and crafting gifts from what little they have:
- A wooden train carved by Daddy.
- A woolen scarf knit by Sister.
- Hickory-wood dolls and Sunday dresses sewn from scraps.
- Rocking horses, wooden flutes, and mittens made from worn-out jeans.

The chorus is built around Paul’s admonition in Romans 12:10—“Be devoted to one another in love.” Falle turns that scripture into a coal-camp creed:
“Be devoted to one another in love,
Honor each other, lift your brother up.”

This is where Falle’s songwriting stands out in the Christmas canon. Rather than asking, What did people get? he asks, What did people give—and what did it cost them?

Vocally, Carly Greer once again steps into the spotlight, her voice carrying both the ache and the warmth of a coal-camp gathering. The band at County Q—Yudkin, Miner, Bub, Matheny, and Hoke—keep the track grounded in classic, front-porch bluegrass, fast enough to feel like a celebration, but never so slick that it loses its grit.

“Chimney Letters” and “Schoolhouse of Glory”: Expanding the Christmas Map

Two songs on the project trace traditions as specific to Appalachia as the Santa Train itself.

Chimney Letters

In “Chimney Letters” (originally released in 2023 and folded naturally into this Christmas cycle), Falle draws from an old mountain custom: children writing letters to Santa, then tossing them into the fireplace so the smoke could carry their wishes skyward.

The narrator—a boy on a struggling Kentucky tobacco farm—doesn’t ask for toys. His plea is heartbreakingly simple:
“Bring my Daddy back home for one Christmas night.”
It is pure Appalachian realism: divorce, abandonment, and economic hardship are all part of the landscape. But the belief that a letter burned in the chimney might reach someone who cares? That’s pure Appalachian faith.

With Dale Ann Bradley’s unmistakable voice and a dream team of pickers, the track feels like a classic already—a modern mountain standard about loss, longing, and the thin line between prayer and pretend.

Schoolhouse of Glory

“Schoolhouse of Glory” widens the lens to the children who walked miles of red-clay roads to a one-room schoolhouse serving as both classroom and church.

“They had no carriage but Christ, no bus but belief,
Shoeless on the red-clay road, mercy was their relief.”
Here, Christmas isn’t defined by what happens under a tree, but by what happens on the way to somewhere hopeful. The schoolhouse glows on the mountain slope like a beacon; each lesson becomes “a manger call.” The children don’t ask for riches—just warmth, a meal, and a glimpse of the Savior’s story.

Again, Falle is doing something rare: he’s not just chronicling Appalachian history; he’s sacralizing it—treating those long walks, those tiny schoolhouses, and those kids’ courage as holy ground.

The Instrumentals: When the Strings Do the Talking

No Marty Falle record would be complete without instrumentals, and on Bluegrass Christmas Stories, they serve as wordless chapters in the same book.

- “Christmas in the Coalfields” is a high-energy breakdown that imagines coal trains rolling past lantern-lit porches, churchhouses, and company depots. With no lyrics to guide the narrative, the fiddle, banjo, and mandolin become the storytellers. You can almost see the steam, feel the cold, and hear the distant whistle cutting through a Christmas Eve sky.

- “Old Kentucky Noel” reaches further back, honoring Kentucky’s frontier-era Christmases—cabins, lamplight, and families grateful simply to have survived another year. It’s a barn dance for pioneers, played with the fire of modern Nashville pros but the spirit of long-ago barn raisings and kitchen jams.

Both tracks prove one of Falle’s core beliefs: there’s an art to the bluegrass breakdown, and when it’s done right, the tune itself becomes a narrative.

The Team Behind the Tales

Like his previous albums, Bluegrass Christmas Stories is anchored by a who’s-who of modern bluegrass and roots musicians, recorded at County Q in Nashville:
- Marty Falle – Executive Producer, songwriter, lead vocals, guitar
- Jonathan Yudkin – Producer, fiddle, mandolin, co-writer on several tracks
- Carly Greer – Lead and background vocals on multiple songs
- Kim Parent – Background vocals
- Justin Weaver / Carl Miner – Guitars
- Mike (Michael) Bub – Acoustic bass
- Josh Matheny – Dobro
- Matt Menefee – Banjo
- Jim Hoke – Accordion, harmonica

It’s the same core creative family that helped Falle shape Wanted in Kentucky and other albums—players and a producer who understand that the point isn’t just virtuosity; it’s serving the story.

Yudkin, in particular, has become Falle’s crucial partner—keeping the recordings rooted in organic, almost old-school analog sensibilities while still sounding modern and radio-ready. The result feels less like a studio project and more like a group of master musicians gathered in a circle, honoring the past while playing for the present.

Why This Christmas Record Matters

In a market flooded with Christmas releases, Bluegrass Christmas Stories stands apart for three reasons:
1. All Originals, No Safety Net
Falle doesn’t lean on “Silent Night” or “Joy to the World.” Every song here is written from the ground up, rooted in a specific Appalachian setting, tradition, or memory. That alone puts the record in rare company.
2. History as Devotion
He treats Appalachia’s past—its coal camps, tobacco farms, schoolhouses, and Santa trains—not as museum pieces, but as sacred stories worth singing. Christmas isn’t an escape from hardship; it’s the light that makes hardship bearable.
3. A Songwriter’s Christmas, Not Just a Singer’s
Many Christmas albums are about the voice. This one is about the writing. Line after line reveals a craftsman who values detail—red-clay roads, ration lines, sooted masks, patchwork pride, babies clutching hymns, fathers brought to their knees by weather and grace.
For years, Marty Falle has been quietly building a body of work that positions him as one of the most compelling roots storytellers in contemporary bluegrass. With Bluegrass Christmas Stories, he makes his boldest statement yet:

Christmas in Appalachia was never just about presents. It was about coal smoke and chimney letters, handmade toys and broken hearts, scripture and snow, trains and schoolhouses and cabins lit by a single lamp—and the stubborn, unshakeable belief that God had not forgotten the mountains.

Falle doesn’t just remember those stories.
He writes them down, sets them to mandolin and fiddle, and sends them back out into the world—
like a chimney letter rising through the dark,
hoping someone is still listening.

11/19/2025 - Marty Falle "Bluegrass Christmas Stories" debuts at #1 on Roots Global Top Bluegrass Albums.

11/21/2025 - Marty Falle interview on Rick Dollar's syndicated iHeart Radio show