Ok I grew up in the 1970s and Karen Carpenter was a staple throughout my childhood and I’ve never heard her sing this until today? Wow…a voice like silk, even when singing Christmas tunes.
Karen Carpenter – The Carpenters – Sleigh Ride – Sometime in the early 1970s
Fearsome Beard 
I loved Karen Carpenter so much! Hers is still one of the most beautiful pop voices I’ve ever heard.
I adored her as a child.
Ah the Carpenters….being somewhat older than your fine self, we, of my ilk, thought Karen and her brother a rather sad, syrupy confection only teenage girls liked. Years later, I’ve come to a place where I think them sweet and harmonious; still not my cup of tea, as it were, but Karen did have a lovely voice which shone above her tragic story of her illness. Now I hear her, or them, with different ears.
As a young shy and awkward boy who didn’t have many friends (any really) her voice on my AM transitor radio was always comforting.
I’d never heard this Carpenters’ version before, and it’s lovely! Karen’s voice was one of only two ‘pop’ voices I’ve ever known that seemed to penetrate down to my very soul (the other being, since you ask, Lighthouse Family’s Tunde Baiyewu – and I can’t identify just why it’s so). But Karen’s is/was so warm, honest and yet vulnerable – increased with our hindsight – that whenever I hear her it leaves an indelible imprint inside of me.
Incidentally, this video, labelled as roughly ‘early 70s’, must have been from when filming singers, white or non-white, with backing singers and dancers, the latter were always exclusively white, as in the old Perry Como and Andy Williams shows we’d religiously watch back in the late-50s and through the 1960s. At the time it never occurred to us how unfair or incongruent it was, so this Carpenters show must have been done around or just after the much overdue and welcome ‘turn’. (I still cringe when I watch the film version of that wonderful musical ‘Sourh Pacific’, the entire on-screen male AND female chorus-line actors being solidly white – save for one single coal-black guy, obviously put in as a token ‘sop’, poor chap. But that was those times, they were).
I remember entering second grade in 1972 and my school had been integrated. I thought it was fun to have all these new, fun and interesting kids. I remember also some other kids parents being very upset. I was startled as an adult to find my kindergarten and first grade class photos which were only white children. It was that moment I realized just how historic of a moment my entering second grade was.
Yes, it’s strange how we so often uncritically accept(ed) the world as it was at that time, and it’s only in retrospect we recognise the prejudices we lived among that were around.
Incidentally, when I mentioned above the T.V. shows of real ‘stars’ of yesteryear like Perry Como and Andy Williams, I didn’t mean to imply that only American shows had this ‘only whites’ policy. Our own stars- and variety-shows were then in exactly the same mode – and very likely the whole rest-of-the-white-world too.