Have you ever listened to—or, better yet, read—the lyrics of “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear”?

As holiday tunes tend to go, it has become a typical Christmas bauble, the stuff of coruscating soft-jazz renditions or tidal choral arrangements. Norah Jones cut a gorgeous version of it in 2012, her soprano curling with a sly country cool, while Frank Sinatra interrupted a fireside chat with Bing Crosby on Sinatra’s own television show to deliver a definitive take in 1957. The song sounds comforting, its seasonal calm the musical equivalent of a warm blanket and a dram of strong eggnog.

But “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear” is a devastating tune. Written in 1849, as the United States recovered from a war and teetered at the brink of another, one that would split the country in two, “Midnight” presents the apocalypse as the only peaceful solution left. The end is the redemption, wrote Massachusetts minister Edmund Sears, offering relief from “life’s crushing load,” “the woes of sin and strife,” and “man, at war with man.” This isn’t a Christmas trifle; it’s a Christian’s prayer for a merciful exit, or at least a restart.

The guitarist John Fahey got this correct in 1968 on The New Possibility—his landmark first Christmas album, or the Fahey record people tend to know if they don’t know much Fahey. Released during one of the most productive portions of his career, just as his cult and commercial appeal began to converge, The New Possibility collects 14 diverse holiday tunes, from his tinny and pensive strum through “Auld Lang Syne” to a frenetic introductory take on “Joy to the World.” There’s a discursive ten-minute original called “Christ’s Saints of God Fantasy,” every bit as imaginative as Fahey’s most heralded work, and a brilliantly moaning blues slide through the antediluvian slave spiritual “Go, I Will Send Thee.”

It’s his 90-second “Midnight,” though, that is the record’s real stunning bit of emotional sophistication—and, by extension, a proclamation that we should all expect more from Christmas music. Fahey plays the hymn with painstaking slowness, peeling apart the chords until you can make out each halting note and even the shifts of his hands between them. He bends some of the notes until they’re hollow and flat, while he plucks others until they shine like stars. Fahey’s thoughtful technique subtly, wordlessly expresses the tension of Sears’ original hymn—a vision of despair, cut by a hope for redemption. The playing is not technically perfect, the production not at all polished. It is, instead, an honest admission of a complex admixture of joy and depression, rendered for a season that often demands we just smile and listen to Sinatra sing again about Santa Claus.

In the 40 years since Fahey reimagined the depths Christmas music could reach, the holiday oeuvre has remained largely static—dominated by late crooners, ostentatious symphonies, and glittering megastars. Sure, there’s been the occasional 8-bit curiosity, an impressionistic seasonal genre-bender, the requisite ’90s alternative nation compilation, and even a new-wave oddities assortment. At least one band, Low, has traced the craters and peaks of holiday moods with a surprising Christmas masterpiece of its own.

Mostly, though, independent and especially experimental musicians have ceded an entire season that overflows with immense sadness, delight, intimacy, alienation, gluttony, and charity—not to mention a wealth of shared vernacular music—to singers who either flatten those feelings or make melodrama of them. For decades, Fahey has inspired flocks of younger musicians, who have either aped his sense of melody and meter altogether or drawn deep influence from his substance and style. But they’ve mostly ignored and sometimes even scoffed at what may be the most consistent and broadly appealing element of his career—Christmas music. Maybe it’s time to fix that.

Critics often represent Fahey as a monolithic genius, a savant of syncopated six-string brood and little else. But his career was a sidewinding rollercoaster, prone to shuttle him anywhere a mix of narcotics and nostalgia, alcohol and obsessions dictated. He did Dixieland jazz and hardline blues, mimetic pop and immersive ragas, psychedelic rock and aloof drone.