Jacob Johnson back for annual Christmas Eve Eve Show at the Radio Room: Upstate Beat

Every year, a couple of days before Santa hops on his sleigh, Upstate singer-guitarist Jacob Johnson steps onstage for a solo acoustic show at a Greenville venue.

Seeing Johnson play an acoustic guitar is a bit like seeing an Formula One driver on a road course. He’s an absolute master of the instrument. He is skilled beyond belief, and he’s just as good at lightning-fast solos as he is at weaving beautiful melodies.

And with his annual “Christmas Eve Eve” show, he uses that talent, not to mention a warm and friendly vocal style, to play some classic Christmas tunes, from centuries-old carols to Vince Guaraldi’s work for the “A Charlie Brown Christmas” TV special to holiday songs he wrote himself. It’s become a tradition for Johnson, who’s been doing the show for the last four years.

“I’m usually on the road with the show for a few dates,” Johnson says. “I typically do a little run around the Southeast to places like North Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia for a few dates. And those all culminate with a big Greenville show.”

This year, the Dec. 23 performance is at the new, bigger Radio Room venue on Liberty Lane, which will be a first for Johnson.

Johnson has honed his show over the last few years, learning from his audience’s reactions, and adding special touches to differentiate it from his regular performances. In fact, this year, Johnson will sing a duet with his wife.

“I’m very aware of my pacing with these shows,” he says. “The songs I tend to gravitate toward are more sentimental. They’re a little more emotive. But if there’s too much of that, it can really slow things down. So I’ve gotten a lot better at pacing the show and making sure the energy doesn’t get too low.”

The Christmas Eve Eve Show is typically one of Johnson’s biggest of the year, which still surprises him, given how things started.

“We kind of threw it together at the last minute the first year,” he says, “but it got a really good response, and it’s gotten a little bigger every year.”

Ultimately, Johnson says, he thinks the show works simply because he genuinely has a feel for the music.

“There are all these artists who either have to come out of their style to do Christmas music, or they try to take Christmas music and put it into their style,” he says. But I think for me, the arrangements that I do and the songs that I pick are all very organic to my style.”