Also, last year I rather enjoyed writing my “reminiscence” essays documenting my intentions, processes, and lessons learned from each year’s musical compilations. Even though I know that part of my writing is much more for my own satisfaction than for you readers, below the information about this spoken word track I will do the same about my compilation of this year’s series of songs, tunes, research, and musings.]

Wee Robin’s Yule Sang

This story was collected by Robert Burn’s biographer Robert Chambers in about 1850 when he was working on his four-volume The Life and Works of Robert Burns. Chambers apparently did not include the story in that work. But he did publish it soon thereafter in an expanded edition of his already-massive folklore collection Popular Rhymes of Scotland (which had first been published in 1826).

The story came from the poet’s youngest sister Isabella (1771–1858), known as Isbal by the family, who said that this was one of the stories that her brother Rabbie had made up to entertain his younger siblings when he was about 20 years old and the family lived at Lochlea Farm. That would have been between 1777 and 1784, when Isbal was 6 to 13 years old. She was almost 80 years old when she recited the story for Chambers. Her married name was Isabella Begg.

Chambers interviewed Mrs. Begg several times between 1847 and 1850 as he compiled what he intended to be a definitive collection of Robert Burns’ writings. By that time Robert Burns (1759-1796) was widely recognized as having been Scotland’s greatest poet, and any newly-discovered work by him, even juvenilia and with questionable provenance, was considered to be an important discovery.

Isabella was a useful and important source of information for Chambers, even though some of the factual information that she gave him in those elder years later proved to be incorrect. She said that she was telling the story as she remembered having heard it from her brother, but since she had been a the mother of nine children herself, and was a teacher during much of her life as a widow, she had probably told the story many times herself over the years.

There is no other source for this story, and since it is neither a poem nor a song but was told as children’s storytelling when he was quite young, it is not typical of Burns’ later work. Some Burns scholars suspect that while the story itself probably originated from her brother, Isabella may well have changed the wording over time to suit her own storytelling style. You can judge for yourself whether this is fine storytelling for children regardless of who may have written it.

Soon after Chambers published the story in his large hardcover collection of Popular Rhymes, in 1860 the story was republished (with attribution to Chambers) by Griffith and Farran individually in an illustrated book under the name The Robin’s Yule Song, who described the story as being “by Robert Burns as retold by Isabella Burns”.

The idea of a European robin (which are much smaller than our North American ones) marrying a wren was already and old scenario, first found in literature from around 1400. In the mid-18^th century, when Isbal says she leaned the story from her older brother, the Mother Goose stories were very popular, and one of those was a long poem (that is usually presented in much-shortened form) entitled The Marriage of Cock Robin to Jenny Wren. The story attributed to Robert Burns is basically an alternate backstory for that marriage.

This rendition is by Scottish folksinger Alistair McDonald and is from his 1996 album Honest Poverty. I don’t have that album (I got the recording from YouTube) and can’t find McDonald’s liner notes that might indicate his source for the words online. But, except for a slightly abridged beginning and end, they appear to be either from the Chambers volume, the 1860 illustrated single-story booklet, or from subsequent inexpensive chapbooks that were published by Edinburgh’s non-profit Saltire Society whose objective is to preserve Scottish culture. In 1908 a booklet with this poem was published with the same title that Alistair McDonald gives to this recording - Wee Robin’s Yule Sang. Perhaps that is a minor variant that he is reciting here.

By the way, if anyone recognizes the tune that accompanies this story please let me know what it is; I’d like to include that information here. [Update: Thank you to Denis Donnelly and Beth Skala for recognizing that this seems to be the same melody as When Johnny Comes Marching Home. After having that pointed out I did a little digging into that song’s history and found out that, by way of a pub song that was popular in America at that time, it is the an old Scottish and English tune John Anderson, My Jo for which Robert Burns wrote one variant of its lyrics. For more info about the tune and its earlier history, see here and here.]

I got this text of the 1860 Griffith and Farran booklet from the story’s Wikipedia entry, and the etchings by “W.F.F” and glossary that appeared in that same book from Google Books.

THERE was an auld grey Poussie Baudrons, (Pussy cat) and she gaed awa’ down by a water-side, and there she saw a wee Robin Redbreast happin’ on a brier; and Poussie Baudrons says: “Where’s tu gaun, wee Robin?” And wee Robin says: “I’m gaun awa’ to the king to sing him a sang this guid Yule morning.”

And Poussie Baudrons says: “Come here, wee Robin, and I’ll let you see a bonny white ring round thy neck.” But wee Robin says: “Na, na! grey Poussie Baudrons; na, na! Ye worry’t the wee mousie, but ye’se no worry me.”

So wee Robin flew awa’ till he came to a fail fauld-dike (Turf wall enclosing a field), and there he saw a grey greedy gled (Kite) sitting. And grey greedy gled says: “Where’s tu gaun, wee Robin?” And wee Robin says: “I’m gaun’ to the king to sing him a sang this guid Yule morning.”

And grey greedy gled says: “Come here, wee Robin, and I’ll let you see a bonny feather in my wing.” But wee Robin says: “Na, na! grey greedy gled; na, na! Ye pookit (pluck, strip) a’ the wee lintie (Linnet), but ye’se no pook me.”

So wee Robin flew an’ till be came to the cleuch o’ a craig (Face of a rock) and there he saw slee Tod Lowrie (Mister Fox) sitting. And slee Tod Lowrie says: “Where’s tu gaun, wee Robin?” And wee Robin says: “I’m gaun awa’ to the king to sing him a sang this guid Yule morning.”

And slee Tod Lowrie says: “Come here, wee Robin, and I’ll let ye see a bonny spot on the tap o’ my tail” But wee Robin says: “Na, na! slee Tod Lowrie; Na, na! Ye worry’t the wee lammie; but ye’se no worry me.”

So wee Robin flew awa’ till he came to a bonny burn-side, and there he saw a wee callant (boy) sitting. And the wee callant says: “Where’s tu gaun, wee Robin?” And wee Robin says: “I’m gaun awa’ to the king to sing him a sang this guid Yule morning.”

And the wee callant says: “Come here, wee Robin, and I’ll gie ye a wheen grand moolins (some crumbs) out o’ my pooch.” But wee Robin says: “Na, na! wee callant; na, na! Ye speldert the gowdspink; but ye’se no spelder me.”

So wee Robin flew awa’ till he came to the king, and there he sat on a winnock sole (Window sill) and sang the king a bonny sang. And the king says to the queen: “What’ll we gie to wee Robin for singing us this bonny sang?” And the queen says to the king: “I think we’ll gie him the wee wran to be his wife.”

So wee Robin and the wee wran were married, and the king, and the queen, and a’ the court danced at the waddin’; syne he flew awa’ hame to his ain water-side, and happit on a brier.

And here is a retelling (not a translation) of the story in an 18th century Mother Goose style of English by Carolyn Sherwin Bailey that was posted here:

Once upon a time there was an old gray Cat and she was down by the waterside when the trees and ground were white with snow. And there she saw a wee, wee Robin Redbreast hopping upon a branch, so Cat said to him: “Where are you going, Robin Redbreast, this frosty Yuletide weather?”

Then the wee, wee Robin said to the Cat, “I am going to the King to sing him a song this good Yule morning.”

And the gray Cat replied, “Go not yet. Come here, Robin Redbreast, and I will let you see the bonny white necklace I wear around my neck.”

But the wee, wee Robin said, “No, no, gray Cat. You may show the bonny white necklace that you wear around your neck to the little mice, but not to me.”

Then off flew the wee, wee Robin until he came to a wall of turf and there he saw a greedy Hawk sitting and watching to see what small birds passed by. And the greedy Hawk called to him and said, “Where are you going, Robin Redbreast, this frosty Yuletide weather?”

Then the wee, wee Robin said to the Hawk, “I am going to the King to sing him a song this good Yule morning.”

And the greedy Hawk replied, “Go not yet. Come here, Robin Redbreast, and I’ll let you see a bonny green feather that I wear in my wing.”

But the wee, wee Robin said, “No, no, greedy Hawk. You have pecked all the tiny birds but you’ll not peck me.”

Then off flew the wee, wee Robin until he came to a hollow in the hillside and there he saw a sly Fox sitting. The sly Fox saw Robin and called to him, “Where are you going, Robin Redbreast, this frosty Yuletide weather?”

Then the wee, wee Robin said to the Fox, “I am going to the King to sing him a song this good Yule morning.”

And the sly Fox replied, “Go not yet. Come here, Robin Redbreast, and I will show you a bonny spot on the tip of my tail.”

But the wee, wee Robin said, “No, no, sly Fox. You may show the bonny spot on the tip of your tail to the lambs but not to me.”

Then off flew the wee, wee Robin until he came to a little shepherd Lad sitting beside his cot. The little shepherd Lad saw Robin and called to him, “Where are you going, Robin Redbreast, this frosty Yuletide weather?”

Then the wee, wee Robin said to the shepherd Lad, “I am going to the King to sing him a song this good Yule morning.”

And the shepherd Lad replied, “Go not yet. Come here and I will give you some crumbs from my pouch.”

But the wee, wee Robin said, “No, no, little shepherd Lad. You caught the goldfinch but you’ll not catch me.”

Then off flew the wee, wee Robin until he came to the King, and he sat down upon a plowshare just outside of the King’s window, and he sang him a pretty song because it was such a good Yule morning.

The King was very much pleased indeed and he said to the Queen, “What shall we give the wee, wee Robin Redbreast for singing us such a pretty song?” The Queen thought and thought and at last she decided. “I think we will give the wee, wee Robin Redbreast a wee Wren to be his wife,” the Queen said to the King.

So the wee, wee Robin Redbreast and the wee Wren were married and the King, and the Queen, and all the court, and the whole countryside danced at their wedding. And after the wedding the two flew home to the Robin’s own waterside.

There is a more recent retelling of the story in modern English called The Wee Robin’s Christmas Song. It was written by Jennie Ellis Burdick, but personally I think that in the context of Scotland, whether in the late 18^th century, when Burns wrote it or in the mid-19^th century when his sister Isbal recalled it for Robert Chambers, the word “Yule” might better be translated as Hogmanay, or New Year’s Day since that was the only allowed core festive day for the midwinter holiday season during those times.

On the other hand, celebration of both Christmastide and Yuletide (in the pre-Christian sense of it being an auspicious time of year) were both strictly forbidden by both the Scottish Kirk and by Scottish laws. Those prohibitions were strictly enforced, and in both cases even a minor violation of the prohibition was considered to be a sacrilege. So I suppose those two markers markers of Midwinter do have something in common. And note that the above Glossary from the 1860 booklet of Wee Robin’s Yule Sang defines Yule as being “the name given to Christmas”.

I’ll include a whole essay about the banning of Christmas in Scotland and among Scots abroad in next year’s Bill’s Midwinter Music postings. It was different and much more long-lasting than the prohibitions in England and New England (even though it had similar unintended consequences.)

Reflections on this year’s Sampler-making

This year, I am proud and happy to say, was the most problem-free year I’ve had for this project since my transition from CDs to this emailed “musical Advent calendar” format. I think I’m finally adjusting to the new medium, and getting the right balance for it as a satisfying and enjoyable annual seasonal creative binge

I developed over 20 annual Christmas and Midwinter music Samplers when they were in a CD format, and I got quite well adjusted to that medium. It presented obvious challenges and opportunities for arranging a full 80 minute compilation, often on a particular theme. It also put the task into a particular time-frame. I wanted to get my CD “Christmas cards” into the mail by the beginning of December. So all of the planning, music selection and writing, - the creative parts of the project - were usually done in September through November, and in a couple of years the creative part was done even earlier in the seasons.

In my first few years of the new “musical Advent card” era I sometimes got my timing off kilter. There is far less of the dull drudgery, but I often found myself doing the creative work much closer to the hard deadlines of each day’s postings because I kept getting side-tracked by the fun stuff like rushing down research rabbit holes. That creates a certain adrenaline rush excitement, but also stress.

This year, I had been generating ideas all year, and began doing final selections and writing in early November. By the end of that month I had well over half of the days’ postings ready to go except for final wordsmithing. By mid-December I was still well ahead of the deadlines and I could scale my creative binge back to a very relaxed pace (which is what enabled this bonus posting.)

Separate from the seasonality of the project, this medium calls for other creative differences from producing 80 minute CDs. There is no reason for each day’s listening experience to be cohesive with the day before it, or the day after. Gone is any rationale for an annual theme, and as I hope you have experienced, even individual day’s sets don’t need to be thematic for the music to sound pleasing together.

I am very happy with this year’s 7-10 minute length target, and I’ve done a great job of sticking within my self-imposed ten-minute limit. Not counting the intended double-set on Christmas Day, I only went overtime once, and that was 10:02 on the Winter Solstice.

Besides the length of the sets, you may or may not have noticed a few other changes in my format this year. Whenever possible I tried to track down the lyrics online for every song, and sometimes adjusting them to how they were sung in the rendition they accompany. Sometimes that was easy, and sometimes it could be rather time-consuming. Hopefully that can make these postings more enjoyable for you, and useful for people who stumble upon my posts while doing their own research about these seasonal songs and tunes. (One of my objectives is to leave a lasting legacy in that regard.)

I also put time into searching online for a thematic image for each day’s posting – usually a painting – and telling you it’s source. But that was at the expense of not spending time searching for pictures of the performers or composers of the music. I’m not sure if that was a good trade-off. This year I listened again to my previous years’ postings, and I often found that I liked seeing pictures the singers and musicians. (I usually tried to find photos of them near the approximate age when the recording was made.) I will be reconsidering this for next year, but finding such photos can be time-consuming. I would appreciate your feedback on the matter.

Looking toward the future, I’ve made a few enquiries and people seem to agree that they would prefer that I return to middle-of-the-night mail-out times, enabling listening to the music at the start out the day for those who want to do that. That also better fits my metaphor that this music is a vaccine immunizing you from the shopping mall Christmas music that you will inevitably encounter later in the day.

In addition to this bonus mail-out, I’ve already used the time I saved by getting ahead of schedule this year to develop a chronological list of all of the renditions that I have posted online here, along with brief statements about the kind of information that accompanies them. (Creating an alphabetized index would be tricky since so many of the songs and tunes have alternate names, and titles in various languages.)

The searchable list was mainly intended to be for my own use in music selection, to avoid inadvertent repetitions, and to assist me in finding my past research findings. I also have another list of the topics of my essays, and essay-length music notes. I will post them here for you to use on my archive/blog when I have the lists ready.

So, as you can see, I’m already looking forward to posting this kind of music again next year.

Playlist

1. Wake Up! - Maddy Prior - 3:24

2. Mary Had a Baby - The Nields - 1:27

3. Joseph, lieber Joseph mein - Boston Camerata – 1:19

4. Es is ein Rose entsprungen - James Oxley and Ensemble Galilei - 3:55

5. Rise Up Shepherd and Follow - children from music school - 1:15

6. Mennonite Doxology (aka 606) - The Howard Stauffer family - 1:48

7. Angels We Have Heard on High - Bermuda Salvation Army Band - 2:33

8. Rolling Downward - John Kirkpatrick - 3:43
   

Music notes

Wake Up!
is from Maddy Prior and the Carnival Band’s 2007 album Ringing the Changes. The Carnival Band was originally formed in 1985 as an early music ensemble. From its beginning, the British folk music legend Maddy Prior, who is known primarily as a folk-rock lead singer, joined them as vocalist and headliner for their pre-Christmas tours and associated albums.

Initially they only did old songs performed with appropriate old style accompaniment. But both Maddy and the band members are accomplished and creative musicians. In 2005 they began to write new seasonal songs and tunes and performing those pieces in contemporary styles. According to this album’s liner notes: “Some of us were old hands at song writing, for others it was a new experience, but the venture was by and large collaborative with ideas brought to rehearsal and the workload shared around.”

The music for this song is credited to mandolinist and guitar player Steno Vitale, and the words to Steno, Andrew Watts (who can play anything that you blow into), and bass player Jub Davis. Here are the lyrics from the liner notes:

Have you heard the news, the angels are singing
A baby boy is born in Bethlehem town.
Cattle gather ‘round the celestial stranger,
Asleep in the manger, a king with no crown.

[Chorus]
Wake up! Wake up!
There’s a new day beginning.
Wake up! Wake up!
Don’t you know that it’s time?
Out in the world there’s a new light that’s shining,
Follow the light, leave the darkness behind.

Shepherds on the hill watching for danger,
Saw a shining light, fell down in fear;
Angels in the sky said “Don’t be afraid now,
Go find the babe now, your destiny’s clear.”
Chorus

Wise men from afar, travel worn and weary,
Following a star, feeling alone,
In a foreign land the strangers are seeking
A boy who will be the king and carry them home.
Chorus

You can find a path that leads you through the mountains,
You can find a road that leads you to the sea,
Just because your lost don’t mean you’re abandoned
Reach out your hand, and you will be free.
Chorus

Mary Had a Baby
This is a spiritual that is in Ruth Crawford Seeger’s 1953 songbook American Folk Songs for Christmas. She got it from St. Helena Island Spirituals, a songbook published in 1925 by the Penn Normal Industrial School on St. Helena Island off the coast of South Carolina. It is basically a zipper song, i.e., performers can easily improvise their own verses - they don’t even need a rhyming couplet - and in her songbook Seeger encouraged music teachers to encourage children to add their own creativity for this song.

The Penn School had been founded in 1862 by Quaker and Unitarian missionaries to educate freed and runaway slaves who had fled to that marshy island before and during the American Civil war. The Black inhabitants of St. Helena and other nearby lowland areas are a sub-group of African Americans called the Gullah Geechee who spoke (and some still speak) in a distinctive creole dialect comprised of English and languages from Central and West Africa. I presume that the original version of this song may have been in that language, but one of the roles of the Penn School was to teach English to the islanders and that was the language of the school’s songbook.

This version of the song is performed by Katryna and Nerissa Nield and is from their 2017 album Joy to the World. On my Dec 9, 2022 post you can hear a poignant song that Narissa wrote. But here are the lyrics for this song:

Oh, Mary had a baby, oh Lord.
Mary had a baby, oh Lord.
Oh, Mary had a baby, Mary had a baby,
Mary had a baby, oh Lord.

Born in a stable, oh Lord.

Laid Him in a manger.

She named the baby, Jesus.

Mary had a baby.

Es is ein Rose entsprungen
2020 was the thirtieth anniversary of the Early Music group Ensemble Galilei, and they had big plans to celebrate the occasion by issuing a new CD album featuring “a prodigious assortment” of current and former members. “It was going to be amazing.” Then came March, and the worldwide Covid pandemic shutdowns.

With considerable logistical difficulty they still were able to pull together a CD that year called A Solstice Gathering, which is my source for this song. Most of its tracks were recorded in that year, but they also included some previously unreleased recordings they had made in 2017. As far as I can tell, this is one of those tracks. I infer that from the fact that it features guest tenor James Oxley, who lives in England, and recorder and baroque oboe player Kathryn Montoya, who doesn’t.

The late song historian William Studwell describes Es is ein Rose entsprungen as being musically one of the finest Christmas songs of all time. It is of anonymous medieval German origin from during the time when the “Marian movement” swept through Christendom from the late 11^th to the 13^th centuries. That was a peoples’ movement that the Roman Catholic church tried to suppress. The people were giving Jesus’ mother Mary a special heavenly status that exceeded that of other saints. It closely resembled the Goddess worship from the still-recent pagan times.

The church only accepted the Marian movement as not being heresy on the understanding that Mary could be venerated (not worshiped!) as an intermediary to convey one’s prayers to Jesus. Later, the Catholic church seems to have fully accepted the movement. My elementary school years were as a student at a Catholic parochial school. I can only vaguely recall being taught that fine distinction about praying to Mary in Catechism class. Like all Catholics I had a rosery that guided a cycle of prayers that included 53 Hail Marys and only 6 Our Fathers.

Here is part of what William Studwell has to say about Es is ein Rose entsprungen in his 1995 book A Christmas Carol Reader, my copy of which is (quite literally) fallen apart:

The rose imagery of this carol, which is by no means unusual in its era, is an allusion to Mary as a blooming plant. Ironically, this excellent allegorical device may have delayed the publication of the carol.

After the beginning of the Reformation in the sixteenth century, songs dealing with Mary were either ignored or altered by the Lutherans. In this instance the former option was apparently exercised. Despite the adversities posed by [the Reformation movement] and by delay in publication of as much as two centuries, Lo, How a Rose survived because of its well-crafted lyrics and, most of all, because of its limited-range yet passionate and exquisite melody.

It was not printed until around 1600, though by 1609 it received a tremendous boost when it was harmonized by the famous German composer Michael Prætorius (1571-1621). That arrangement, which is the one still most commonly used today, helped considerably in the publicizing of the carol, and also led some persons to erroneously attribute the carol to Prætorius himself.

Of all that could be said or done, perhaps the highest tribute to Lo, How a Rose was the adoption of the melody by the great German composer Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) as the basis for an 1896 chorale prelude. To be associated with such a master after a four-century interlude is certainly one sign of excellence. To be well-liked and frequently sung after five centuries of considerable cultural change is an even clearer indicator.

You can find the German lyrics here, but below are five verses of the Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming English translation (out of the over a dozen translations that the song has been given to English alone, and at least 23 verses that have accreted to it over the years):

Lo, how a Rose e’er blooming, from tender stem hath sprung!
Of Jesse’s lineage coming, as men of old have sung.
It came, a flow’ret bright,
Amid the cold of winter, when half spent was the night.

Isaiah ‘twas foretold it, the Rose I have in mind;
With Mary we behold it, the virgin mother kind.
To show God’s love aright,
She bore to men a Savior, when half spent was the night.

The shepherds heard the story proclaimed by angels bright,
How Christ, the Lord of glory was born on earth this night.
To Bethlehem they sped
And in the manger found Him, as angel heralds said.

This Flow’r, whose fragrance tender with sweetness fills the air,
Dispels with glorious splendor the darkness everywhere;
True Man, yet very God,
From sin and death He saves us, and lightens ev’ry load.

O Savior, Child of Mary, who felt our human woe,
O Savior, King of glory, who dost our weakness know;
Bring us at length we pray,
To the bright courts of Heaven, and to the endless day!

Joseph, lieber Joseph mein
This tune is that of another traditional Weihnachtslieder, the German word equivalent to an English Christmas carol or a French noël. There are national differences between the Christmas folk songs of those countries. Except for England’s wassails, almost all of its traditional Christmas carols relate to the Nativity story, but while those carols mostly date back only to the 19^th century, French and German ones tend to be much older dating back to the 17^th century or earlier. French ones tend to be about shepherds, and German ones tend to be quiet songs that emulate Mary’s lullabies.

As can be heard in its lyrics (English translation below) this is another Marian song that dates to about the same time as Lo est ein Rose entsprungen. The composer Johann Walter (1496-1570), who was a close friend and associate of Martin Luther, gave the simple folk song a 5-part polyphonic arrangement. This is that choral setting, but played on medieval instruments by The Boston Camerata which was founded in 1954. It is from their 1974 vinyl album A Renaissance Christmas, but I got it from a 1986 re-release on CD.

Unlike many of the other Protestant leaders, such as the Geneva reformer John Calvin, Martin Luther was a strong supporter of both congregational and choir singing, although in people’s everyday language not in the form of continuing the Catholic’s Latin hymns and Gregorian chants. He believed music was a divine gift, second only to theology, that could move hearts, educate people of all ages, and transform church services into vibrant, understandable expressions of faith. You can read more about Luther’s views on the relationship between music and religion in this blog post.

Rise Up Shepherd and Follow
This is another song from Ruth Crawford’s songbook. In this case it came from a 1909 songbook compiled by Thomas P. Fenner for the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Hampton, Virginia, called Religious Folk Songs of the Negro, As Sung on the Plantations. However, based on the factors that I discussed in my Dec 7 post I think this particular song is more likely to be a jubilee spiritual sung by freed slaves rather than one from the plantation days. The Hampton school was established in 1870 to provide education for former slaves and their children. It has evolved to become Hampton University.

Ruth Crawford Seeger died shortly before her songbook was published. Soon her three daughters, Peggy, Barbara and Penny, and son Mike began to work on recording an album of songs from their mother’s book for the Folkway’s label. It was ready for release in 1955, and like the songbook the album is titled American Folk Songs for Christmas. (Note: This recording should not be confused with a more polished 2-disc Rounder Records album by the same name that the sisters recorded with their brother Mike in 1989 with the same memorial purpose.)

This selection is from the original 1955 album and is sung by a group of children from the South Boston Music School. I suspect that one of the daughters was a music teacher there at the time.

There’s a star in the East on Christmas morn
Rise up, shepherd, and follow
It will lead to the place where the Savior’s born
Rise up, shepherd, and follow.

Leave your sheep and leave your lambs
Rise up, shepherd, and follow
Leave your ewes and leave your rams
Rise up, shepherd, and follow.

Follow, follow
Rise up, shepherd, and follow.
Follow the Star of Bethlehem
Rise up, shepherd, and follow.

If you take good heed to the angel’s words
Rise up, shepherd, and follow
You’ll forget your flocks, you’ll forget your herds
Rise up, shepherd, and follow

Follow, follow
Rise up, shepherd, and follow.
Follow the Star of Bethlehem;
Rise up, shepherd, and follow.

Mennonite Doxology
Also known by the names Dedication Anthem, Mennonite Anthem, or most commonly simply by its number 606 in the old 1969 Mennonite hymnbook. It this isn’t really a Christmas hymn. It is an acknowledgement of faith that is commonly sung by members of Mennonite congregations any time of the year, whether gathering in a church service or just socially. But it certainly sounds Christmasy to my ears, especially since it adds “Halleluja” to it’s “Amen”.

Praise God, from whom all blessings flow;
Praise Him, all creatures here below;
Praise Him above, ye heav’nly host;
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
Hallelujah, amen.

The history of its lyrics are easy to trace: They were written by the hymnist Thomas Ken in 1674 when he was the pastor/chaplain for Winchester College. That school was established in 1382 and is still the oldest “public” boarding school in England. Ken later went on to become bishop of Bath and Wells. According to his biography on hymnary.org:

He was a man of conscience and independent mind who did not shirk from confrontations with royalty. When King Charles II came to visit Winchester, he took along his mistress, the famous actress Nell Gwynne. Ken was asked to provide lodging for her. The story is told that Ken quickly declared his house under repair and had a builder take off the roof!

He later was dismissed from the court at The Hague [where he had been appointed chaplain to Princess Mary] when he protested a case of immorality. Then, later in 1688, Bishop Ken refused to read King James II’s Declaration of Indulgence in the churches, which granted greater religious freedom in England, and he was briefly imprisoned in the Tower of London. A few years later he refused to swear allegiance to King William, and he lost his bishopric.

The history of the melody and musical arrangement of this song is more complicated. It began as a tune attributed to the English cellist and composer Samual Stanley (1767-1822), which was made into an 1822 choral arrangement by the Boston composer (and hater of the use of folk harmonies for hymns) Lowell Mason. Mennonite Joseph Funk adapted Masson’s arrangement to make it more lively, and included it in his 1847 hymnal A Compilation of Genuine Church Music, which was changed to a shape-note songbook in 1851 and renamed Harmonia Sacra.

From there, Lowell Mason’s version became a widely-used arrangement for church choirs, and still appears in some hymnals today, but Funk’s lively arrangement became largely forgotten.

Skip ahead to the late 1960s when the Mennonite church decided it was time to update its official 1927 hymnal which did not include the song. They decided to add a slightly revised version of the Mennonite arranger Joseph Funk’s hymn near the end of their new hymnal. It was primarily included for historical interest, but also thinking that it would be a challenging piece for church choirs to include in their repertoires.

The editors never expected this to be sung by congregations. But they have taken to singing it, and doing so “lustily and with good courage” (which is Methodist co-founder John Wesley’s 1761 instruction about how to how to sing hymns.) It is so universally sung by them that it is often now jokingly referred to as the Mennonite National Anthem.

A more recent updating of the official Mennonite hymnal involved some slight changes by the contemporary composer Joseph Barlowe, and the editors chose to put his name on it as the arranger. That is why you usually see the hymn credited to him, rather than the more deserving and now largely forgotten Joseph Funk. The editors also moved it up in the hymnal to be with other anthems, that changed its number in the book. At first, people could not find it there and that resulted in a huge backlash against the new hymnal.

You can find more information about the history of this song here and here. I found many renditions of it sung by congregations on YouTube, but as you have probably noticed I tend to prefer harmony singing that is more intimate. This rendition of 606 is from a YouTube video shot and recorded by Jean Stauffer using her cellphone. It is being sung at a family gathering of the Howard Stauffer family. It was posted to YouTube back in 2017 and I was only the 194^th person to view and listen to it.

Angels We Have Heard on High
This tune version of the famous Christmas carol comes from an undated non-commercial CD, compiled by the Salvation Army’s Canadian and Bermuda Divisions’ Music and Gospel Arts Department as a gift for members. I found it in a thrift store. This arrangement is by Paul Curnow and is played by the Bermuda Divisional Band.

This is another case where the origin story for the song is a bit complicated. Its title is a very loose English translation of the noël’s actual name, Les anges dans nos campagnes (angels on our mountains). The origins of the noël are anonymous, but it is probably from 18^th century France. (More about that later.) Interestingly, the song was first documented in England in 1816. In that year the Scottish poet and James Montgomery published a translation and arrangement of it that he called Angels from the Realms of Glory. The original French tune is still associated with that variant. The noël itself was only first documented in France later, in 1855.

Here is where it gets complicated. In 1862 there was a new anonymous translation, and arrangement published credited to the English organist and composer Henry Thomas Smart. Smart had revised the original melody for that version. That translation did not remain popular for long, but in 1916 an American carol collection used Smart’s tune for yet another anonymous translation, and that is the way that we sing the Angels We Have Heard on High today.

Then there is the further ambiguity related to the anonymity of original French noël. Some music historians think that those lyrics are just too darn good to have come from a folk source, and the melody is too sophisticated. Also, they think that the song’s distinctive descending Gloria in excelsis Deo melisma refrain being in Latin suggests that it was written by an unidentified ecclesiastical composer rather than it being a folk noël. (A melisma is the singing of a single syllable over several notes, creating a fluid and ornamental effect.) As I understand it, melasmas were common in early polyphonic church compositions, but they are not generally found in French folk music. So they argue that the composer is still anonymous, but that person was not just some peasant but an ecclesiastical composer.

If you couldn’t follow all that, don’t worry. This is only an instrumental anyway. But it is an instrumental version of one to the top international-class Christmas carols of all time.

Rolling Downward
This is another song that folklore collector Ian Russell collected from Christmastime pub singing around Sheffield and the Peak District. It is a relatively recent song by the traditional carol pub-singing standards there, having been written by the noted American hymnist Robert Lowry in about 1873 which is when it was first published in Sankey’s Sacred Songs and Solos and called The Angels’ Song.

A reporter once asked Dr. Lowry “Do you write the words to fit the music, or the music to fit the words?” His reply was:

I have no method. Sometimes the music comes and the words follow, fitted insensibly to the melody. I watch my moods, and when anything good strikes me, whether words or music, and no matter where I am, at home or on the street, I jot it down. Often the margin of a newspaper or the back of an envelope serves as a notebook.

My brain is a sort of spinning machine, I think, for there is music running through it all the time. I do not pick out my music on the keys of an instrument. The tunes of nearly all the hymns I have written have been completed on paper before I tried them on the organ. Frequently the words of the hymn and the music have been written at the same time.

This version of Rolling Downward is performed by the renowned squeezebox player and teacher, and one of Northern England’s strongest supporters of preserving the region’s musical heritage, John Kirkpatrick. It is from his 2006 Carolling & Crumpets album, available from his website.

Rolling downward through the midnight
Comes a glorious burst of heavenly song
‘Tis a chorus full of sweetness
And the singers are an angel throng

[Chorus]
Glory, glory in the highest
On the earth goodwill and peace to men
Down the ages, send the echo
Let the glad Earth shout again

Christ the Savior, God’s anointed,
Comes to earth our fearful debt to pay
Child of Mary, man of sorrows
Lamb of God, that takes our sin away. [Chorus]

Wandering shepherds see the glory
Hear the words the shining ones declare
At the manger fall in worship
While the music fills the quivering air [Chorus X 2]

[Note: Technically, these music posts are audio podcasts. I don’t listen to podcasts myself, but I presume that there is a way that you can get your podcast listening app to turn my archive into a big playlist for your Christmas Eve and Christmas Day listening pleasure. That is a total of over twenty hours of this less familiar seasonal music to listen to, with very few repeats. You can see the whole archive by scrolling down the first column and clicking on the small “see all” button.

You can also tip off your friends who might like this music about this opportunity, and they can subscribe to get on my mailing list for next year.]

Today’s playlist

1. At Last I’m Ready for Christmas - Stan Rogers - 3:11

2. That Spirit of Christmas - Ray Charles - 5:09

Music notes

At Last I’m Ready for Christmas
As far as I know, the beloved late Canadian folk singer-songwriter Stan Rogers (1949-’83) only ever recorded two Christmas songs; this lighthearted one and his very poignant First Christmas (away from home). This one is far less well-known than the other one, which has become a folkie Christmas season standard. Perhaps that is because this one is only found on a compilation of concert recordings called From Coffee House to Concert Hall that does not include any of his big hits, which was published by his estate over 15 years after Stan died.

I’m not saying that this is a great song, but it is a rarely heard song by a great singer-songwriter. Here are the lyrics:

Last Boxing Day the wife went out the “White Sales” for to see,
In trunk-load lots bought half-price paper and tinsel for the tree.
I packed it up for use this year in a box I marked so plain.
That stuff would sure be handy now, but it’s never been seen again!

[Chorus]
At last I’m ready for Christmas, I’ve even finished the tree,
At last I’m ready for Christmas, like I thought I’d never be!
With my feet propped up by a good hot fire and a matching inside glow;
At last I’m ready for Christmas, with nearly two hours to go!

We swore this year we’d start off early, no need to rush around;
The intention was to start in August when the prices still were down!
But it was dentist-this and new bike-that and the money melts away;
So I had to wait for Christmas bonus and did it all yesterday!
[Chorus]

We must be fools, just look at that pile, you can hardly see the tree!
We said this year we’d keep things simple, then did our usual spree.
But it feels so good when the kids go nuts! It’s worth the toil and strain.
These kids are only this young once, and they’ll never be so again.
[Chorus]

That Spirit of Christmas
I’ve had this Ray Charles Christmas song in my candidate file for a long time. I had ripped it from his somewhat over-produced 1985 vinyl album called The Spirit of Christmas, which only had a couple of songs that I liked. This track was rather long with its repetitive outro. Length was a significant negative factor back in my space-limited days of cassette and CD Sampler days, and I had to passed up on a lot of good songs. I considered shortening it with a fade out, but doing that to a Ray Charles song, even an overproduced and over-long one, seemed too much like sacrilege.

Now that I am less length constrained, I looked around on YouTube and found this remastered version. While I was at it, I checked the various covers of the song on YouTube that have been recorded by other performers. I must admit that I liked some of their arrangements better than the one that Ray had. But, although the singers tried, none could match the sheer presence and expression of his voice. Oh well, despite being overproduced it is still a great song, and Ray Charles at his Ray Charlesiest.

The song was written by the Motown singers Mabel John, Joel Webster, and Parnell Davison, but Ray Charles’ was the first person to record it.

Christmas is the time of year
For being with the ones we love
Sharing so much joy and cheer.
What a wonderful feelin’
Watching the ones we love
Having so much fun.

I was sittin’ by the fireside
Taking a walk through the snow
Listening to a children’s choir
Singing songs about Jesus
The blessed way that he came to us

[Chorus]
Why can’t it remain
All through the year.
Each day the same.
Ah, that’s what I wanna hear
It’s truly amazin’, that spirit of Christmas.

All the kinfolk gather ‘round
The lovely Christmas tree.
Hearts are glowing full of joy;
Sense the gifts that we’re giving
And the love that we’re living.
[Chorus]

Introduction

In 1761, the Methodist co-founder John Wesley give this instruction for hymn singing:

Sing lustily and with good courage. Beware of singing as if you were half dead, or half asleep, but lift up your voice with strength. Be no more afraid of your voice now, nor more ashamed of its being heard, then when you sung the songs of Satan.

One of my favourite musical activities is participating in twice-a-month singings held by Victoria Sacred Harp where we mostly sing old-style four-part harmony arrangements from a songbook called the Sacred Harp. The above poster invites you to a special singing school that we will be having this February here in Victoria to introduce folks to participating in singing the style of choral music represented in today’s set.

We are not a performance oriented choir, but a casual local group that sings this way for fun, and part of an international movement reviving historical part-singing that does not follow the standard rules of choral harmonization. We mainly sing from a book called the Sacred Harp.

The above poster invites you to join us a for a day of such singing, with a potluck lunch, coming up in February. You do not need to know how to read music, although admittedly that is helpful. You can learn the songs by ear. Although what we sing are Christian hymns, most of us do not view this as a religious experience. It is participation in an authentic choral folk-singing tradition.

Here’s some background: The latter half of the 17th century was the peak of the English Reformation - it was a time when even the singing of religious songs conflicted with Puritan beliefs and only monophonic congregational singing of the Psalms was permitted by the Church of England. All else was considered to be blasphemy.

The words “sacred harp” are a reference to the argument for the alternative concept - that the human voice is God’s musical instrument and it is meant to be used.

Our hymnbook is a collection of 4-part hymn arrangements composed in the style of choral singing that emerged shortly after the Puritan stranglehold over morality had loosened in New England in about 1750. There was a sudden and huge public demand to participate in harmony singing of what came to be called “hymns”. But after over a century of suppression of singing, there were no music teachers, choir masters, or hymn books. There were also no hymn-writers who had been trained in the classic rules of harmony that had been fine-tuned (sorry about the pun!) back during the Baroque era.

The need for someone to write hymns, and lead congregations in the singing of them, was filled by self-taught amateurs who either did not know the classic rules of harmony or chose to ignore them in accordance with the above-quoted instruction. That is the kind of hymns that are in our Sacred Harp songbooks, and which are in today’s music set. As you can hear in these Christmas hymns, the styles of singing that developed back then were rhythmically more varied and had more robust harmonies than what most people associate with hymn singing today.

Playlist

1. Cranbrook (While Shepherds Watched) - Vinyl Café Orchestra - 2:34

2. Sherburne (While Shepherds Watched) - 1959 Lomax remastered - 1:50

3. Shiloh (Methinks I See an Heav’nly Host) - The Elastic Millennium Choir - 3:06

4. Herald Angels - The Oxford Waits & The Mellstock Band - 2:44
   

Music notes

Cranbrook (While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night)
This might be the most fun-to-sing arrangement of While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night. It is mainly notorious for having the same lively tune and semi-fuguing arrangement as the well-known Yorkshire dialect folk song On Ilkla Mooar Baht ‘at (On Ilkley Moor without a hat). But that association is problematic for it as a church hymn. Is a hymn appropriate if people start to giggle when it begins?

Since most people probably learned On Ilkla Mooar Baht ‘at well before they heard this hymn, they might think that this is one of those many cases of church music being based on a folk song. Or they may have heard its legendary origin story that the song was written a group of choirboys who were out on a post-practice ramble and picnic on Ilkley Moor (in West Yorkshire, near Leeds and Bradford) on a chilly day, and they improvised the song based on the melody and choral arrangement of While Shepherds Watched they had been learning.

The tune and arrangement was indeed a hymn written at least 50 years before the humorous folk song with gruesome food-chain logic first appeared. The tune and arrangement, known as Cranbrook (aka Northampton) was written sometime before 1805 by the prolific Methodist, and later Unitarian, hymnist Thomas Clark. Clark’s day-job was as a shoe-maker and he lived his whole life in the city of Canterbury in south-east England,

But Clark did not compose it for Nahum Tate’s poem While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night. He wrote it to accompany Grace ‘tis a charming sound, that was written by the non-conformist poet Philip Doddridge (1702-1751). That lyrics-music combination still appears in various hymnals today.

Clark self-published several hymnals, but they were mainly used only by non-conformist congregations in the south-east of England. It is not at all clear when or how Clark’s tune and arrangement got to Yorkshire, or when his arrangement was first used for While Shepherds Watched. Interestingly, the online sources for information about hymns for use in churches seem to ignore this fun-to-sing arrangement of WSWTFBN, probably because of the giggling problem that I mentioned above.

My guess, and it is only my speculation, is that perhaps it was through pub-singing that the lively and easy-to-sing Cranbrook arrangement got linked to the everyone-knows-the-lyrics Christmas hymn. We have already seen how Yorkshire pub singers near Sheffield preserved early hymns as pub songs, including several versions of While Shepherds Watched, after the churches installed organs and abandoned the rousing early “west gallery” style of singing in favour of silky smooth hymns that conformed to the classic rules of harmony.

During and after that transition the singing of the old hymns as pub-singing was widespread in England, not just around Sheffield, Cornwall and a few other rural places. I can easily envision this hymn-tune combination going viral in pubs from town to town across the country, which would solve the mystery of how it got from Canterbury all the way up to Yorkshire.

The late Dr Arnold Kellett, who studied Yorkshire dialects, determined that On Ilkla Mooar baht ‘at is in the specific dialect of people who live around Halifax, just west of Leeds. He recounts without judgement the legend of the song’s choirboy origins, but noting that no particular town’s church or singing school is identified in the story, and that the folk song’s lyrics were not documented until 1916. At that time it was described as “a dialect song which, for at least two generations past, has been sung in all parts of the West Riding of Yorkshire.” From that information he placed its origin as being not later than 1877.

Continuing with my speculation, the Ilkla Mooar baht ‘at origin legend is possible but with Grace ‘tis a charming sound having been the hymn that the choirboys had been practicing. Alternatively, perhaps there may never were any choirboys. Some pub singer set the While Shepherds Watched hymn to Clark’s lively tune and arrangement, and it went viral. From there, some mischievous rapscallion (choirboy or not) wrote the parody Ilkla Mooar baht ‘at lyrics. We certainly know that they went viral, first in Yorkshire, and then internationally in the 1960s.

Whatever its history, it sure is a fun song to listen to, as well as to sing a cappella, and that is why one of Canada’s favourite radio hosts, the late Stuart McLean, enticed the members of his Vinyl Café Orchestra to sing it on his Dec 13, 1996 Christmas Show. The singers here are Ian Bell (lead), Rick Avery, Judy Greenhill, Anne Lederman, Kate Murphy, and Oliver Schroer. I got it from a Vinyl Café Productions CD released in 1997. Here are the full six verses of the original song:

While shepherds watched their flocks by night,
All seated on the ground,
The angel of the Lord came down,
And glory shone around.

“Fear not,” said he for mighty dread
Had seized their troubled mind
“Glad tidings of great joy I bring
To you and all mankind.

“To you, in David’s town, this day
Is born of David’s line
A Savior, who is Christ the Lord;
And this shall be the sign:

“The heavenly babe you there shall find
To human view displayed,
All simply wrapped in swathing bands
And in a manger laid.”

Thus spoke the angel, and forthwith
Appeared a shining throng
Of angels praising God, who thus
Addressed their joyful song:

“All glory be to God on high,
And to the earth be peace;
Goodwill henceforth from heav’n to men
Begin and never cease.”

Sherburne (While Shepherds Watched)
For many years I had a policy of not repeating the same rendition of songs. Well, not on purpose anyway. Then, two years ago I said that I would begin allowing myself to repeat renditions that had been on my cassette or CD Samplers here on my online Bill’s Midwinter Music series. But I would not repeat renditions that I had already posted online (well, not on purpose anyway.)

This selection is cutting it pretty close. Just last year on Dec 23 I posted a version of Sherburne (page 186 in the Sacred Harp songbook) that the folk music collector Alan Lomax had recorded at the United Sacred Harp Annual Convention in 1959. But now I found this recording on YouTube of a better quality, higher resolution recording of the same song being sung at the same group’s 1999 annual convention. It gives a more accurate impression of what it sounds like to be in the middle of a Sacred Harp square leading the singers. It really brings up the tenor melody and the bass harmony parts. As a bass myself, I like that.

As is common with Sacred Harp singing, only the first two verses are sung here.

Shiloh (Methinks I See an Heav’nly Host)
Both the words and music for this piece were written by William Billings (1746-1800). Billings was a Boston tanner who also held the civic post of scavenger for the city of Boston (i.e., he was responsible for removing dead animals from the streets.) He came from a poor family. His father had died when he was 14 years old, and he had to quit school to support his family.

Billings had one eye, and one of his legs was shorter than the other. According to a contemporary description of him, he did not have a winning manner but he did have a strong addiction to snuff and “… an uncommon negligence of person. Still, he spake & sung & thought as a man above the common abilities.” Billings was a good friend of the revolutionary instigators Sam Adams and Paul Revere, leading to speculation that he might have been one of the participants in the Boston Tea Party (which happened when he was 27 years old.)

According to an authoritative introduction to a compilation of Billings’ compositions:

The Boston into which William Billings was born on October 7, 1746, was a busy, thriving seaport town of over 15,000 inhabitants. It was the largest city in the British American colonies, and the center of commerce and trade for one of the colonies’ most populous areas. … The proximity of Harvard College, across the Charles River in Cambridge, added an intellectual aura to Boston’s reputation.

However, in spite of its position as a commercial and intellectual center, Boston’s Puritan origins still weighed heavily upon public activities. Although the Puritan oligarchy of the seventeenth century had passed into history, the clergy still exerted an important and often decisive influence on the affairs of the town. …

Boston’s reputation as a center of sacred music is well known, although again the public record can only suggest the extent of the activity. One can claim that the practice of sacred music was widespread, but there is no reason to believe that music-making in Boston churches was of a high artistic calibre. The principal churches were Congregational, and reformed Calvinists had traditionally opposed instrumental, polyphonic choral, or florid solo vocal music in public worship. Only the singing of Psalms in verse by the entire congregation was an authorized musical part of worship services.

Prejudice against harmonized choral music weakened somewhat during the mid-eighteenth century, and choirs of singers appeared in many churches. Originally designed as a group of experienced singers to lead and support congregational singing, the choir on special occasions was sometimes permitted to sing an anthem before or after the service.

Opposition to instrumental and solo vocal music continued into the nineteenth century in most Congregational churches. …

In addition to his day jobs as a tanner and scavenger, Billings became a largely self-taught choir leader, composer and publisher, issuing six volumes of his music. He served as the choir director for several Congregational and reformed-Calvinist churches, and occasionally organized singing schools. Billings usually wrote the airs (tunes) and arrangements for established texts, such as the poetry of British poet laureates Isaac Watts and Nathum Tate, but he wrote the words for Shiloh himself.

Actually, this is one of two arrangement that he published with these lyrics. He had earlier used almost exactly the same text for a choral arrangement named Boston (abridged version here). That had appeared in his 1778 hymnbook The Singing Master’s Assistant and he had to vigorously defend the biblical validity of its lyrics to the elders of several congregations.

But over the next few years he developed an idea for this other arrangement for those words that had already been found acceptable. That is how this hymn arrangements came to be published in his 1786 hymnbook The Suffolk Harmony. It is performed here by the short-lived Canadian ensemble The Elastic Millennium Choir that was based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. It is from their 1997 album An Old Canadian Christmas.

This song isn’t in the version of the Sacred Harp songbook that we usually use for our singings, but it is in Karen Willard’s An American Christmas Harp songbook that we sometimes sing hymns from.

Methinks I see an heav’nly host,
Of angels on the wing!
Methinks I hear their cheerful notes,
So merrily they sing.

Let all your fears be banish’d hence,
Glad tidings I proclaim;
For there’s a savior born today,
And Jesus is His name.

Lay down your crooks, and quit your flocks,
To Bethlehem repair;
And let your wand’ring steps be squar’d
By yonder shining star.

Seek not in courts or palaces,
Nor royal curtains draw;
But search the stable, see your God
Extended on the straw.

Then learn from hence ye rural swains,
The meekness of your God,
Who left the boundless realms of joy
To ransom you with blood.

The master of the inn refus’d,
A more commodious place;
Ungen’rous soul of savage mould,
And destitute of grace.

Exult ye oxen, low for joy,
Ye tenants of the stall,
Pay your obeisance, on your knees
Unanimously fall.

The Royal Guest you entertain,
Is not of common birth,
But second to the Great I Am,
The God of heav’n and earth.

Then suddenly a heav’nly host,
Around the shepherds throng,
Exulting in the threefold God
And thus address their song.

To God the Father, Christ the Son,
And Holy Ghost ador’d:
The First and Last, the Last and First,
Eternal praise afford, eternal praise afford.

Let all your fears be banish’d,
Glad tidings I proclaim;
For there’s a savior born today,
And Jesus is His name.

Herald Angels
The famous Christmas carol Hark! The Herald Angels Sing as we know it today is the product of many hands over many years, but its history too is well documented. The song was first published in Hymns and Sacred Poems in 1739 under the title Hymn for Christmas-Day. It had been written by the influential preacher, and composer of almost 9000 hymns and poems, Charles Wesley, who with his brother John was one of the founders of Methodism.

Wesley’s opening couplet was: “Hark how all the welkin rings / Glory to the King of Kings.” Even at the time, the word welkin was a rather archaic expression meaning the sky or the heavens. Charles Wesley said that the song was inspired by having heard the joyous sound of London’s bells while walking to church on Christmas morning.

In 1753, a fellow preacher and poet who was a close associate of the Wesleys published the song in his new hymnbook, but he changed those first two lines to the ones we know today. Seven years after that, more words of the hymn were revised by the Rev Martin Madan. Another hymnodist dropped two verses, and another one added a refrain. But still, the song remained only modestly popular.

The problem was not in the words, but the melody. It wasn’t that the arrangement composed by Charles Wesley was a dud – it was the same superb one that is now commonly affixed to Wesley’s celebrated Easter anthem Christ the Lord is Risen Today! But for some reason that triumphal tune just did not work well with the words, and so even with the massaging of the lyrics the hymn still wasn’t widely sung.

Several composers tried to write a better tune for it over the years. A few of those variants still survive in the British pub-singing and west gallery tradition, but mostly they are now only known because of their survival on the shelves of archives. One of the unsuccessful variants is this one composed by “J. Massey” that has the tune name Radiance. He published it in Manchester in 1840. I cannot find any information online about J. Massey.

Then, finally, in 1855 an English organist named William Hayman Cummings matched it with an arrangement that the finely-polished lyrics deserve. He didn’t compose the arrangement himself. He just slightly-adjusted the arrangement of an obscure choral work that the German composer Felix Mendelssohn had written in 1840 to celebrate the 400^th anniversary of the invention of the printing press. That arrangement immediately caught the public’s favour! It soon was widely published in just about every subsequent hymn book. (The concept of copyright was meaningless in those days.) The song soon left the liturgical world of church hymns to become one of the world’s most popular Christmas carols.

The melody and lyrics were not an obvious match. According to Christmas music historian William Studwell:

… it is one of the strangest of carols. It is, in fact, the most peculiar piece from the top musical echelon of Christmas. In addition to its singular history which necessitated five major contributors, it is artistically odd, as well. The superlative tune, among the very best associated with any Christmas song, is actually an uncarol-like military-type march.

While most carols fall into one of three types – the jolly Yuletide song, the tranquil nativity hymn, or the stately religious processional – Hark! is in contrast a rousing, fast paced, dynamic, unhesitating, unpausing, breathtaking march in 4/4 time. Its bold, stirring, powerful, rapidly cadenced strides vigorously transport the singer or listener on a confident wave of martial music which loudly and joyfully proclaims the story of Christ’s birth. …

Studwell goes on to note that every verse is “saturated with religious doctrine” but “notwithstanding this overdose of theology” the quality of poetry of the time-polished lyrics, especially the first verse, is exceptional, and that the tone and rhythm of the words are musically very much in sync with the melody. He concludes:

And this is the most crucial consideration, for although we cannot ignore the carol’s peculiarities and limitations, its fundamental reasons for existence are not to serve the purposes of the critic or analyst but to be sung, to be enjoyed, and to inspire. All three of these aspirations, certainly, are fully and continually achieved, season, after season, after season.

So, after all that big build-up why am I not giving you the Mendelssohn version? Because you will undoubtedly be hearing that one other times during this Christmas season, but I can confidently predict that you won’t hear this “loser” J. Massey version which repeats the last two lines of each verse instead of using the standard refrain elsewhere.

This recording is by The Oxford Waits & The Mellstock Band, and is from their 2000 album Hey for Christmas. Here are the full lyrics of the song:

Hark! The herald angels sing
Glory to the newborn King!
Peace on earth, and mercy mild
God and sinners reconciled

Joyful, all ye nations rise
Join the triumph of the skies
With th’ angelic host proclaim
Christ is born in Bethlehem!

Christ, by highest heav’n adored
Christ, the everlasting Lord!
Late in time behold Him come
Offspring of a virgin’s womb

Veiled in flesh the Godhead see
Hail th’ incarnate Deity
Pleased with us in flesh to dwell
Jesus, our Emmanuel

Hail the heav’n-born Prince of Peace
Hail the Son of Righteousness
Light and life to all He brings
Ris’n with healing in His wings

Mild He lays His glory by
Born that we no more may die
Born to raise us from the earth
Born to give us second birth

The Carol Singers, painted by William M. Spittle in 1893 (image source)

Playlist

1. Broadwood Wassail Coope Boyes & Simpson et al. 2:48

2. A Wassail Tune (Chestnut) Baltimore Consort 1:44

3. Gower Wassail Quadriga Consort 3:27

Music notes

Broadwood Wassail
I got this from the 2011 album Fire and Sleet and Candlelight published in Britain by the NoMasters Co-op folk music label founded by John Tams and Jim Boyes. The singers are Barry Coope, Jim and Georgina Boyes, Lester Simpson, and sisters Jo Freya and Fi Fraser.

This wassail song was documented earlier than most of the other wassails we know today. It was written down by Rev. John Broadwood and privately published in 1843 in his booklet with the unwieldly title: Old English Songs as now sung by the peasantry of the Weald of Surry and Sussex and collected by one who has learnt them by hearing them sung every Christmas from early childhood by the country people, who go about to the Neighbouring Houses, singing or “Wassailing” as it is called, at that season.

Song-catchers preferably document from whom they get the songs they collect, and they have tended to name wassails either after the places from which they were collected or with their opening words. Those conventions had not yet been established in 1843, and Rev. Broadwood did not give any names to his songs or identify specific locations for the wassails in his booklet. On the album Coope Boyes & Simpson et al. named this one Broadwood Wassail after its collector, but other artists who have recorded it have called it Sussex Wassail, A Wassail A Wassail, and simply Our Wassail.

[Update: I was so focused on the lyrics that I hadn’t noticed that it is set to the tune to God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen until Avery drew my attention to that in the comments after I posted this. All of the recorded versions under their various names use that same familiar melody, so I presume that Rev Broadwood documented that the local wassail song was sung that way (although that is also possible that that is a setting that someone suggested when Rev Braidwood’s 1843 booklet was first discovered and everyone has been following that suggestion.) It was quite common in earlier times for new songs to be set to already-familiar melodies.

God Rest Ye Merry is clearly the older of the two songs. It is widely acknowledged to date back to London in medieval times as a song that was sung by that city’s Waits, or night security guards. Those urban roots are significant. From the city, that song spread to the countryside, and there are a number of variations on it with its very religious lyrics that have been collected from rural areas. That makes it quite unlike almost all songs that have the word “wassail” in them, which rarely have any lyrics related to the nativity story.

Those lyrics might have been sung by rural wassailers, especially when they were visiting someone who was known to be very religious, but God Rest Ye Merry isn’t a wassail song as such. The songs well-documented antiquity was one of the main reasons that Victorian era people believed that there had been a practice of Christmas caroling with religious songs in medieval times.

Searches for more examples of such songs turned up too few examples of them to support that theory, although they did find a few more true medieval carols with religious lyrics such as The First Nowell and Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day.]

Here are the lyrics:

A wassail, a wassail, a wassail we begin
With sugar plums and cinnamon and other spices in.

Chorus (after each verse):
With a wassail, a wassail, a jolly wassail,
And may joy come to you and to our wassail.

Good master and good mistress, if you will so incline,
Come send us out your roast beef, like wise you Christmas chine.

If you’ve any maids within your house, as I suppose you’ve none,
They’d not let us stand a-wassailing so long on this cold stone.

For we’ve wassailed all this day long, and nothing could we find,
But an owl in an ivy bush and her we left behind.

We’ll cut a toast all round the loaf, and set it by the fire,
We’ll wassail bees and apple trees, unto your heart’ s desire.

Our purses they are empty, our purses they are thin,
They lack a little silver to line ’em well within.

Hang out your silver tankard upon your golden spear,
We’ll come no more a-wassailing, until another year.

A Wassail Tune (Chestnut)
The name of this dance melody might be a bit of a stretch, because its use for wassailing appears to be somewhat speculative. But since this recording comes from the Baltimore Consort’s 1994 album Bright Day Star: Music for the Yuletide Season, and that authenticity-oriented Early Music group both named it as such and included it on their Yuletide album is a good enough excuse for me to include it here.

The tune is for an English country dance that is called Chestnut (or Dove’s Figary) in John Playford’s important 1651 tunebook The English Dancing Master, which was subtitled Plaine and easie Rules for the Dancing of Country Dances, with the Tune to each Dance. The speculation about the tune’s use for wassailing was in music historian and folklorist Margaret Dean-Smith’s commentary for her facsimile edition of that book. There, she alludes to the tune’s use as a wassail song along with several other possibilities.

In the liner notes, this arrangement is described as their reworking of a three-part setting of Playford’s melody-only tune by Marshall Barron, from his 1986 tune-book Early Playford for Early Instruments.

Gower Wassail
was collected by A.L. Lloyd from the remote Gower Peninsula on the south-west coast of Wales, near Swansea. It came from the singing of Phil Tanner (1862-1950) when that great repository of folklore was 75 years old. Lloyd included it in his 1967 songbook Folk Song in England. I included a different rendition of this song in my Dec 21, 2022 newsletter/blog posting and there I gave a fairly detailed report about both the wassail and Phil Tanner, so I won’t repeat that information here. That posting also includes an essay about the roots of wassailing and other luck-visit songs and rituals.

This version is by the Austrian ensemble Quadriga Consort who specialize in bringing early British music to the continent, where for the most part the music is not familiar and is considered rather exotic. It is from their 1012 CD On a Cold Winter’s Day, which is subtitled Early Christmas Music and Carols from the British Isles. The singer is Elizabeth Kaplan.

A-wassail, a-wassail throughout this town,
Our cup it is white and our ale it is brown.
Our wassail is made of the good ale and true,
Some nutmeg and ginger, it’s the best we can do .

Chorus (after each verse):
Fol-dee-dol, fol-dee-dol-dee-dol,
Fol-dee-dol-dee-dol, fol-dee-dol-dee-dee,
Fol-dee-derol, fol-dee-der-dee,
Sing too-ra-li-doh.

Our wassail is made of the elderberry bough,
And so my good neighbours, we’ll drink unto thou,
Besides all on earth, you’ll have apples in store,
Pray let us come in for it’s cold by the door.

We hope that your apples will prosper and bear
So we may have cider when we call here next year.
And where you have one barrel we hope you have ten
So we can have cider when we come here again

There’s a master and a mistress sitting down by the fire
While we poor wassail boys do wait in the mire.
And you pretty maid with your silver-headed pin,
Please open the door and let us come in.

We know by the moon that we are not too soon,
And we know by the sky that we are not too high.
We know by the stars that we are not too far,
And we know by the ground that we are within sound.

We jolly wassail boys are growing weary and cold,
Drop a bit of small silver into our old bowl,
And if we’re alive for another New Year,
Perhaps we may call and see who does live here.

Playlist

1. Winter Solstice Song - Rosemary Beland - 1:11

2. Solstice Evergreen - Spiral Dance - 4:49

3. Light is Returning – KIVA - 3:13

4. Gaia’s Grace - Penny Sidor - 0:55

Music notes

Winter Solstice Song
A winterborne is a seasonal stream that dries up in the summertime. That is also the name of an all-instrumental album recorded in 1996 by Victoria BC musicians Rosemary Beland and the late Mark Bracken (1947-2014). This is a hammer dulcimer solo by Rosemary.

The tune is a Hungarian folk song that was collected by Béla Bartók. Bartók is primarily now remembered as having been one of the most important early 20^th century composers, but he was also an important collector of Hungarian, Slovak and Bulgarian folk music. He was one of the pioneers of comparative musicology, which later became known as ethnomusicology. The great American folk music scholar Charles Seeger (who I tend to think of as Ruth’s husband, rather than as Pete’s father) described him as “one of the greatest field collectors of the first half of the 20th century.”

Bartók was a good friend and colleague of fellow Hungarian composer and music educator Zoltán Kodály, creator of the Kodály method of music education, who also was an important collector of Hungarian folk songs. The name of this piece is Regös ének (Winter solstice song). It is one of several practice pieces based on Hungarian and Slovak folk music that Bartók composed in 1908 or ‘09 specifically for Kodály’s teaching method under the title Gyermekeknek (For Children).

Bartók’s score for this piece includes the instruction that it be played molto vivace (very lively). You can see it being played on a piano by a student here.

Solstice Evergreen
I just discovered the pagan folk-rock band Spiral Dance this year. They are based in Adelaide, Australia so the winter solstice that they sing about occurs on June 21. The group was formed in 1992 and their membership has evolved quite a bit over the years, but they have always had Adrienne Piggott as their songwriter and lead singer. This is one of her compositions. It comes from their 2006 album The Quickening, but I got it from their having posted it on YouTube. But if you want to watch a well-done slideshow while listening to it again, I recommend this independent fan video posted by Denise Kelsey which also has the same high-bitrate quality of sound.

It came as a scene from an old picture postcard
Of Victorian ladies with skates on their feet
Of ponds frozen over and boughs hung with ice tips
And through frosty panes watched the snow and the sleet

And the smoke ventured out from the soot-blackened chimneys
And shimmered beneath an icy-cold moon
But inside an evergreen stands in the corner
And a bright blazing fire to keep out the gloom

[Chorus]
There’s holly and ivy and white mistle berry
The sun is in hiding, his face he can’t show
So, fill up your glasses so we can be merry
While rosy-red cheeks by the fire light glow

Under the street lights, they’ll gather together
Their shivering voices will ring out with song
To sing in the Yule regardless of weather
And brighten the darkness all the night long

And the mummers perform their plays from the ages
In comes King George, a man of courage bold
While out in the orchards, we’ll go wassailing
And sup on spiced cider to keep out the cold
[Chorus]

The holly and oak king are now changing places
And Jack Frost is wearing his new winter vest
While out in the wood pile, old Jack Green is sleeping
To awaken in spring from his long dreamy rest

So on this Yule tide, we’ll gather together
Beneath the sign of the ancient god’s horns
As the new year beckons through cold misty weather
We’ll raise a toast as the sun is reborn
[Chorus]

It came as a scene from an old picture postcard
Of Victorian ladies with skates on their feet
Of ponds frozen over and boughs hung with ice tips
And through frosty panes watched the snow and the sleet

And the smoke ventured out from the soot-blackened chimneys
And shimmered beneath an icy-cold moon
But inside an evergreen stands in the corner
And a bright blazing fire to keep out the gloom
[Chorus]

Light is Returning
This song, which is eminently suitable to be a spiral dance chant, was written by the late singer-songwriter and social activist Charlie Murphy (1953-2016). Charlie lived with his husband on Whidby Island in Washington State. According to his obituary in the Seattle Times: “He was a pioneer of the men’s movement and sang openly about gay rights, making him one of the few out and proud gay singer/songwriters of his day.” He was also life-long social activist and an out-and-proud pagan.

Light is returning
Even though it is the darkest hour
No one can hold...
Back the dawn

Got to keep it burning
Got to keep the light of hope alive
Make safe our journey...
Through the storm

Our planet is turning
Circle on her path around the sun
Earth Mother is calling...
Her children home

I first learned this song as a member of Victoria’s Gettin’ Higher Choir when Charlie was the guest performer for a 2002 benefit concert that we gave as a fund raising event for Power of Hope. That is an organization he and Peggy Taylor co-founded which organizes summer-camps to empower youth to become social activists through the arts. At that concert, I and a couple of hundred other singers backed him up when he sang a jazzy rendition of the song. (A recording of that performance was included on my Bill’s 2010 Solstice Sampler CD. I’ll post it here someday.)

Light is Returning has become a familiar song on Winter Solstice music recordings. One measure of its success is that it is included in the songbook Rise Up Singing – being included there is like making it into the Folk Music Songwriter Hall of Fame.

It is sung here by KIVA, a Washington DC based group that was founded 35 years ago. They do not describe themselves as pagan or neo-pagan, but they: “weave a rainbow tapestry of ancient cultures and natural imagery into energizing mystical folk music for all ages.” It is from their 2014 album Yuletide. They got this feedback about their version of the song from Charlie himself:

Wow! It’s wonderful and such a creative rendition of the song. I love the rhythm, the vocals... Wow.

Gaia’s Grace
This mealtime grace song was written by the late Becky Berson (1953-2000) who was born and raised in Salt Lake City, but moved to the Pacific Northwest by way of Oregon’s Willamette Valley, and then to Victoria where she became a leader in our local folk music community. It is sung here by Penny Sidor and is from a posthumous tribute album to Becky that was self-produced by her widower Denis Donnelly with performances by a Who’s Who of Vancouver Island and the adjacent small islands’ folksingers.

I already posted this song on my Dec 8, 2021 posting, but although it is a pre-meal grace song I thought that its message is the best way to end today’s Winter Solstice set.

Playlist

1. Let Us See the Beauty - Laurence Cole and friends - 2:39

2. Winter Solstice Chant - Susan T. Mashiyama - 3:13

3. Gaia, Carry Us Home - MotherTongue - 3:29

Music notes

Let Us See the Beauty
Laurence Cole didn’t write this to be a Winter Solstice song – it is an Every Day sort of song. On the front page of his website he explains why he composes this kind of music:

Part of my mission is to re-acquaint people with their birthright and natural ability to make beautiful and meaningful sound together. Most of the songs I’ve written are short, easy to learn, chant-like songs with several layers that fit over and around each other in interesting and pleasurable rhythmic and harmonic challenges that make them fun to sing. Group singing is one of the most ancient and primal “technologies of belonging” that we humans have been using since our earliest times, possibly before speech itself.

When we make joyous and passionate song together, it nourishes our souls and offers an enlivening gift back to the natural world that made us and gives us our sustenance and our very being. When such an exchange is genuinely made, and the song finds its natural ending, often there is a sweet, lively silence in which we simply stand and hold the “enchantment,” the sense of deep and genuine communion amongst each other and with the whole living world.

Laurence’s website is filled with inspiring songs like this, and he keeps adding more. And he doesn’t just post performances like this one. He has tracks for each of the separate parts in the voice ranges that suit them – soprano, alto, tenor, bass – to aide people in learning how to sing his songs. He also tells the stories behind their origin, and sometimes he even gives instructions of how they can be used as a ritual dance.

All of Laurence’s music is freely available to use. Again, in his words:

It’s the traveling of these songs that gives me the greatest joy. A multi-track recording with only a few voices is not nearly the same magic as many diverse voices singing together. It’s that large and lustrous group expression that gives us a sense of what the word “Universe” really means, “Unity midst diversity.” My fondest dream is that you take these songs and share and teach them with your groups and communities, workshops, festivals, rituals, families, etc.

The page for this song is here. His explanation for its origin that is that it is based on a fragment from a poem called The Invitation written by Oriah Mountain Dreamer. The poem is on the front page of her website. It begins:

It doesn’t interest me
what you do for a living.
I want to know
what you ache for,
and if you dare to dream
of meeting your heart’s longing.

It doesn’t interest me
how old you are.
I want to know
if you will risk
looking like a fool
for love
for your dream
for the adventure of being alive.

Reading the poem helped me to understand Laurence’s much more focused musical poetry: In its second part (the higher voices) he skips the “it doesn’t interest me” preamble and gets right to the nub of the matter: “I want know if you can see the beauty, even when it’s not pretty every day.”

The song only has two parts:

Part One:
Let us see the beauty every day
And source our lives from its presence.

Part Two:
I want to know if you can see the beauty
Even when it’s not pretty every day.
I want to know if you can see the beauty
And source your life from its presence.

In his notes about the song Laurence says: “This is also a song that is lifted up by little improvisational embellishments. Have fun!”

Winter Solstice Chant
I just discovered this one on YouTube a few days ago. I was looking for songs and tunes using “winter solstice” as my search phrase. That is a trick that I only recently began doing: Back when my annual Christmas and Midwinter music Samplers were on cassette, and then on CD, I almost always only posted music from my own album collection, or ones that had been sent to me by other Christmas music collectors. Mind you, back in those days YouTube mostly had low quality, low-bitrate copies of the music that fans had ripped from their vinyl or CD albums. These days, it is the performers themselves or their album labels who often post high-bitrate versions of their recordings online.

When I first saw the YouTube video of this song, after a lone-player Celtic harp introduction the image went into a multi-person mosaic of harpists and singers. That format of posting songs became so familiar during the Covid “social isolation” years of 2020 and ’21 that I immediately thought that it must have been made at that time. It was only when I opened the attributions and saw that it had been posted in 2018 that I looked at the people more closely and saw that they were all the same person!

The composer, musician and singers are all Susan T. Mashiyama who posts as susansharpsongs. Besides being a harpist and singer-songwriter, she is a music teacher and Unitarian-Universalist congregation music director who lives in the San Francisco Bay area.

Normally, unless songs are in a foreign language I’m pretty fussy about selecting ones that have sufficiently good enunciation that you can follow their lyrics without having to read them. That means I tend to avoid recordings like this that have heavy reverb or breathy singers. But the interlocking countermelodies and fuguing turned spellbinding, and reading the lyrics hooked me:

[Chorus]
Chant the seasons all around us
These words never will be stayed
As the chestnut falls in silence
We will catch the wind inside a whisper and a prayer
Sleep and dream ye of peace

Now the day turns into darkness
As the sunlight starts to fade
Winter Solstice is upon us
And the twilight stars are sparkling upon the air
Chanting of trees
Chorus

All the leaves are softly blowing
Brown and red and gold they rustle everywhere
‘Tis the season to go softly
Still into the night and keep each other in our care
Go now in peace

Gaia, Carry Us Home
MotherTongue was a performance group affiliated with the non-profit organization EarthSpirit based in New England. That is a neo-pagan organization founded in 1977 dedicated to the preservation and development of Earth-centered spirituality, culture and community.

The word “pagan” comes from the Latin word paganus, meaning “country dweller” or “rustic”. Throughout the world, agricultural people have equated God with nature, and developed animist religious beliefs that honour Nature itself as it is embodied in the spirits of trees, places, animals and all things.

Part of pagan belief is veneration for, and the marking of, nature’s cycle of changing seasons. The people of what we now call northern Europe likened the annual cycle to the turning of a wheel: Indeed, the word Yule is believed to derive from the Saxon word for “wheel”. (I don’t know what they called the midwinter season before that late Neolithic or early Bronze Age technology was first introduced to northern Europe in the 4th century BCE.)

Our continuing tradition of Christmas decorating with circular wreaths made from evergreen boughs is rooted in this imagery. In fact, almost all of what we think of as traditional Christmas customs are descended from pagan rites and rituals, for the simple reason that until quite recently most European people were country-folk. Their animist beliefs lingered despite Christianization. I wrote a whole series of essays about that, called Ancient Origins, which I posted with my 2021 songs-of-the-day mailings beginning here.

While EarthSpirit is still in operation, MotherTongue appears to now be disbanded; at least, I cannot find evidence online of recent concerts or recordings by them. They appear to have been active from the early 1990s to about 2007. This song came from their excellent 1994 album This Winter’s Night: A Celebration of the Winter Solstice. The song was written in 1992 by Abbi Spinner & J. Magnus McBride, who were musicians with MotherTongue’s band. The intertwining lyrics are:

Gaia, carry us home.
Mother, we are one.
Remember the god,
Remember yourself,
Remember the goddess,
Remember.

Playlist

1. Husbandman and Servingman Andy Turner and Ian Giles 4:20

2. Serving Girl’s Holiday Felicia Dale 4:53

Music notes

Husbandman and Servingman
This dialog between a farmer and a footman from the manor is representative of might have been common style of mummers’ song in the 19^th century. This one is from the southwest Dorset village of Symondsbury. It’ lyrics are from a detailed published account of that community’s 1880 mummers play. In 1951 that documentation, as well as remembrances from community elders, was used to revive the mummer play tradition that had been discontinued several years earlier. A similar song was collected from William Walton of Adderbury, in Oxfordshire. Today’s variant was collected independently by folklorist Peter Kennedy sometime before 1956 from the singing of brothers Fred and Ray Cantwell of Standlake, also in Oxfordshire.

But the roots of such songs might go back to quite a bit earlier. Mummers plays were often performed on Boxing Day, when servants in the manor houses and other employees of the landed gentry were traditionally given the day off so that they could celebrate Christmas with their families. For some of the families it was an opportunity to all go out mumming together. According to the Mainly Folk website: “In Shakespeare’s time most English villages had their local amateur acting companies, who … performed traditional dramas in the streets or the halls of great houses.”

One can readily imagine dialogs such as this being held, and parodied, between the family members who continued to live an agricultural lifestyle and those who had left that life behind to become maids or footmen in the local manor. Would this kind of family rivalry/teasing have been different in medieval times?

The song is sung here by Ian Giles and Andy Turner, and is from Magpie Lane’s 1993 inaugural album The Oxford Ramble. That band is still going strong, and both Ian and Andy are still performing with them.

Well met, well met, my friend, all on the highway riding,
Though simply together here we stand.
I pray now tell to me of what calling you may be,
And art thou not a servant man?

Oh no, my brother dear, what makes thee to inquire
Of any such thing from my hand?
Indeed I will not ‘frain, but I will tell you plain:
I am a downright husbandman. [repeat last 2 lines as a refrain]

Well, if an husbandman you be, will you come along with me,
Though freely together here we stand.
For in a very short space I may take you to a place
Where you may be a servant man.

As to thy diligence, I give thee many thanks,
But nought do I require from thy hand.
But I pray now to me show wherefore that I may know
The pleasures of a servingman. [repeat last 2 lines]

Well, isn’t it a nice thing to ride out with the king,
With lords and dukes and any such men;
For to hear the horn to blow and see the hounds all in a row,
That’s pleasures of a servant man.

But my pleasure’s more than that, to see my oxen fat
And a good stock of hay by them stand;
With me plowing and me sowing, and me reaping and me mowing,
That’s pleasures of an husbandman. [repeat last 2 lines]

But then we do eat such delicate fine meat
Of goose, and of capon, and of swan;
Our pastry’s also fine, we drink sugar in our wine,
That’s diet for a servant man.

As to the ducks and capons, give I my beans and bacon,
And a good drop of ale now and then;
For in a farmer’s house you will find both brawn and souse,
That’s diet for an husbandman. [repeat last 2 lines]

And then we do wear the finest of grandeur,
Our coats are trimmed with fur all around;
Our shirts as white as milk, and our stockings made of silk:
That’s clothing for a servant man.

As to thy grandeur give I the coat I wear
Some bushes to ramble among;
Give to me me good greatcoat, and in my purse a grout,
That’s clothing for an husbandman. [repeat last 2 lines]

Kind sir, I must confess although it causes me distress
To grant to you the uppermost hand;
Although it is most painful, it is altogether gainful
And I wish I’d been an husbandman.

And so now, good people all, both be you great and small,
Honour the king of our land;
And let us, whatsoever, to do our best endeavour,
For to maintain an husbandman. [repeat last 2 lines]

Serving Girl’s Holiday
is much older than that other song. This is an abridged version, and translated into modern English, of a song from the 14^th or 15^th century. Its lyrics are in a book published in 1952 called Secular lyrics of the XIVth and XVth centuries by the respected scholar of old- and middle-English literature and music Prof. Rossell Hope Robbins. As the title suggests, Dr. Robbins’ book only has the lyrics, with no melody. I presume that if I bothered to do so, I could find the source where he found the song online.

Maddy Prior got it from an unidentified book that included this poetic translation of the lyrics from Prof. Robbins’ book. She shortened it and set the lyrics to the melody of a 12^th century Latin song Orientis Partibus (hear that here.) Orientis Partibus is a parody song that was sung in Sens, France on the Christmas season’s topsy-turvy day, when roles were reversed and a choir boy officiated as the bishop. That custom was a survivor from how the Romans had celebrated Saturnalia over 1000 years before then.

This song, with Maddy’s setting, has been covered by several folksingers and groups. Here it is sung by Felicia Dale accompanying herself on the hurdy-gurdy. Felicia and her partner William Pint perform as Pint &Dale and are based in Seattle, Washington. They are primarily known for performing nautical songs, which is I how I came to learn about them. This is from an out-of-print 5-song holiday EP called Eight Bells that they released in 2009 .

I’ve waited longing for today:
Spindle, bobbin and spool, away!
In joy and bliss I’m off to play
Upon this high-o holiday.

CHORUS (repeated after each verse):
And spindle, bobbin and spool, away,
For joy that it’s a holiday!

The dirt upon the floor’s unswept,
The fireplace isn’t cleaned and kept.
I haven’t cut the rushes yet
Upon this high-o holiday.

In pails the milk has got to go;
I have to spread this bowl of dough —
It clogs my nails and fingers so
As I knead this high-o holiday.

The cooking herbs I must fetch in
And fix my kerchief under my chin.
Darling Jack, lend me a pin
To fix me well this holiday!

And when we stop beside the track
At the inn, this Sunday, Jack
Will whet my whistle and pay my whack
As on every holiday.

I’ve waited longing for today:
Spindle, bobbin and spool, away!
In joy and bliss I’m off to play
Upon this high holiday.

If you want to see the original version of the song, including the verses that Maddy edited out, here it is courtesy of Bruce from the Mudcat discussion forum:

Al this day ic han sought,
spyndul ne werue ne wond y nought;
To myche blisse ic am brout
azen this holyday.
Wybbe &c.

[Chorus]
Wybbe ne rele ne sypyyn yc ne may
ffor ioyze that it is holyday

All vnswope ys owre vleth,
& owre fyre ys vnleth,
Oure ruschen ben vnrepe zeth,
azen this hy halyday.

Ye moste feschun worton In;
thredele my kerchef vndur my khyn;
leue iakke, lend me a pyn
To thredele me this holiday.

Now yt draweth to the none
& al my cherrus ben vndone;
y moste a lyte solas mye schone
to make hem dowge this holyday.

Y most mylkin in his payl;
Outh me bred al this schayl,
zut is the dow vndur myy nayl
as ic knad this holyday.

Iakke wol brynge me onward in my wey,
Wyth me desyre for te pleyze;
Of my dame stant me non eyze
an neuer a god haliday

Iacke wol pay for my scoth
a sonday atte the ale-schoth;
iacke wol sowse wel my troth
eury god haliday.

Sone he wolle take me be the hand,
& he wolle legge me on the lond,
that al my buttockus ben of sond,
opon this hye holyday.

In he pult & out he drow,
& euer yc lay on hym y-low;
‘by godus deth, thou dest me wow
vpon this hey holyday!’

Sone my wombe began to swelle
as greth as a belle;
durst y nat my dame telle
Wat me betydde this holyday.

If your Old English has gotten a bit rusty and you can’t read that, you can find a translation of the full poem to modern English here. Be prepared for a surprise ending regarding how the singer enjoyed her holiday.

Playlist

1. Multi-holiday song Christine Lavin & the Mistletones 2:07

2. Ye Christian Heralds The Elastic Millennium Choir 1:48

3. A New Year’s Round Christine Lavin & the Mistletones 1:44

4. Dona Nobis Pacem Leah Salomaa & friends 3:30

Music notes

Rounds, also called perpetual canons, are both fun to sing and make for enjoyable listening. They are one of the easiest choral styles to learn because everyone sings the same words and tune – they just start at different places. The musical style appears to have been first invented in Germany in medieval times. The oldest known ones are in Latin dating back to the time of the construction of Notre Dame Cathedral in the 12^th century.

These four add to two rounds that I have already posted this year – King Henry VIII’s Green Grow’th the Holly posted on Dec 1, and Joyce Poley’s Christmas is Here on Dec 5.

Multi-holiday song
This was written by New York City singer-songwriter and promoter of contemporary acoustic music Christine Lavin. This is not the actual name of this song. She calls it A Christmas / Kwanzaa / Solstice / Chanukah / Ramadan / Boxing Day Song, but I found that name rather clunky so I abbreviated it here. It is not really a round or a canon even though it sounds like one; it is six songs that she wrote to the same melody that lock together. The melody is by the English composer William Sheild (1748-1829), so that is at least 200 years old.

This recording is from her 2003 album The Runaway Christmas Tree which is out-of-print now but still available from her website as a digital download. Also on her website, Christine apologizes for the absence from this song of other international holidays that celebrate the New Year near this time but which she missed; to me, Diwali comes to mind because we have lots of folks here in BC from the Punjab. She suggests that people celebrating those other occasions write their own verses to include themselves in the song.

We wish you a Merry Christmas
a joyful and merry Christmas
to all who celebrate Christmas
we wish you a Happy New Year

We wish you a happy Kwanzaa
a hip hop Happy Kwanzaa
to all who celebrate Kwanzaa
we wish you a Happy New Year

We wish you a happy Solstice
a sunny satisfying Solstice
to all who celebrate Solstice
we wish you a Happy New Year

We wish you a Happy Chanukah
a hap hap happy Chanukah
to all who celebrate Chanukan
we wish you a Happy New Year

We wish you a Happy Ramadan
a peaceful holy Ramadan
to all who celebrate Ramadan
we wish you a Happy New Year

We wish you a Happy Boxing Day
a hap hap happy Boxing Day
to all who celebrate Boxing Day
we wish you a Happy New Year

Ye Christian Heralds
This circle canon of unknown origin was found by the Elastic Millennium’s founder and music director Faye Armsworthy in a hymnal called The Harmonicon, compiled and published in 1850 by Charles Robson and James Hepburn of Pictou, Nova Scotia. It is not clear whether those gentlemen wrote it or whether they got it from another source. Faye thinks that the song may have been included in that hymnal for use as a warm-up song for choir practice. The recording is from the Elastic Millennium Choir’s 1997 album An Old Canadian Christmas, which has the lovely subtitle Songs to Beguile a Winter’s Eve.

Ye Christian heralds, go proclaim
Salvation, salvation in Emmanuel’s name
To distant climes the tidings bear,
And plant the Rose of Sharon there.

I was not familiar with the Rose of Sharon, so I had to look it up. In a religious context, as it is used here, the phrase is used as a metaphor for Jesus Christ, portraying him as the source of spiritual blessings that is intended to be nurtured and shared in the world.

The Rose of Sharon is mentioned in the the Song of Solomon in the Bible, but as is typical with the common names for many plants, there are several species that are called by the same name in various places. There is dispute among scholars as to which species is the one that has biblical status. You can read about that in its Wikipedia entry. The one thing that is certain is that it is not a type of rose. According to an annotation by the translation committee of the New Revised Standard Version of Song of Solomon 2:1, rose of sharon is a mistranslation of a Hebrew word for a type of crocus.

Here in North America, the name rose of sharon is usually applied to a type of deciduous hibiscus – Hibiscus syriacus to be precise, although that name is a misnomer because it is not native to Syria. It is indeed beautiful and grows readily without much care, but planting it is not advisable because Hibiscus syriacus has been declared to be an invasive species in several jurisdictions. You can read about that here.

A New Year’s Round
This is another one from Christine Lavin’s album. It is a fairly well-known round that was written in 1971 by the late Alix Herrmann, who was a member of the San Francisco Folk Music Club and daughter of folk music collector Lani Herrmann. It is included in the Rise Up Singing songbook under the title Ring in the New Year.

Ring it in, ring in the New Year
Ring it in, ring in the New year

Bells are ringing, bells are ringing
Bells are ringing, bells are ringing

Peace and love, throughout the New Year
Peace and love, throughout the New Year

Joy, joy, joy!
Joy, joy, joy!

Dona Nobis Pacem
You probably already know this one too. It is not necessarily a Christmas song, but because of its message of peace it appears on a lot of folk music Christmas albums. Usually I would not include such a well known song in my postings, but in this case I wanted to share this version with you to show how rounds can sound so rich when they are sung slowly. This recording is from the late Leah Salomaa’s self-published 2008 children’s album under a winter star.

Its lyrics are just the three words in its name; dona nobis pacem – Latin for “grant us peace”, a phrase from the Agnus Dei in the Roman Catholic mass.

For such a famous song its origins are quite obscure. Some have credited it to famous composers including Mozart, Bach, or Palestrina. But, as someone pointed out in a Mudcat discussion forum thread about the origins of this song:

This particular round is often attributed to Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina … Though rounds were popular in Palestrina’s day -- the English round “Three Blind Mice” first appeared in print c. 1600 - it is unlikely that he wrote Dona Nobis Pacem. On the word “nobis“ when first sung when first heard the melodic leap is a 7th, the distance of seven steps between two notes. Such an interval, expressive though it might be, was considered dissonant or “disagreeable” in Palestrina’s time and would have been avoided by so conservative a composer.

Similar issues would apply to Bach, Mozart or any other classical composer. The Mudcat discussion could not identify a composer, or even an estimate for its date or place of composition. Separately, the late Sol “Roundman” Weber, who collected rounds and compiled a book of 340 of them from international sources, speculated that it was of medieval German folk music origin since it is in Latin and comes from the Catholic mass, and that is where the circular canon format of singing first began.

Its time of origin is therefore anyone’s guess, but remember, at the beginning of these music notes I said that the earliest known Latin circular canons date back to the 12th century. That is when polyphony was just beginning to emerge from Gregorian plain chant, and the classic rules for harmony singing had not yet been formulated. Possibly the folk music origin of this song was a bunch of medieval monks or nuns goofing off during whatever free time they had.

Playlist

1. The Birthday of Jesus Maura Slon and Joel Hume 1:20

2. Peace and Joy Kim Suoka and The Rose Ensemble 2:21

3. We have found the promised Saviour Randy Folger and ensemble 2:30

4. Love is Little The Tudor Choir 2:38

Music notes:

The Birthday of Jesus
The Shakers were a Pentecostal religious sect that emerged in mid-18th century England. They shared many beliefs with the of the Quakers, but featured communal celibate living, and a very different style of ecstatic singing and dancing worship rather than deep listening for the voice of God in meditative silence. The Shakers considered speaking in tongues and the songs that came to them individually as having come from God, and those songs infused all aspects of their lives.

Shakers lived a communal, pacifist, and celibate lifestyle. They thrived as a sect in the 19th century, but are almost now extinct. I have a bit more background information about the Shakers after the Music Notes below, but for much more info and and six more of their songs go to my Dec 10, 2023 posting. As an update to the information in that post, earlier this year 59 year-old April Baxter, a former Episcopal nun, has joined the Sabbathday Lake Shaker community and is on the path to full membership. That would bring their total number of current Shakers up to three. You can hear a 3 minute NPR All Things Considered clip about that here.

This song is an anonymous composition from the short-lived West Union, Indiana Settlement near Dayton, Ohio which was in existence from 1811 until 1827. That community had been settled by about 300 Shakers as part of a Western expansion, but the Shakers there “struggled against mother nature (malaria, floods, tornados) and decided to move back east.” It had been the Shakers’ westernmost settlement.

The duet is sung by Maura Slon and Joel Hume. It is from an independently-produced 1995 album called Joy of Angels: Shaker Spirituals for Christmas and the New Year. That CD is now out of print. Unfortunately I do not know anything more about the song’s history and I don’t have written lyrics. There is a companion book for the album, but I have been unable to obtain a copy.

Peace and Joy
is an anonymous composition found in Original Shaker Music, published by the Shaker settlement of Mount Lebanon, NY in 1893. The soloist is is Kim Suoka and the recording is from The Rose Ensemble’s 2008 album And Glory Shone Around. Unfortunately, that Minnesota-based professional chamber choir did not survive the Covid shutdowns.

Lyrics:
Awake for the angels are gath’ring near,
Whispering peace and joy,
Gathering near Christ’s blessing to bring,
Let nothing that boon destroy.

Happy are they who gather these gifts,
Fresh from the heav’ns the soul to uplift. (X2)

Oh, then let us gain ev’ry Christian grace,
Whate’er the toil and strife,
Thus forming here a household of faith
The fruit of the virgin life.

Let us sing with the angels in glad accord,
Peace and Joy are the gifts of the Lord. (X2)

We have found the promised Saviour
is also from an anonymous composer who lived in the Mount Lebanon Shaker Settlement. The soloist is the late Randy Folger, who was one of the foremost experts on Shaker music. This performance is also from the Joy of Angels album so I donot have further information.

Love is Little
This song is from the Seattle-based Tudor Choir’s 2001 album of Shaker songs gentle words which was dedicated to Randy Folger. The liner note does not identify a songwriter, but it is dated from 1834 and came from the 6000 acre South Union Shaker Settlement near Auburn, Kentucky. That community was established in 1807 and lasted until 1922.

This choral arrangement is not how the Shakers would have sung the song. It is by Kevin Siegried, who after a career as a composer, singer, conductor and music teacher was at the time a doctoral student in composition at the new England Conservatory of Music.

Lyrics:
Love is little, love is low;
love will make my spirit grow.

Grow in peace, grow in light
love will do the thing that’s right.

In his liner notes, Seigfried explains the apparently paradoxical statement “love is little” by explaining that “the words ‘little’ and ‘low’ appear frequently in Shaker texts to signal or invoke humility.” We are all familiar with that concept from a song called Simple Gifts which is nearly the only Shaker song that has gone mainstream and become famous. It begins: “’Tis a gift to be simple …”. Seogfried goes on to quote a stanza from the first published Shaker hymnbook, published in 1812:

I want to feel little, more simple, more mild,
Like our blest parents, and more like a child;
More thankful, more humble, more lowly in mind;
More watchful, more pray’rful, more loving and kind.

Background information

The Shakers, formally known as the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, were a Pentecostal Christian communal sect that was founded in 18th century Manchester England. Under the charismatic leadership of Mother Ann Lee, the Shakers moved from England to the United States in 1774 hoping to escape religious persecution. However in the US their pacifism during the American Revolution and nonconformist Protestant beliefs continued to draw religious persecution, but despite that it grew rapidly until the late 19^th century. But since then the sect, which believes in celibacy, has declined to the point where it is now in a precarious position.

The Shakers were perhaps the most musical of all the Christian religions. All aspects of their lives were imbued with singing and dancing. They believed that all creativity, including lyrics and melodies, came as gifts from God and should be shared. I began to collect recordings of Shaker songs suitable for Christmastime back when I was still sharing my midwinter music on 80 minute CDs. I aimed to someday have one of my annual CDs be completely filled with Shaker songs and music, with its liner notes mainly being an essay about the history of the Shake denomination and their music.

That plan needed to be changed when I switched the medium for these seasonal music compilations to these pre-Christmas daily newsletters. My December 10, 2023 newsletter was a set of six Shaker songs accompanied by my envisioned essays. Today’s musical selections are four more Shaker songs. I won’t repeat the background information in these notes. To hear those songs and/or learn more about the Shakers and their music go here.

Playlist

1. We Three Kings The Sackville All Stars 6:16

2. Bring a Torch, Jeanette Isabella Fernando Ortega 3:20

Music notes

We Three Kings
This familiar Christmas carol was written by Deacon John Henry Hopkins Jr, editor of the Church Journal in New York City. Since Hopkins Sr. was an Episcopal bishop, and Hopkins Jr. and his brothers were all church officials in various places, Christmas Day itself was an inconvenient day for the family to hold its annual family holiday gathering. So it was always held on the Epiphany (January 6) at their parent’s home in Burlington, Vermont.

As a gift for his nephews and nieces, in 1857 Uncle John wrote both the words and music of this carol for them to sing for the adults at that year’s family gathering. Children’s “theatricals” were very popular at that time, and he purposely set the song in a key that is good for children (and basses) to sing.

I can imagine him giving his manuscript of the song to the children in confidence when he first arrived so they could surprise the adults with it in the context of a Christmas pageant. (Actually, they may have staged a Christmas pageant every year, but a brand new song that no one had ever heard before would have been quite a treat.) They could secretly have practiced it and other Nativity songs out in the barn, and scoured their grandparents’ house for bits and pieces of clothing, costume jewelry, and other stuff to make attire for their performance. It may not have happened that way, but that is how I imagine it occurring.

Anyway, that first performance was a big hit with the family, which encouraged Hopkins to write more Christmas hymns and carols for the kids and publish a songbook with them. Unfortunately, Hopkins proved to be a one hit wonder as a songwriter, but he had better success as an author, journalist, book illustrator and stained-glass window designer. But his one hit was certainly a big one: It was the first American Christmas song to cross the Atlantic to Britain, and now is one of the world’s most well-known Christmas carols.

The recording of it is one of several jam sessions that were recorded to create an album for the now-defunct Sackville Records, a Toronto-based jazz label. The musicians are all now deceased but they truly all were major jazz stars in their time. They are Jim Galloway on the soprano saxophone, Ralph Sutton on piano, Milt Hinton on bass, and Gus Johnson on drums.

As I understand it, the musicians mostly toured the jazz club circuit independently but all happened to be in Toronto at the same time. That enabled the founders of Sackville Records, John Norris and Bill Smith, to book them together a recording gig. The album is The Sackville All Star Christmas Record, and all of its tracks were recorded on two days in March 1986. It is now one of the best-selling jazz Christmas albums of all time.

Bring a Torch, Jeanette Isabella
is performed here by Fernando Ortega, who is primarily known as a singer-songwriter of contemporary Christian music. He was born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico, near the banks of the Rio Grande, and started learning piano at eight years of age. This is from his 2008 album Christmas Songs.

The melody and words for Un flambeau, Jeannette, Isabelle are included in a manuscript written by Joseph Bastide, an Avignon surgeon, at the beginning of the 18th century. At the time the region was part of the Papal States, and the people spoke the local dialect called Provençal Occitan. The manuscript documented noëls that his friend Nicolas Saboly had collected or written himself. Saboly had trained to be a priest, and became one, but ending up finding that his true calling was as the Cathedral’s organist and choirmaster, as well as a religious poet and composer. He worked almost entirely in his native dialect, and his poetry and songs are now considered an important part of the heritage of that region.

It is not clear whether this is entirely Saboly’s own composition, or is a folk noël that he collected, or a folk or other kind of melody for which he wrote Provençal noël-style lyrics, or something in between. In any event, as soon as Bastide’s transcription of Saboly’s songs was published in 1662 they were translated into Parisian French, and this song went viral, and not just as a noël. Within four years Charpentier used this melody for a pub song in a revival of Molière’s farce Le médecin malgré lui (The physician in spite of himself). Perhaps the tune had returned to its natural habitat.

Playlist

1. Colorado Christmas Greg Blake 3:25

2. My Little Country Church at Christmas Time Matt Anderson 4:15

Introduction

I’ve noticed a pattern. In the rare times when new songs get into the rare status of having sufficient popular appeal that they come back year after year, it is usually not that they are about new aspects of the holiday, or express new feelings. To achieve the status of becoming a Christmas Classic they respect the traditional tropes of Christmas songs.

Those can be organized by topic, and within each topic the ones that have become and remained popular adhere to an optimistic or nostalgic take on the events or feelings they portray. All I Want for Christmas is You is a new “Christmas Classic” song, but it is not a new trope.

Calling the recurring themes of Christmas music “tropes” is not a criticism of them. I think that one of the things that most of us love about the holiday season is that its “meaning” is optimistic and aspirational. Our vision of the perfect Christmas is our vision for a perfect world. We sing about the world we want, not necessarily the real world around us. And we return to those same aspirations every year, especially at this season that is identified as a time of new beginnings and redemption.

An example of such a trope is that our songs about going home for Christmas are almost always about leaving the city and returning to rural roots. That also seems to be the common scenario for Hallmark Christmas movies.

We live in a time when most people have grown up in cities or the suburbs, but there are very few “Christmas Classic” songs about going there for Christmas. (Silver Bells is the exception, and interestingly that song is much more likely commonly recorded by country music singers.) The popular Christmas songs are almost always about returning to home in the country or a small town. I suppose that it is difficult to convey sentimentality and nostalgia for urban life, and those are emotions that we have come to want and expect from our annual binge of Christmas.

The core trope of such songs seems to be that the key to achieving a better future can be found by returning to Christmas’ idealized past.

Music notes

Colorado Christmas This song has someone expressing a desire to experience snow on Christmas Day. Where have we heard that before?

It was written by the late singer/songwriter Steve Goodman (1948-’84). Goodman is best known for having written City of New Orleans. He was born and lived most of his life in Chicago, but he and his family lived in Seal Beach near Los Angeles from 1980 to ’84, near the end of his tragically short life. Goodman never lived in Colorado. But the song’s references to wanting to go there are not expressing a longing to return home – just to experience the snow there, as is the case with that other song. Here is Goodman’s own recording of this song, released posthumously.

The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band had recorded Colorado Christmas in 1983, the same year it was written, and released it as the “A” side of a 45rpm 7” record (with a re-release of their early big hit Mister Bojangles on the “B” side.) I was going to include their version of the song here, but then I found this one by Greg Blake on YouTube. I love its intimacy - just him and his guitar. It isn’t from a recording: You can see him playing and singing it in the video, and in an introduction he says that it was the third song that he posted on that day. Greg has a website where you can learn more about him and his music.

Looking out the window of this Hollywood hotel
You’d never know that it was Christmas Eve.
The billboards and the neon took the place of silver bells,
And the temperature is 84 degrees.

I can hear the traffic on the crowded strip below,
As the palm trees poke their heads above the scene.
There’s not a single reindeer and it hardly ever snows,
And Santa drives a Rolls Royce limousine.

But all along the Rockies you can feel it in the air
From Telluride to Boulder down below,
The closest thing to heaven on this planet anywhere
Is a quiet Christmas morning in the Colorado snow.

I remember Christmases when I was just a boy,
In the morning I would run to see the tree.
And the carolers on the hillside sang their songs of Christmas joy,
Well, I always thought they sang them just for me.

Now the sun is setting in the California sky
And I can’t find the spirit anywhere.
So I think it’s time for me to tell Los Angeles goodbye
I’m going back home to look for Christmas there.

But all along the Rockies you can feel it in the air
From Telluride to Boulder down below,
The closest thing to heaven on this planet anywhere
Is a quiet Christmas morning in the Colorado snow.

By the way, this song is very similar in both sentiment and content of the little-known introductory verse that Irving Berlin wrote for his immortal White Christmas. That verse was not included in Bing Crosby’s version which became such a big hit song that it became the template for almost every cover of it, so they do not include the introductory verse either. But that verse provides a clarifying set-up for why the narrator has such a longing for snow on Christmas:

The sun is shining, the grass is green
The orange and palm trees sway
There’s never been such a day
In Beverly Hills, L.A
But it’s December the twenty-fourth
And I am longing to be up North.

I’m dreaming of a white Christmas
Just like the ones I used to know....

You can hear that introduction in this beautiful rendition of White Christmas sung by Ginny Reilly, recorded in 1984.

My Little Country Church at Christmas Time
This song is by singer-songwriter Matt Andersen and is from his self-published 2011 album Spirit of Christmas. Attending church on Christmas is a common country music Christmas-song trope. I’m not really into country music myself in general, but that kind of music is a great source for Christmas songs that exhibit sincerity and authenticity, and that is what I hear in this song. I especially like the little touches, like noting “the crack of the pews as we kneel down” and “the sound of the heater clicking on.” I presume that this song comes from personal experience, either depicting one particular Christmas service or memories compiled from several of them.

Matt was raised in the small village of Perth-Andover, New Brunswick but now lives in the Ottawa Valley. The first line of the song suggests that the song is from the perspective of someone who lives in the community, rather than someone who has returned home for the holidays, and narrator’s parents are clearly depicted as being members of the congregation. That leads me to suspect that Matt Andersen wrote this song based on childhood memories of going to church on Christmas.

Seeing faces, we haven’t seen all year
And some who’ve come as friends of friends
Our hearts are filled with Christmas cheer
And the chills we get, when the songs begin

I hear my mother singing with the choir
My father shaking hands at the door
It’s the smell of the hall hung with freshly cut pine
It’s my little country church at Christmas time

The crack of the pews as we kneel down
The sound of the heater clicking on
A fresh batch of snow lays on the ground
As we think about the year that’s come and gone

I hear my mother singing with the choir
My father shaking hands at the door
It’s the smell of the hall hung with freshly cut pine
It’s my little country church at Christmas time

A father holds his daughter
A mother holds her son
We bow our heads and we are thankful
For all that we have, to be among the lucky ones

The room is full with the love of Christmas
We share a smile as a baby cries
We sound just like a band of angels
As we sing the closing hymn of Silent Night

I hear my mother singing with the choir
My father shaking hands at the door
It’s the smell of the hall hung with freshly cut pine
It’s my little country church at Christmas time

Playlist

1. The Many and the Few The Klezmatics 6:20

2. Hanukkah Dance Woody Guthrie 1:24

Music notes

The Many and the Few
This song is an account of the history of the establishment of the Jewish people’s annual Hanukkah Festival, but it begins much earlier than that - in 538 BCE when King Cyrus of Babylon ended the Hebrew people’s captivity and allowed them to return to their homeland, bringing their sacred book the Torah with them.

Later, the kingdoms of Judea and Israel were again conquered, this time by Alexander the Great in 332 BCE. Upon his death, the Hellenized (i.e., living in accordance with Greek culture) Macedonian Empire was broken up, and the Jewish homeland soon fell under the control of the Seleucid dynasty based in Syria. At first, the Seleucids continued Alexander’s policy of permitting religious and cultural diversity in the conquered lands, but about 150 years later the Seleucid ruler Antiochus IV Epiphanes began to issue decrees to homogenize the empire. He forbade Jewish religious practices, and required the people to adopt Greek culture and religion.

Many of the Jewish people, especially those in positions of power and wealth, accepted conversion to Hellenism, but there was also resistance. In 167 BCE, after an unsuccessful Jewish revolt, Antiochus re-conquered Jerusalem and converted its Temple to a a place for the worship of Zeus. This led to a successful uprising, initially led by an elderly rural priest called Mattathias, and then by his son Judah “The Hammer” Maccabee. The song recounts some of the early battles of that uprising.

One of the early successes of that revolution was a reconquering of Jerusalem and its Temple, but now we’re getting into the part of the story that you probably already know. If you don’t, well, that story is greatly abbreviated in the last four verses of this song.

Here is where the story gets interesting. This song was written and recorded by Woody Guthrie in or before 1949. Woody was not Jewish himself but he got a crash course in Judaism when he began dating and then marrying Marjorie Greenblatt and promised that their children would grow up in the Jewish religion and culture. Marjorie’s mother was a prominent poet, songwriter, and leader in New York’s Coney Island hotbed of Jewish culture and political activism. Woody got along great with his mother-in-law and her friends; he and Marjorie moved to a house on Mermaid Street across from hers.

I could go on and on about Woody’s family and his acceptance into the core of that neighbourhood’s Jewish cultural and political community, but I have already done that. If you want to learn more I suggest that you read my essay about it in my Dec 6, 2021 post.

This rendition of the song is by The Klezmatics. It is from their 2005 album Woody Guthrie’s Happy Joyous Hanukkah.

Hanukkah Dance This song is Woodys own recording of another Hanukkah song that he wrote. It was found by the Smithsonian Museum archivists among the documents and master discs that were donated to them by Moses Ashe, the founder and proprietor of the legendary recording company Folkways Records. Unlike Woody’s own recording of The Many and the Few, they do not know when this track was recorded. It might have been during the same session as that song (Dec 29, 1949) or it may have been earlier.

Since the song is so short and stops so abruptly, it might not have been intended to be a full song for Woody’s intended album of Hanukkah songs; a project that was never completed. Perhaps it was a sound check for The Many and the Few or one of Woody’s other Folkways recordings, or a demo to show the range of songs that could go on his proposed Hanukkah album. It does provide a contrast to the seriousness of The Many and the Few. Those two tracks are the only Hanukkah songs that Woody ever recorded, although lyrics for other Hanukkah songs that he wrote for the proposed album were found by his family in his notebooks.

To me, this sounds like the kind of song a father might improvise to spur on a laughing and dancing toddler or very young child. Both the family and the Smithsonian archivists think that it was probably written for Woody and Marjorie’s daughter Cathy, who was born in February 1943 but died tragically in a house fire at the age of four years old. The cause was an electrical malfunction in the family’s radio. As you can imagine, the event deeply affected both Woody and Marjorie.

Woody suffered a serious depression from his grief, especially because that was not the first time that fire had caused a family tragedy for him. Little Cathy’s death is often cited as a turning point towards Woody’s deteriorating mental and physical health in the following years, prior to the onset of the symptoms that accompanied his final extended deterioration from genetically-inherited Huntington’s Disease. But despite his grief, Woody continued to write songs and stories based on his memory of that lively little daughter, as well his interactions with other children.

If this was recorded in 1949 or later, the dancing child might have been Arlo, but the song itself might still originally have been inspired by Cathy. I know from my experience with my own daughters that family ditties I made up for Gillian often got recycled when singing to Wendy.

You can hear a much longer version of this song by the Klezmatics on my Dec 5, 2021 post. In it, Lorin Sklamberg, the lead singer, adds additional lyrics from a Woody manuscript, and in the last half he seems to be giving shout-outs to the children of the band members and their entourage. In the context of Woody’s loss of little Cathy, the tenderness of that version always brings both a tear to my eye as well as a smile to my face. The tone of this recording by Woody seems to be set by his little laugh in the first verse.

Want to learn more about Hanukkah?

I spent many years collecting Hanukkah songs and tunes to make a Hanukkah music album to be one of my Bill’s Sampler CDs. Hanukkah music, and Hanukkah itself, was a subject about which I had previously known next to nothing. As I came to appreciate the music I began to envision it as being a theme I could occasionally intersperse with usual Christmas music samplers, as I had done with Winter Solstice music.

But that was not to be. It was only two years after my Bill’s 2019 Hanukkah Music Sampler that I recognized that my years of using CDs as my medium to convey this music to people had come to an end, just as my five years of putting them on cassette tapes had ended 20 years earlier.

But, as a silver lining for that dark cloud, the space limitations of fitting my research into printed liner notes had always meant holding back a lot of things I learned from my research that I wanted to tell. As you have seen, these online message do not impose a length-limit on my writing. In 2021 I wrote three essays on the history and evolution of Hanukkah that I think are pretty good:

1. Nov 25, 2021 Hanukkah’s history Part 1 - Rebellion, rededication, and an eight-day celebration of gaining freedom from foreign rule. Song: Chanukah Light from Oil for the Lamps, a folk opera.

2. Dec 1, 2021 Hanukkah’s history Part 2 - Talmudic reinterpretation of the meaning of the festival, oil, and becoming a Festival of Light. Songs: Three Hanukkah classics; Banu Choshech, the Candle Blessings, and Ocho Kandelikas.

3. Dec 3, 2021 Hanukkah’s history Part 3 – Transformation for new times; becoming more celebratory and family-focused. Songs: Hanukkah humour; The Latke Song (Mrs. Maccabeus) and Is it Hanukah or Chanukah?

The wassailing tradition, a forerunner to the Victorian-invented Christmas caroling, is a custom that almost certainly pre-dates Christianity. I wrote an essay about that attached to my Dec 21, 2022 posting, as well as one about how other pagan customs survived medieval times in my Dec 18, 2021 posting. I won’t repeat all of that for you now (you’re thinking “thank goodness!”) but after the Music Notes below is an essay (about 1600 words) with some follow-up thoughts about the possible history of the custom and its songs.

Playlist

1. Here We Come a-Wassailing The Watersons 1:28

2. Jacobstowe Wassail Waterson:Carthy 2:51

3. Here We Come a-Wassailing Kate Rusby 3:12

Music notes

Here We Come a-Wassailing
is the name that the then-newly-formed British folk-revival group The Watersons used for this song when they recorded it in 1965 as the opening song on their very first album, Frost and Fire. After considerable research, the origins of this particular wassail song are still a mystery to me. Its first and fourth verses are very familiar with only minor variances from those found in many wassails, but its melody is unusual and the charming second and third verses seem to be unique:

Here we come a-wassailing among the leaves so green,
Here we come a-wandering so fairly to be seen,
Now is winter-time strangers travel far and near,
And we wish you, send you, a happy New Year.

Bud and blossom, bud and blossom, bud and bloom and bear,
So we may have plenty of cider all next year;
Hatfuls and in capfuls and in bushel bags and all,
And there’s cider running out of every gutter hole.

Down here in the muddy lane there sits an old red fox,
Starving and a-shivering and licking his old chops;
Bring us out your table and spread it if you please,
And give us hungry wassailers a bit of bread and cheese.

I’ve got a little purse and it’s made of leather skin,
A little silver sixpence it would line it well within;
Now is winter-time; strangers travel far and near,
And we wish you, send you a happy New Year.

The Frost and Fire album’s original sleeve notes did not give any information about this particular wassail’s origins, and I have been unable to find any source in which the Watersons identify it. Since this was the first song on their first album, and the Watersons had been raised in Yorkshire, I thought it might have been a version of The Yorkshire Wassail (Roud no. 209). That is often called Here We Come a-Wassailing. Taking that a step further, since the Watersons had been raised in Kingston upon Hull, it might be a variant from near that city and perhaps even the version that the Watersons themselves had sung as children.

But Yorkshire has a carefully researched database of the region’s folk music curated by The Yorkshire Garland Group, and the notes for their entries about The Yorkshire Wassail, which is what they call Here We Come a-Wassailing, say:

. . . no Yorkshire song collection could possibly avoid including at least one version of The Yorkshire Wassail. Practically every village in Yorkshire has its own version and, though the words show little variation, there can be almost any permutation of the eight or so standard stanzas, and the chorus and tune can vary considerably.

Though nearly every county of England and Wales has its own distinct Wassail song, some more than one, it is The Yorkshire Wassail which is the most widely known across the whole country, probably the world, due to its early publication and its subsequent inclusion in all of the standard national carol anthologies.

In some parts of England this led to the strange paradox of the local wassail song being sung in the villages, and middle classes in nearby towns singing The Yorkshire Wassail. Fortunately the Yorkshire family group The Watersons have more than redressed this imbalance by recording the main varieties of Wassail songs from other parts of the country.

That last part is certainly true. On the 6 albums that the Watersons and Martin Carthy recorded as a group, and many more that they and their descendants have recorded as duos or singly, they have indeed recorded wassails from all over England. But the two middle verses of this one are not among the “eight or so standard stanzas” with words that “show little variation” that the Garland Group describes as characteristic of The Yorkshire Wassail. If those delightful and rare middle verses appeared in a wassail that had been collected in Yorkshire, I would expect that the Group would take great pride in identifying their region as having been their location of origin.

As far as I know, throughout their career the Watersons only sang traditional English folk songs, albeit in their own idiosyncratic style of harmony singing. I think it unlikely that those middle verses were either their own composition or that they patched them from another source into a variant of The Yorkshire Wassail, and that is despite the fact that doing so would have been very much in the authentic spirit of true wassailing.

If anyone knows the origin of this wassail song variant, please let me know.

Jacobstowe Wassail (aka Robin Redbreast Wassail)
was recorded in 2006 by Waterson:Carthy, the next-generation version of the original Watersons group. They were then comprised of Norma Waterson and Martin Carthy from the original group, Eliza Carthy (Martin and Norma’s daughter), and Tim van Eyken. It is from their album Holy Heathens and the Old Green Man.

It was easier to find the origin of this one, and it does have an interesting story. The song was gathered by the Anglican priest, antiquarian, hymn-writer and folk song collector Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould (1834-1924). Baring-Gould collected, documented and published many books on the folk music of Devon and Cornwall, often working in collaboration with another important folk music collector, Cecil Sharp. He also sometimes even collaborated with the American folklorist Francis Child who collected and analyzed variants of English and Scottish ballads and published the eight volume work now known as the Child Ballads.

Rev. Baring-Gould’s contribution to traditional music did not end when he died. He had donated his note books and working drafts to the Plymouth Public Library Archives in 1914 and folklore scholars have been mining information from them ever since. Then in 1998, a previously unknown trove of 30 boxes full of Baring-Gould manuscripts, notebooks and correspondence was discovered at Killerton, a house-museum operated by the National Trust. That has provided a whole new source of previously unknown folk songs, including this one.

One way that Baring-Gould would gather old songs, besides his own field collecting, was to encourage people from Cornwall and Devon to send him transcriptions of old songs and tunes together with information about where and from whomy they collected them. In the Killington trove was correspondence from Mrs. Batchellor who lived in Jacobstowe on the Cornish Penninsula which included the lyrics to this song. She had written them down from the singing of an unnamed wassailer. Since she had not sent him the music, Baring-Gould tentatively matched it with this tune that had been sent to him independently by G. Lewis Maitland.

Baring-Gould never completed that project and published it, which is why it was not with the documents he donated to the Archives in 1914. Baring-Gould hadn’t given a name to his mash-up of lyrics from one source with a tune from another a name in his private manuscript. They also do not say if the tune had been collected in Jacobstowe or from elsewhere. It has gone by various titles since it was discovered.

This rendition by Waterson:Carty was the first to be recorded and they chose to call it Sugar Wassail on their 2006 album. When an amateur group called the Wren Chorus, which is affiliated with the researchers who found it in Baring-Gould’s papers, recorded their version of it in 2008 they chose to call it just Robin Redbreast.

More recently, the name has become standardized by general consensus as Jacobstowe Wassail, since wassails are generally named after the places from which they were collected. Topic Records, the label that published the Waterson:Carthy album, has now posted this same 2006 recording on YouTube and even they are now calling it Jacobstowe Wassail. (This confusion in assigning a name to this newly-found old wassail explains how I accidentally repeated this version of the song after having previously included it in my Dec 8, 2022 set.)

Hopefully, more old songs (including wassails) are still out there to be discovered.

Wassail, wassail,
Good master and mistress, sitting down by the fire,
While we poor wassailers be dabbling in the mire,
With a jolly wassail.
Oh, little Robin Redbreast he has a fine wing,
Give us of your cider and we’ll begin to sing,
With a jolly wassail.

Wassail, wassail,
Good master and mistress, our wassail begin,
Please open your door and let us come in,
With a jolly wassail.
Oh, little Robin Redbreast he has a fine song,
Give us of your cider, we won’t keep you long,
With a jolly wassail.

Wassail, wassail,
Your ale cup is white and your ale it is brown,
Your beer is the best that e’er can be found,
With a jolly wassail.
Oh, little Robin Redbreast he has a fine leg,
Give us of your cider, and we’ll begin to beg,
With a jolly wassail.

Wassail, wassail,
Your gin it is brew’d from the juniper tree,
Your gin is the best that ever can be,
With a jolly wassail.
Oh, little Robin Redbreast he has a fine toe,
Give us of your cider, and we’ll begin to go,
With a jolly wassail.

Wassail, wassail,
With a jolly wassail.

Here We Come a-Wassailing
Kate Rusby, from Penistone in the West Riding of Yorkshire, is one of England’s best-known contemporary folksingers. She doesn’t seem to have gotten the message that the folk music revival is long past. She records traditional English songs acoustically but in a way turns them into pop music hit songs in Britain.

Rusby appears to have a special affinity for Christmas music. Of the 20 albums that she has recorded, seven have been Christmas albums, and as far as I can tell they have all become mainstream Christmas best-sellers. This is the opening track from Sweet Bells, her first Christmas album released in 2009,

After having done all that research trying to find the roots of the Waterson’s version of Here We Come a-Wassailing and thinking (probably incorrectly) that those roots would be in Yorkshire, this one was easy even though her liner notes only attribute it to “Trad & Kate Rusby”. It ticks all of the boxes for being a variant of The Yorkshire Wassail; even the melody and refrain are the very familiar ones from that region.

The oldest documentation of this generic version of The Yorkshire Wassail seems to be in the 1871 edition of Henry Ramsden Bramley and John Stainer’s Christmas Carols New and Old. That was the Christmas songbook that fueled the Victorian era’s taste for Christmas carols that related to the Nativity story, many of which are very familiar today.

Perhaps as influential in making this particular wassail song so well-known is that it was also in the 1928 edition of The Oxford Book of Carols which Martin Shaw co-authored with Percy Dearmer and R. Vaughan Williams. In it they included this version, which Shaw had learned as a boy from his father, who had often heard it in the streets of Leeds in the 1850s.

Rusby’s version abbreviates the wassail down to five of the standard Yorkshire verses, which is the common length. Her three-line verses (with a repeat of the usual second line) may or may not have ever been sung that way by actual wassailers. She employs her own creativity to make England’s old Christmas songs popular for present and future generations rather than preserving them intact as they had been sung in the past. I can’t recall having ever heard a wassail sung quite this way by anyone else.

Here we come a-wassailing among the leaves so green
Here we come a-wandering so fairly to be seen
Here we come a-wandering so fairly to be seen

[Chorus; sing after each verse]
Love and joy come to you
And to you our wassail too
God bless you and send you a Happy New Year
God send you a Happy New Year

We are not daily beggars that beg from door to door
But we’re the neighbour’s children that you’ve seen before
We’re thе neighbour’s children that you’ve seen bеfore

I have a little purse, it’s made of leather skin
I need a silver sixpence to line it well within
I need a silver sixpence to line it well within

God bless the master of the house and then the mistress too
And all the little children that ‘round the table grow
All the little children that ‘round this table grew

And here we come a-wassailing among the leaves so green
And here we come a-wandering so fairly to be seen
Here we come a-wandering so fairly to be seen

Essay: Further thoughts about wassail songs (about 1500 words)

During the Middle Ages throughout most of Christianized Europe, the people kept old pagan traditions alive either by endowing them with Christian symbolic meaning or by purely secular observation. That was the only way those old customs could survive to this day, if they did at all.

But the English wassailing custom and the now largely-extinct-but-not-forgotten Yule Log tradition made no pretense of having Christian meaning. Their probable ancient meaning as a religious rite had likely been long forgotten, but they appear to have been continued as purely secular traditions. Not very many of the wassailing songs that we consider to be traditional today even mention the occasion of Christmas at all, let alone God or the Nativity. Their only connection to the Christian holiday is that the days on which the wassailing takes place locally are often identified by their Christian holy day names.

But how could that happen? How could a tradition with pagan origins survive through adamantly Christian times without at least taking on a veneer of Christian meaning? And why should England be an exception to the medieval Christianization of ancient pagan luck-visit traditions that took place in almost all other places in Europe?

I do have a theory, but it is pure speculation. Perhaps in England the old wassailing custom did take on a Christian symbolic meaning during the Middle Ages, with the songs adapted to reflect being part of celebration of the Christmastide season rather than a continuation of pagan observation of Yuletide.

That was what the early- and mid-Victorian song-collectors thought when they went looking for extant medieval “Christmas carols” from rural communities in isolated locations. The problem was that they couldn’t find very many old songs about the Nativity in the common people’s luck visiting singing repertoire. What they found was that the singing that was being done door-to-door at Christmastime was wassails like these, with no mention of Christmas or the Nativity. For the most part, they didn’t bother to collect those because they were clearly not the medieval Christmas carols they were looking for.

Folklorists have tended to draw the conclusion that medieval caroling as a door-to-door singing of Nativity-oriented songs did not exist: They concluded that it was an imagined Christmastime tradition that Victorian era medievalists were hoping to revive in support of the “keep Christmas” movement. The medievalist’s perspective was that if there had been such a Christian practice in medieval times it would have been discontinued and then forgotten after the celebration of Christmas and its associated Christmastide season had been banned by the Puritan Parliament and Church of England in the latter half of the 17^th century.

That ban and its unintended consequences is another topic that I have previously written about in some detail – you can read about it in the essay in my Dec 3, 2021 posting (which is mostly about the modern history of celebrating Hanukkah but I needed to tell about the “Keep Christmas” movement to give context for that story.)

So here’s my theory – perhaps wassailing really had changed into a Christianized custom, with songs related to the Nativity, but then in the mid 17th century when celebration of Christmas was banned by both law and the church the people just adapted to the times again: They removed the Christian symbolism from the occasion and Nativity words from their songs. By doing so they could not only continue to celebrate the season legally and theologically acceptably as a secular occasion in the traditional way, but also revel in their successful resistance to authority by imposing an unintended consequence upon the Puritans in authority who sought to deprive them of the year’s most beloved holidays.

If that had happened, wassail would likely have become what it is now – a secular tradition with no pretense of Christian or Pagan meaning that people participated in simply because it was what you do at this time of year. It is unlikely that the people at that time even knew about wassailing’s pagan roots, and if they did, they certainly would not have revived the pagan aspect of the tradition during a time when witches were being burnt at the stake. In other words, the songs would have ended up being exactly the kinds of solicitations that are in the traditional wassail songs today, with good wishes replacing words like blessings as what the wassailers offer in return.

We know that kind of adaptation is how people might have responded back then, because that is how they did respond when Rumania’s atheist government under Nicolae Ceaușescu banned the celebration of Christmas in the 1980s. I told about that in a post three years ago as background information for two songs from the Rumanian equivalent to wassailing, but to save you from having to find that, here is what I said back then:

This recording was made at a time when the caroling custom, and Christmas itself, was prohibited in Romania. Like the Puritans had done in England in the 17th century, the Communist government under Nicolae Ceaușescu banned celebration of the holiday! But his reasons for doing so couldn’t have been more different from the English Puritans. Ceaușescu saw Christian leadership as posing a threat to his one-party rule and decided to impose Communist Atheism as the state religion. (Or is that a state non-religion?) He had the Orthodox priests arrested and executed, and prohibited all forms of religious observance including colinde [the Rumanian luck-visit equivalent to wassailing] and the singing of Christmas carols. . . .

How did the people react to this prohibition? Pretty much as you would expect (and the same as what had happened in England 300 years earlier.) In the cities, public acknowledgement of Christmas did not take place in public but its celebration continued in the privacy of people’s homes (even though they no longer got the day off work.) In the rural areas the custom of colinde pretty much continued as usual, but with some discretion.

It still began on December 24, but that was nominally done only to keep up tradition: The people said that their new focus of the custom was to celebrate the coming of a new year under the Communist regime. What they sang during the visits depended upon the reputation of who was being visited. For trusty old friends it would be the old carols. But if they were visiting the home of the local party official they would sing the national anthem or another patriotic song. That person could then report what he saw: The people of his village were conforming to both the letter and spirit of the law.

In some cases they would write new secular lyrics to sing to the traditional Nativity carols’ melodies.

But again, the idea that this may have been what happened in England in the 17^th century is just speculation, and I’ll have to think more about it. There are some problems with the theory, such as: Why would Christian themes remain so thoroughly removed from wassailing through the 18th and 19^th centuries, when England was still a fervently Christian country?

My idea is based on the fact that the wassail songs are an ever-changing type of folk music. As far as we know, wassail songs have always been improvised and tailored specifically for whichever household was being visited, or whoever opened the door. That is another reasons why they escaped attention from folklore collectors until the custom was on the verge of dying out in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. The earlier collectors knew that the verses in the wassails they heard were not necessarily old songs; at least some of the verses they heard had just been made up on the spot.

Once folklorists did begin collecting wassails from the living tradition it was to document the current state of the folklore. They would cherry-pick the most clever or most representative verses from the singing. And if they documented the melody at all – most didn’t before the days of recording technology – it would have been by giving the name of the tune they heard if they recognized it. Remember, the 19th century was a time when, unlike our current approach to singing, swapping out melodies between songs was commonly done and a common skill.

As with collecting other types of folk music and songs, such as sea shanties and children’s play songs, the process of documenting these moment-in-time bits and pieces of performances given at various households has created a rather artificial and frozen single “authentic” version of what had been a community’s living and evolving tradition.

Because of similarities in the lyrics of wassail songs collected from far-flung places, often with the exact same couplets being used for the verses collected from places far from each other, I suspect that they were often not collected before the local variants had been influenced by exposure to clever wassail verses from other communities and regions. Also, it seems apparent that some wassail songs were not collected until wassailing that in previous decades had been done by whole families survived only as a remnant children’s activity (as is evidenced by the third song in today’s set.)

So take these “authentic” wassail variants with a grain of salt. Although their melodies and lyrics sometimes vary, what English wassail songs actually say is almost always the same thing: After a polite greeting the visitors are asking householders to fulfill their role in the local wassailing tradition by giving largesse to the visitors.

I think it would be reasonable to think of almost all them as being variants of the same song. Perhaps they should all be called simply The Wassail Song, with the community of origin and circumstances of collection identified in the liner notes. But that won’t happen, so here are several of the variants of The Wassail Song to enjoy, listed under the titles that the performers identified them when they recorded the songs.

Playlist

1. The Wish - Dave Townsend - 2:51

2. To Drive the Cold Winter Away - Martin Simpson - 1:45

3. The Houses of Winter - Peter Mayer - 4:25

The Wish (aka The Trees Are All Bare)
The lyrics of this song derive from a poem written by Thomas Brerewood of Horton, Cheshire who died in 1748. It was part of a series about the seasons. When that poem was first set as a song is unknown. The earliest dated reference to music for it is by a “Mr. Lockhart” in 1813 but that tune is not documented. Sung versions spread and became folk-processed into many variants all across England under many names such as The Turn of the Year, When the Trees Are All Bare, and The Timid Hare. There are also many broadsides (printed lyrics sheets) in the Bodleian Library and in other archives. It was clearly very popular throughout the 19^th century.

The song faded from usage during the early 20^th century. The melody was unknown until it was discovered in that living archive of English folk music known as the Copper Family. The Coppers have lived in the small village of Rottingdean in rural Sussex since the 16^th century. They sang an orally-transmitted repertoire of old English songs together in a rustic harmony style.

The Copper’s repertoire of obscure old songs first caught the attention of collectors of traditional songs in the late 19^th century, and a new generation of song-catchers came to them during the 1960s to find ones that previous collectors may have missed. Sure enough, cousins Bob and Ron Copper were still singing the old songs, and among them was this variant of The Trees Are All Bare, which they called simply the Christmas Song.

The song is sung here by the scrupulously authentic heritage musician and folksinger Dave Townsend accompanying himself on the concertina. It is from the Oxford Waits and Mellstock Band’s now out-of-print album Hey for Christmas, released in 2000, where the song is called The Wish. As always, Dave Townsend tells about the song’s background in his liner notes.

The melody he uses is the one sung by Bob Copper, but the lyrics are from an old broadside dated April 1794 which is more similar to the original poem. It also includes the original second verse, which is rarely included in other variants. (As the author of this website has noted; “The people who kept this song alive presumably knew that peasants rarely had the chance to be inactive, and they had more sense than to be outdoors on a freezing cold day.”)

The lyrics for this version are:

When the trees are all bare, not a leaf to be seen,
And the meadows their beauty have lost.
When Nature’s disrobed of her mantle of green,
And the streams are fast,
And the streams are fast, fast bound with the frost.

Whilst the peasant inactive stands shivering with cold
As fleet the winds northerly blow
And the innocent flocks run for ease to the cold
With their fleeces all,
With their fleeces all, all covered with snow.

In the yard when the cattle are foddered with straw
And they send forth their breath like a steam.
And the neat-looking dairy maid finds she must thaw
Flakes of ice that she finds,
Flakes of ice she finds, that she finds in her cream.

When the birds to the barn door come hovering for food
And with silence they rest on the spray.
And the poor timid hare in vain seeks the woods
Lest her footsteps her course,
Lest her footsteps her course should betray.

Heaven grant in this season it may be my lot
With the nymph whom I love and admire
Whilst the icicles hang from the eaves of my cot
I may thither in safety,
I may thither in safety retire.

To Drive the Cold Winter Away
The tune is even older than The Trees Are All Bare: It is well documented that it dates back at least to the 17^th century and lyrics for it are also found in a number of printed broadsides from that time, the oldest being dated 1625. It has a more-than-common variety of lyrics and titles, which are indications of extensive evolution through oral learning and polishing by many generations of singers, but all express a similar sentiment that the way to drive away cold winter is by filling the season with goodwill and festivities.

Remember, the latter 17th century was the time when the observation of Christmas had been banned by both Parliament and the Church of England, but exuberant celebration of midwinter (not Christmas as such!) was continued in public mainly by young rowdies.

Its melody is known because John Playford set it down in his dance tune-book The English Dancing Master, published in 1651. His name for it is When Phoebus did Rest, which presumably was the opening line of one of the more wide-spread variants. This simple-but-elegant cello rendition is by Martin Simpson and is from a 2000 album called Beautiful Darkness. If you want to try singing along there are many versions of the lyrics available online (for example, from here.)

The Houses of Winter
This is a relatively new song, written by singer-songwriter Peter Mayer who lives in Stillwater Minnesota, not far from where I spent every July as a child and where I lived during my high school years. It is from his self-published 2005 album Midwinter (which might be the best midwinter music album that I have in my entire collection!) He does not include any information in his liner notes or on his website about the source of inspiration for this song, but I guess it is pretty self-explanatory.

The houses of winter stand in a row
With chimneys that billow and windows that glow
They play out their scenes for the snow drifts and icy streets at night
Inside they are clearing their dishes away
Watching the news and recounting the day
And reading their children stories before their bedtime

And when the rites of the evening are done
The lights in the windows go dark one by one
Until the inhabitants all fall asleep
And the houses of winter become houses of dreams

And they tend their fires with care
And whisper a prayer
For their dreamers’ safe-keeping
As the cold blows wind at the doors
And hangs icicle swords
Where his captives are sleeping

The houses of winter stand in the cold
Fending off blizzards and murderous lows
Biding their time till they breathe in the April breeze again
Harboring lives with their walls and their roofs
Watching like mothers watch over their broods
Wakeful as monks meditating before the day begins

And in the darkness, before the day starts
They ponder the purpose in their furnace hearts
And hope that the people for whom their hearts burn
With love, the long winter, will love with their own hearts in turn

And they tend their fires with care
And whisper a prayer
For their dreamers’ safe-keeping
As the cold blows wind at the doors
And hangs icicle swords
Where his captives are sleeping

And Orion holds court in the sky
And night owls fly above frozen rivers
And dreams, like chimney smoke rise
From behind the closed eyes
In the houses of winter

Playlist

1. Stars of Glory Dustin Christensen & Debra Fotheringham 2:52

2. Mary’s Boy Child modern music box 2:50

3. Quelle est cette odeur agréable Lisa Moscatiello 3:17

Music notes

Stars of Glory
This song is a hymn with lyrics written in 1862 by the English Catholic priest Frederick Charles Husenbeth (1786-1872), who was also a Doctor of Divinity. It has been set to a variety of tunes in different hymnals. I found one source that says that this melody was inspired by a traditional Celtic carol. That may be true, but I have heard a lot of Celtic Christmas songs and tunes, but offhand I cannot place this melody. (If anyone does recognize it please tell me its name in the comments below so I can update this post in my blog/archive.)

This duet is by Dustin Christensen & Debra Fotheringham, and was recorded when they were members of a Salt Lake City gospel/folk collective called the Lower Lights. It is from that group’s 2011 album Come Let Us Adore Him.

Here are the full original lyrics, including the third verse that is not sung here; the chords are available here.

Stars of glory shine more brightly,
Purer be the moonlight’s beam,
Glide ye hours and moments lightly,
Swiftly down time’s deep’ning stream.
Bring the hour that banished sadness,
Brought redemption down to earth,
When the shepherds heard with gladness
Tidings of a Saviour’s birth.

See the shepherds quickly rising,
Hast’ning to the humble stall,
And the newborn Infant prizing,
As the mighty Lord of All.
Lowly now they bend before him
In His helpless infant state.
Firmly faithful we adore Him,
And His greatness celebrate.

See how Mary loves her Boychild
In the light of Bethlehem.
Lowly ox and ass breathe warmly
On the little Lord of All.
Now the world is hushed in stillness,
In the joy of knowing God is near!
Hope and love have come to dwell here,
Driving out the night of fear.

Hark! The swell of heav’nly voices
Peals along the vaulted sky.
Angels sing while earth rejoices,
“Glory to our God on high!
Glory in the highest heaven.
Peace to lowly ones on earth.
Joy to these and bliss be given
In the great Redeemer’s birth.

Mary’s Boy Child
Those of you who have my Christmas Music Samplers on CD know that I am a sucker for the sound of music boxes. They sound so cheery and delicate that no matter how lively the tune might be, they fit right in with the kind of relaxing music that is the intent for today’s postings. But in this case I chose a song that is already quite relaxing and delicate.

I got this from one of those cheap compilation albums of “Christmas classics” from a no-name label that you used to always see in drug stores at Christmastime. It still has its price tag - $2.00. It came in a sleeve, not a plastic jewel case, and of course it has no liner notes. The only attribution for this track is “modern music box”.

But I can tell you about the tune itself. When I first researched it for the liner notes of another version that was on my 2007 Sampler I was rather surprised to discover that this is an American song. I had assumed that was as Jamaican as Harry Belefonte, who made it a calypso hit song in 1956. That year it rose to #12 on the Billboard pop music chart, and stayed in the top 40 for 5 weeks. The next year it made it to #1 on the British pop music charts.

Actually, I was wrong on both counts. Harry Belefonte was born in Harlem, on the teeming East Side of Manhattan. He spent four years during his youth living with his grandmother in Jamaica, but otherwise he lived his entire life in the United States. And both the words and music for Mary’s Boy Child were written by Jester Hairston, who was born in North Carolina but raised in the industrial city of Pittsburgh. You can read about how he came to write this calypso Christmas song from its Wikipedia entry, or in more detail here.

This is a very popular Christmas carol so you probably already know the words. But in case you don’t:

A long time ago in Bethlehem,
So the Holy Bible say,
Mary’s boy child, Jesus Christ
Was born on Christmas day.

[Chorus]
Hark, now hear the angels sing
A new King born today
And man will live for evermore
Because of Christmas day

Trumpets sound and angels sing
Listen what they say
That man will live forevermore
Because of Christmas day

While shepherds watched their flock by night
Them see a bright new shining star
Then hear a choir sing
The music seemed to come from afar

Now Joseph and his wife Mary
Come to Bethlehem that night
Then find no place to born she child
Not a single room was in sight
[Chorus]

By and by they find a little nook
In a stable all forlorn
And in a manger cold and dark
Mary’s little boy was born

Long time ago in Bethlehem
So the Holy Bible say
Mary’s boy child, Jesus Christ
Was born on Christmas day
[Chorus]

Quelle est cette odeur agréable?
This is a usually attributed as being a 17^th century traditional noël. Certainly the tune is that old, although oddly, the earliest documentation of it is from England in 1698 when it was included in Thomas D’Urfey’s Wit and Mirth: Or Pills to Purge Melancholy. Thirty years later it appears as a drinking song called Fill Ev’ry Glass, sung by the rogues in playwright John Gay’s The Begger’s Opera that had music by the German-born Baroque composer Johann Christoph Pepusch.

The earliest reference to the song in France is from Christophe Ballard’s 1717 collection of theatrical songs La Clef des chansonniers ou Recueil des Vaudevilles depuis cent ans et plus. As I understand it, this tune was used as a drinking song in several French comic opera productions in the 18^th century. It is less clear whether or not the melody was also used as a noël with these lyrics at that time. I have been unable to find any source that says when Quelle est cette odeur agréable? was first documented. Some sources I found say that it comes from the Lorraine region, but none say when it was collected there.

In my research into various carols and noels I have found that many share their melodies with drinking songs, and while drinking songs seem to come and go readily, the tunes seem to have a better chance at longevity as Christmas songs. So I don’t know if Quelle est cette odeur agréable? is a drinking song that became a noël, or if it is the other way around. I suppose it really doesn’t matter. We can be thankful that this beautiful song survives and comes back to us every year as a Christmas song, whether in French or in any one of its many poetic translations.

This French version is sung here by the American singer Lisa Moscatiello (who also plays the whistle in the instrumental break), with accompaniment by Sue Richards on Celtic harp, Jennifer Cutting on the organ, and Barbara Brown on cello. It is from Jennifer Cutting’s 2010 album Song of Solstice.

Here are the French lyrics for the full six verses of the song. Usually only the 1^st, 2^nd and 5^th verses are sung, and that is the way that Lisa sings it here.

1. Quelle est cette odeur agréable,
Bergers, qui ravit tous nos sens?
S’exhale t’il rien de semblable
Au milieu des fleurs du printemps?
Quelle est cette odeur agréable
Bergers, qui ravit tous nos sens?

2. Mais quelle éclatante lumière
Dans la nuit vient frapper nos yeux
L’astre de jour, dans sa carrière,
Futil jamais si radieux!
Mais quelle éclatante lumière
Dans la nuit vient frapper nos yeux.

3. Voici beaucoup d’autres merveilles!
Grand Dieu! qu’entends-je dans les airs?
Quelles voix! Jamais nos oreilles
N’ont entendu pareils concerts.
Voici beaucoup d’autres merveilles!
Grand Dieu! qu’entends-je dans les airs?

4. Ne craignez rein, peuple fidèle
Écoutez l’ange du Seigneur;
Il vous annonce une merveille
Qui va vous combler de bonheur.
Ne craignez rein, peuple fidèle
Écoutez l’ange du Seigneur.

5. A Bethléem, dans une crèche
Il vient de vous naitre-un Sauveur
Allons, que rien ne vous empâche
D’adorer votre redémpteur
A Bethléem, dans une crèche,
Il vient de vous naître-un Sauveur.

6. Dieu tout puissant, gloire éternelle
Vous soit rendue jusqu’aux cieux.
Que la paix soit universelle
Que la grace a bonde en tous lieux.
Dieu tout puissant, gloire éternelle
Vous soit rendue jusqu’aux cieux.

You can find three versions of three poetic, singable English translations here, and a lot more can be found online by googling.

Playlist

1. A taste of the Grandshire peal Victoria Guild of Bellringers 1:00

2. Ring Out Wild Bells Emily Brown & Alyssa Pyper 3:12

3. Russian Orthodox Christmas bell peal Novo-Diveevo Convent bellringers 1:01

4. Sweet Chiming Bells Nowell Sing We Clear 4:03

Music notes

A taste of the Grandshire peal
The 17th century English playwright and diarist Ben Jonson said that the change-ringing of church bells was “the poetry of the steeples”. Another way of thinking about it is that they are the loudest and most public form of folk music.

According to this article:

Bells [have] long been part of the English aural landscape. In the eighth century, Bede wrote that a bell sounded the call to prayer at the monastic house at Hackness, near Scarborough. But by the end of the 16th century bell ringing had become a secular pastime and pleasure. A German traveler in 1602 noted that: ‘On arriving in London we heard a great ringing of bells in almost all the churches, going on very late into the evening. We were informed that the young people do that for the sake of exercise and amusements.’ And for gambling too, he was told.

It is out of this milieu that change ringing developed. The first-known secular bell-ringing society, the ‘Schollers of Cheapeside’, was founded on 2 February 1603 . . .

In 1628, the parishioners of Ashby-de-la-Zouch felt compelled to crack down on bell ringers. ‘None shall be allowed to ring for pleasure above twice in the week’, they decreed, ‘and that above the space for an hour at a time.’ No doubt they felt, to use a ringing term, over-belled.

I live about four blocks from Victoria’s Anglican Christ Church Cathedral which has a bell tower with large bells suitable for doing the full circle change-ringing known as peals. Christ Church’s ten bells range from 250 to 1450 kilos (550 to 3200 lbs.) with diameters ranging from 66 cm (2 feet 3 inches) to 137 cm (4 feet 6 inches). They are all tuned to harmonize with the largest bell which is tuned to the note of D. They are the same size, weight and have the same tuning as the change-ringing bells of Westminster Abbey.

I have a nice view of the cathedral from my balcony, and hear them ringing frequently. The ringers practice most Tuesday evenings, and do a short “method” (a short duration of change-ringing) before two masses on most Sunday mornings. That makes it easy to take for granted what a rare privilege it is for me to hear this glorious “joyful noise”.

Here is the Cathedral’s Guild of Bellringers’ explanation of change-ringing, from their notes about this recording:

We are one of seven churches in Canada (three in BC) equipped for traditional “change-ringing” in the style that emerged mostly in England in the 16th Century. The bells are mounted on wheels which are turned by means of a rope passing round the rim of the wheel and controlled by the ringer on a lower floor, who cannot see the bell he or she is ringing. Each bell turns through nearly a full circle and is struck at the end of its swing by the clapper suspended inside the bell from its crown. [There is therefore a time delay between when the rope is pulled and the bell is rung.]

This method of ringing makes the playing of tunes impracticable, so the aim of change-ringing is to produce a changing pattern of sound through a set of mathematical permutations which are both rhythmic and musical. The bells begin by ringing down the scale and, at a signal from the conductor, proceed to ring in a different order each time the bell-ropes are pulled.

There are fixed rules governing the position of each bell in these changing sequences. The bells eventually return to ringing down the scale, without any one change being repeated. Since one person can ring only one bell, change-ringing is very much a team enterprise and requires great concentration on the part of all the ringers. Eight ringers were involved in the performances on this recording.

Here is an interesting four minute video about Christ Church Cathedral’s bells and bellringers.

This track is only a small one-minute sample from the beginning of a plain peal where it is just starting to get into the more abstract-sounding parts of the progression. A full change-ringing peal takes over 5000 rings from each of 8 bell, with the progression continuing non-stop for about three hours and 25 minutes, but those are only accomplished very, very rarely. (As far as I know, the Victoria Guild has not done one.) More common but still very challenging is a 45 minute quarter-peal, but even length of change-ringing is very challenging and rare.

The ringers adjust the place of their bell in a cycle through a brief pause of the appropriate length in their rope-pulling. Proper ringing takes and incredible amount of both memory and concentration by the ringers, and even one bell rung out of its proper order means that the peal, quarter peal, or shorter change-ringing sequence is not considered to have been successful.

Actually, there are a variety of peal sequences of different lengths based on different mathematical progressions of changes. This recording is excerpted from the Grandshire Triples progression composed by Robert Roan around 1650. I got it from a YouTube video. These are the same bells that I get to hear every week.

Ring Out Wild Bells
The lyrics for this song are a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson that was first published in 1850, the same year that he was appointed Britain’s Poet Laureate.

According to a local legend, the poem was inspired by the ringing of a midnight New Year’s Eve peal by the bellringers of Waltham Abbey in Essex, north of London. They don’t do it that late here, but there is an old English custom for some churches to “ring out the old year and ring in the new one” at midnight. Sometimes the bells are first rung half-muffled for the death of the old year, then the muffles are removed to ring proudly, marking the birth of the New Year.

For most churches, this would just be ringing the church bell enthusiastically, but like Victoria, the bell tower of Waltham Abbey is equipped for ringing the changes. Lord Tennyson happened to be staying nearby to the Abbey in High Beech and apparently a heard a midnight peal for the first time.

This recording is by Emily Brown & Alyssa Pyper, and is from an out-of-print 2015 charitable fund-raising sampler album called Merry Christmas Provo Vol. 2 (from Provo City, Utah.) This music setting for the poem is by Crawford Gates and is published in the Hymnal of the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-day Saints.

Below is the whole Alfred Lord Tennyson poem, and here is allpoetry.com’s analysis of an uncommonly optimistic message from that Victorian poet:

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

Russian Orthodox Christmas bell peal
This is a is another abridged from a YouTube video, but this one was posted by the Novo-Diveevo Russian Orthodox Convent in Nanuet, New York. You can see the bell-ringers in action in that four-minute video.

Not only are the size of these bells smaller and higher in pitch than I am used to, but the Russian Orthodox style of change-ringing is very different. There is an interesting Wikipedia entry about the history and spiritual meaning of bells for the Orthodox church where they are described as “singing icons” that are as important for the Orthodox church as its painted ones.

According to that article:

The foundation of Orthodox bell ringing lies not in melody but in rhythm, with its intrinsic dynamic, and in the interaction of the timbres of the various bells. These sequences have a very special harmony, since Russian bells (unlike Western European ones) are not tuned to a single note. Western bells usually have an octave between the loudest upper tone (”ring”) and the loudest lower tone (”hum”). Russian bells have a seventh between these sounds. Generally, a good Russian bell is tuned to produce a whole scale of sounds (up to several dozen of them). . . .

The Russian Orthodox [liturgical instruction manual] provides for different types of bell ringing. Different ringing is used on different days (on working days, on Sunday, on holy days, during fasts, Lent, Easter etc.) Different ringing is required for different services (for morning service, service for the dead, liturgy, etc.). These differences are accomplished by ringing particular bells in particular ways.

Sweet Chiming Bells
is derived from a Salvation Army song called The Bells Ring Out at Christmas Time, which is of unknown origin. Its Salvation Army lyrics were:

The bells ring out at Christmas time
Their message loud and clear.
Our hearts are stirred as on the air
The joyful sound we hear.

CHORUS
Sweet chiming Christmas bells
Sweet chiming Christmas bells
They cheer us on our heavenward way
Sweet chiming bells.
They cheer us on our heavenward way
Sweet chiming bells.

Thanks be to God since all may learn
The bells’ exultant theme.
The babe of Bethlehem was born
This lost world to redeem (Chorus)

Glad message of the Christmas bells
Of God Whose name is love. (Chorus)
Oh may this music all our days
Our hope and comfort prove (Chorus)

Those verse lyrics would have fit perfectly for my set today about bells, but I can’t find a recording of it being song sung that way. They are certainly appropriate for the Salvation Army, whose red kettles and bell ringers (where permitted) have become a ubiquitous feature of the Christmas season.

[Digression about the Salvation Army kettles and bells: According to the Salvation Army, their use of kettles to solicit donations for Christmas charity was begun in San Francisco by a Canadian-born ex-sailing captain named Joseph McFee:

When his corps (local church) wanted to host a Christmas Day dinner for 1,000 of San Francisco’s poor, Joseph accepted the task of raising money to pay for the meals. He then remembered the “Simpson’s pot” he saw in Liverpool, England, during his years as a sailor. The pot was a cooking kettle that a man named Simpson placed near the wharf to collect donations for the poor.

Joseph decided to use this same technique and, on either December 14 or 15, 1891, he placed an iron cooking pot on San Francisco’s wharf near the ferry depot entrance. He hung a sign above the iron pot that read: ‘Fill the pot for the poor. Free dinner on Christmas Day to 1,000 poor women, children, and unemployed men.” A Salvation Army Soldier (local church member) stood guard next to the pot. A second pot, this one a brass urn, was placed in the ferry waiting room, and a third near the ferry exit.

The donation pots were an immediate success and this pre-Christmas charitable fund-raising technique soon spread to other Salvation Army corps across the US and Canada, and has since gone world-wide. The use of bell-ringing to draw attention to the donation kettles was invented in 1900 by 16 year-old Salvation Army cadet named Amelia Kunkle (1884-1984). According to her:

When I first stood by the kettle to ‘keep the pot a-boiling,’ it was a bleak, cold, damp day. Girl-cadets wore long, black cotton stockings and rubbers over regular shoes; rubbers resembled slippers but were unlined and not high-topped like modern galoshes or boots.

Standing on newspapers helped block the dampness and penetrating cold. I was in The Battery, near Wall Street. Our kettle was by the entrance, or exit, to the ‘El’ which brought droves of businessmen to and from the financial district. Some contributed to The Salvation Army kettle; most passed by.

In those days, the average donation was a nickel or a dime; sometimes a quarter; occasionally, a dollar. One afternoon, donations totaled $18; very good for a four-hour stint! Most days, I was disappointed that people ignored me and my kettle.

Someone suggested that she bang a stick on the kettle to draw attention but she considered that to be too unladylike. But when she was in a nearby Woolworths she saw a small handbell that made a tinkling sound. It cost only 10 cents and she bought it. On her next day of kettle duty she rang her bell and more people stopped and donated. Raising more money to feed the poor was obviously much more satisfying. When she told the other cadets about the success she was having with her new technique, it spread like wildfire.

The Salvation Army’s kettles and bell ringing has become an iconic symbol of Christmas charity. That is the type of bells referred to in the traditional Christmas song Silver Bells, but I’ll leave that song and story for another time. End of digression.]

Back to this song, Sweet Chiming Bells. The Salvation Army song The Bells Ring Out at Christmas Time apparently soon faded away but it did not die. In northern England it was transformed by folk-processing into this popular Christmas pub-singing song.

Like many hymns, and many other songs too, its verses are in a commonly-used poetic rhythm – in fact, it is so commonly used that it is called common meter (CM). CM has four stanzas, and the number of syllables in each stanza is 8,6,8,6 with the accents on the even-numbered syllables. That makes it easy to the swap melodies between any songs with lyrics are written in CM.

Playing around with songs by matching different lyrics to melodies used to be much more common than it is today. The most popular pub-singing way to sing the verses of this song became using the familiar words of While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night, but for a chorus still singing a close variant of the original song’s jolly Sweet Chiming Bells chorus, even though it now had nothing to do with shepherds and angels.

During England’s folk music revival in the 1960s the song sung that way spread from Northern England’s pubs to become a popular mainstream Christmas song throughout the country. And that is the form in which the song came across the pond to the seasonal recording and touring folk group Nowell Sing We Clear (active 1977 to 2019) which was very popular in New England.

NSWC already had plenty of versions of WSWTFBN in their repertoire, so they changed the verses again but now they were a poem called A Song for Christmas Eve that was common meter, and in the chorus they changed a single word, swapping “heav’nly” to “merry”.

The poem had come from a small, stapled 95 page paperback book called Kriss Kringle Recitations, Dialogs and Songs for Christmas, compiled by Hal. J. Weigle and published in Chicago in 1914. The group says “this little book of poems and stories yielded pure gold.” They recorded this version of Sweet Chiming Bells on their 1995 album Hail Smiling Morn! and with its light-hearted, highly sing-along-able chorus it became a fan favourite.

Here are the song’s lyrics the way Nowell Sing We Clear sings it here:

O blessed night! A star shines bright
Though seen through falling snow:
The star of love lit from above
To set the world aglow.

CHORUS
Sweet bells, sweet chiming Christmas bells,
Sweet bells, sweet chiming Christmas bells,
They cheer us on our merry way, sweet chiming bells.
They cheer us on our merry way, sweet chiming bells.

Child voices sweet once more repeat
The angels’ glorious strain,
Our grey old earth in holy mirth
Becomes a child again. [Chorus]

Chime sweetly on, ye Christmas bells,
While happy voices sing.
Shine out, O star, from Heaven afar
And guide us to our king. [Chorus]

To hail the little new-born king
A few poor shepherds came,
Although with wonder, joy and love
The heavens were aflame. [Chorus]

The wise men came upon their way
Led by that heavenly light,
O star of love, shine from above,
And make our pathway bright. [Chorus]

The loving heart, the prayer of faith,
Are sweeter gifts to bring,
Shine out, O star, from heaven afar,
And guide us to our king. [Chorus]

Playlist

1. Ríu Ríu Chíu Bruce Cockburn 6:26

2. A la nanita nana Alina Alcántara, Crystal Lizardo, Don Soledad 3:03
   

Music notes

Ríu Ríu Chíu
This is a sixteenth century or earlier Spanish villancico; a dance-song equivalent to a French carole or English carol from that time. Some music scholars attribute it to the Catalan composer Mateo Flecha the Elder, and some suspect the Aragonese composer Bartomeu Càrceres, but it is accepted by most as being anonymous.

The song did not survive in the popular culture. We only know it from an old music book of villancicos that was published in Venice in 1556. It is in the part of the book that has Villancicos de Navidad a quatro bozes (Christmas villancicos for four voices). There is only one known remaining copy of that songbook. It is at Uppsala University in Sweden.

The earliest recording ever made of Riu Riu Chiu was in 1957, by the highly regarded ensemble New York Pro Musica which was active from 1952 to 1974. The hallmarks of that group were being able to find long-forgotten old songs in obscure places, and a reputation for being meticulous in researching how to authentically perform their early music. They sang this in the original archaic Spanish from the antique songbook, and they would have sought advice from a linguist regarding the proper 16^th century pronunciation.

During the folk revival of the 1960s this lively Christmas song spread from the early-music appreciators out to the general public via both the folk music community and pop music: It was recorded in modern Spanish by such groups as the Kingston Trio and The Monkees. (Those are links to their versions.)

More recently, in 1993 Canadian folksinger Bruce Cockburn recorded this version that he learned from the New York Pro Musica’s recording in antique Spanish. It is from his 1993 album simply called Christmas. Cockburn accompanies himself here on guitars, dulcimer and percussion, and is accompanied by Hugh March on the violin, Dick Smith on percussion, and background vocalists Eliseo Borrero, Alberto Mirabal and Candi Sosa.

The expression “Riu, riu, chiu” is not translatable; it represents a bird singing. That was first thought to represent the song of a nightingale, but scholars now think that both etymology and the other lyrics in the chorus indicate that it was intended to be the song of a kingfisher. The lyrics and translation from a fan site are:

Riu, riu, chiu, la guarda ribera
Dios guarde el lobo de nuestra cordera

El lobo rabioso la quiso morder
Mas Dios poderoso la supo defender
Quizole hazer que no pudiesse pecar
Ni aun original esta uirgen no tuuiera (Chorus)

Este uiene a dar a los muertos uida
Y uiene a reparar de todas la cayla
Es la luz del dia aqueste mocuelo
Este es el cordero que San Juan dixera (Chorus)

Yo ui mil garcones que andauan contando
Por aqui bolando haziendo mil sones
Diziendo a gascones, “Gloria sea en el cielo
Y paz en el suelo pues Jesus nasciera.” (Chorus)

Este uiene a dar a los muertos uida
Y uiene a reparar de todas la cayla
Es la luz del dia aqueste mocuelo.
Este es el cordero que San Juan dixera. (Chorus)

Yo ui mil garcones que andauan contando
Por aqui bolando haziendo mil sones
Diziendo a gascones “Gloria sea en el cielo
Y paz en el suelo pues Jesus nasciera.” (Chorus)

A translation is:

Riu, riu, chiu, the river bank protects it,
As God kept the wolf from our lamb

The rabid wolf tried to bite her
But God Almighty knew how to defend her
He wished to create her impervious to sin
Nor was this maid to embody original sin

He comes to give life to the dead
He comes to redeem the fall of man
This child is the light of day
He is the very lamb Saint John prophecied

A thousand singing herons I saw passing,
Flying overhead, sounding A thousand voices
Exulting, “Glory be in the heavens,
and peace on earth, for Jesus has been born.”

He comes to give life to the dead
He comes to redeem the fall of man
This child is the light of day
He is the very lamb Saint John prophesied

A thousand singing herons I saw passing
Flying overhead, sounding a thousand voices
Exulting, “Glory be in the heavens,
And peace on earth for Jesus has been born.”

A la nanita nana is a Christmas carol written by Juan Francisco Muñoz y Pabón and was first published in 1904. It is very popular in the Hispanic world both as a Christmas carol and as a lullaby sung to babies at any time of the year. The song recently came to popular attention among non-Hispanic young people after the Disney-created band The Cheetah Girls sang their version of it in their second TV movie on the Disney Channel.

I also have a beautiful a cappella choral version of the song that was recorded by the Trapp Family Singers in 1953, but I found today’s rendition on YouTube and especially enjoyed the guitar accompaniment by Don Soledad. The singers are Crystal Lizardo and Alina Alcántara.

A la nanita nana, nanita ea, nanita ea,
Mi Jesús tiene sueño. Bendito sea, bendito sea. (X2)

Fuentecita que corre clara y sonora,
Ruiseñor que en la selva, cantando llora,
Callan mientras la cuna se balancea.

A la nanita nana, nanita ea, (X2)

English translation:

Come, let’s sing a little lullaby, Come, let’s sing a little,
My Jesus is sleepy. Blessed be, blessed be.

Little spring that runs clear & sonorous,
Nightingale that in the forest,
Weeps as it sings,
Hush, while the cradle rocks.

Come, let’s sing a little lullaby,
Come, let’s sing a little lullaby.

Playlist

1. The Abbots Bromley Horn Dance Lisle Kulbach 1:07

2. I Am Christmas John Conolly 4:35

3. Joy to the World The Mouldy Figs 1:43

Music notes

The Abbots Bromley Horn Dance
is an ancient autumn dance that is still performed every year in the small Staffordshire village of Abbots Bromley. It is believed to descend from a pre-Christian stag-hunting ritual,and is considered by folklore scholars to be one of the oldest and most important survivals of community magico-religious ceremony in all of Europe. Musically, like many other songs and tunes related to other holidays this tune has migrated to being associated with Christmas and the Winter Solstice.

The event is performed in the dim twilight of evening by Morris dancers ceremonially engaging each other with the massive horns of reindeer. The antlers used in the dance these days are relatively recent replacements because the ones that the villagers had been using became too fragile. The old antlers have been scientifically analyzed as being British reindeer dating from before they became extinct in that country in the 12^th or 13rd century.

This simple recorder version of the tune was played Lisle Kulback to accompany the opening scene for one of the early performances of The Christmas Revels, a Christmas pageant tradition that began in New York in 1957 but which is now held by local affiliates in several American cities. I got this recording from the CD version of the Revels’ first album; issued in 1978 which is called simply The Christmas Revels.

I Am Christmas
was written by John Conolly and Bill Meek, with Meek credited for the haunting lyrics. John Conolly recorded it on his 2008 album The Grumpy Old Men of Old England, but I got it from this YouTube video that he posted at that time. I posted another rendition of this song on Dec 2, 2021 in which I give a bit more background information about the song.

Here are the lyrics:

I will sew a braid of gold on grey December’s ragged sleeve
Teach the crabbed and jaded soul how to give, how to receive
For rooms are thick with magic now, the tree its soft light throwing
The mistletoe, the holly bough, my age-old spell bestowing

For I bring stories by the hearth, delight in half-forgotten names
Apple logs on fragrant fires with flick’ring faces in the flames
And as the year draws in its days and tired leaves are falling
I will brighten darkened ways where dusk is early calling

I am warmth and I am light, and I am kith and kin
A candle in your longest night
I am Christmas, let me in, I am Christmas, let me in

I can take the weary miles and weave a carpet to your door
Guide the dusty wand’rers home, safely to your side once more
And I can cheer the bitter days with tunes to set you singing
My standard in your heart I’ll raise, joy and comfort bringing

I bring churches all a-glow and carols on the midnight air
Coloured windows streaked with snow that gild the congregation there
For young and old shall join and sing to mark the longest turning
From one glad candle that I bring, ten thousand more are burning.

I am warmth and I am light, and I am kith and kin;
A candle in your longest night,
I am Christmas, let me in, I am Christmas, let me in [x2]

Joy to the World
This version of the familiar carol tune was recorded by a St. Paul, Minnesota bar band called The Mouldy Figs, and is from their 1996 self-published album Have Yourself a Mouldy Little Christmas. It was sent to me as a Christmas present by a high-school friend. (Thanks Kingsley!)

The band members were Rick Anderson on Banjo, John Plomondon on fiddle, Adam Granger - guitar, Dave Faison on Bass, and the group’s leader, the late Jim “Fig” Field on washboard. The band is no longer active, but that is not surprising since in 2003 they issued an anniversary album called Never Trust a Band Under Thirty to celebrate having played together for 30 years.

The poem that became the lyrics for Joy to the World were written by “the father of English hymns” Isaac Watts. Authorship of the melody and arrangement is more complicated, and for a long time was been mis-attributed to either the great Baroque composer Georg Friedrich Handel or to the Bostonian banker and music director Lowell Mason, a leader in 19th century American church music. But recent research has pretty persuasively solved the mystery. If you want to know whodunit, go here.

Playlist

1. Rise Up Shepherd and Follow Odetta 1:42

2. Born in Bethlehem Blind Boys of Alabama, w. Mavis Staples 6:29

Music notes

Rise Up Shepherd and Follow
I found a lot of information (as well as misinformation) about the origins of this song online. One thing is clear: It is an authentic spiritual – what we used to call a Negro spiritual. Most cite its earliest documentation as being in a short story written by Ruth McEnery Stuart titled Christmas-Gifts that appeared in the January-June 1891 issue Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine.

The song appears in Ruth Craawford Seeger’s 1951 American Folk Songs for Christmas, and her attribution says that she collected it from Religious Folk Songs of the Negro, As Sung on the Plantations, a 1909 songbook compiled by the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute’s Music Director Thomas P. Fenner. While Fenner might have gotten the song from that short story, but I think it more likely that he collected it directly from an African American source.

The song also appears in other plantation days songbooks published before 1920, but it is not clear to what extent they were copying songs from the same sources. I haven’t dug into it enough by looking for differences in the texts of the various sources to see if they all are derived from the quoted song in the Ruth McEnery Stuart short story.

Either way, we are left with the question of whether this is a song that dates back to the days of slavery, or whether it is a relatively new “jubilee spiritual”. Spirituals are inherently songs that were passed around orally and they would have been prone to rapidly evolving. Jubilee spiritual is the name given to songs that arose among freed ex-slaves either during the Civil War or shortly after it during the short-lived period of the 1865-1877 Reconstruction. That time period is after the ending of direct slavery but before the ex-slaves’ optimistic spirit of freedom was shattered by the rise of Jim Crow laws. It is that type of spiritual that is the root of the style of songs and singing that we now call Gospel Music.

The contrast between the styles of jubilee spirituals and slavery-time ones has been studied by many people, including the African-American poet, novelist and social activist Langston Hughes. There are many documented Christian religious spirituals from the times of slavery, but they are not about Christmas and Christ’s Nativity. Almost all of the slavery era’s spirituals refer to a powerful King Jesus, with an intention and capability to relieve his followers from oppression, and not about him being a helpless baby. Therefore, a spiritual like this one is likely to have been first sung during that brief post-emancipation and pre-Jim Crow period.

If you want to explore the history of this song, and the problems of documenting spirituals in general, besides Langston Hughes’ writings on the subject, I recommend you start with its Wikipedia entry and this article from a series about the history of songs sung in Methodist churches.

Rise up Shepherd is sung here by Odetta, arguably the most influential Black folksinger of all time. What do I mean by “influential”? Well, besides her leadership role in getting nearly the entire folk revival movement to actively support the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, her 1957 album At the Horn was cited by Bob Dylan as having spurred him into singing folk music (where he became a folk music icon before moving on to folk-rock and beyond.) This recording is from her 1960 Vanguard album Christmas Spirituals.

There’s a star in the east on Christmas morn,
It will lead to the place where the Savior’s born,

[Refrain]
Follow, follow,
Rise up, shepherd, and follow
Follow the star of Bethlehem,
Rise up, shepherd, and follow.

If you take good heed to the angel’s word,
Rise up, shepherd, and follow,
You’ll forget your flocks, you’ll forget your herd,
Rise up, shepherd, and follow

Leave your sheep, and leave your lambs
Rise up, shepherd, and follow
Leave your ewes, and leave your rams
Rise up, shepherd, and follow

[Refrain]

Born in Bethlehem
This memory-challenging cumulative or counting song is known by many names including Little Bitty Baby and The Holy Baby, but it is generally titled by its opening line: Children Go Where I Send Thee. It is accepted as being a spiritual, and is often said to date back to the days of slavery in the US, but as discussed above that is unlikely.

The earliest reference that I can find to collection of the song was in 1934 by John and Alan Lomax, who recorded it from Black convicts at the Bellwood Labor Camp in Georgia while on the same collection trip where they first met Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter.

That is not to say that the song is not an authentic jubilee spiritual; there is certainly identified song-writer, and there are many variants in the wording, especially in the counting progression, which is evidence of considerable oral transmission. But the song does not appear in Ruth Crawford Seeger’s American Folk Songs for Christmas book, nor presumably in any of the early sources of African American songs that gathered songs from in her diligent research. She must have known about Children Go Where I Send Thee and if she thought that it was an authentic spiritual she would certainly have included it in her book.

Another reason to suspect that it is not an old spiritual is that none of the documented ones are cumulative songs. The history of this song is closely intertwined with a similar well-known cumulative song that has very early European roots. It is also known by various names and has many variants in both melody and lyrics. You’ll probably instantly recognize the song I am talking about from this first verse from one of its variants. . .

I’ll sing you one O
Green grow the rushes, O
What is your one, O?
One is one and all alone
And evermore shall be so.

. . . and/or from this first verse from many other variants:

Come and I will sing you,
What will you sing me?
I will sing you one-o.
What will the one be?
One the one that’s all alone and ever more shall be so.

That song, which also has many names, comes from long tradition of European memory-game songs. What the variants of that song and Born in Bethlehem have in common is that their counting progressions, while they vary considerably in specifics, are totally interchangeable. Unless the adaptation went the other way, the use of religious counting lyrics in a memory-game song might have been inspired by a 16^th century Ashkenazi Passover teaching song for children called Echad Mi Yodea.

This song’s collection by the Lomaxes in 1934 coincides with the early growth of the Gospel singing movement, and the earliest recordings of Children Go Where I Send Thee (under its various names) were recorded by Black musical evangelists like Dennis Crumpton & Robert Summers (1936) and by Black quartets like the Golden Gate Quartet (1937) and the Heavenly Gospel Singers (1938). (You can listen to those early recordings through those links.) Gospel singing is rooted in spirituals but also includes newly-written songs. What they all have in common is that their singing is in the style of African-American worship singing.

Whenever this song came into being it is clearly from African-American roots and it has become a core Christmas song among gospel music singers, Black and White.

This version, with the full twelve verses, was arranged and recorded by The Blind Boys of Alabama, a group whose roots go back to 1939. It is from their 2003 album Go Tell It On The Mountain. The lead singer is Jimmy Carter, and he is accompanied by the great Mavis Staples of the Staple Singers.

In the style of gospel singing this song has so much improvisation and variations from verse to verse that it would be a transcription nightmare. I will only give you the first verse and the progression of numbered characters in the constantly growing verses.

Little children, go where I send thee.
How will you send me?
I’m gonna send thee one by one
One for the little bitty baby.
Born of the Virgin Mary
Born, born, born in Bethlehem.

2. Two was Paul and Silas …
3. Three for the Hebrew children …
4. Four for the four that stood at the door ...
5. Five for the gospel preachers ...
6. Six for the six that couldn’t get fixed ...
7. Seven for the seven that couldn’t go to heaven ...
8. Eight for the eight that stood at the gate ...
9. Nine for the nine that dressed so fine ...
10. Ten for the ten commandments ...
11. Eleven for the gospel riders ...
12. Twelve for the twelve disciples ...