The fascinating stories behind our Christmas carols
Andrew Gant
If you haven’t already, you will soon find yourself singing carols in church. You will, I hope, thrill once again to those familiar melodies and timeless, ancient words, part of our Christmas inheritance since time began.
Well, not really.
Nor do they really belong in church- at least, many of them don’t; or, at least, not entirely.
Take Deck The Hall. It’s a new year party song, no more, no less, celebrating the ancient habit of decorating the common hall with vegetation in the dark days of the year as a symbol of the turning of the seasons and the coming of new life. Words, and music, originate in Wales. The English version we sing today was written by a Scotsman, Thomas Oliphant.
Even if you are singing a song with sacred words, the doctrinal content can be a little hazy. It Came Upon the Midnight Clear is a beautiful song, but it doesn’t mention God much. Nor does it mention Jesus, or indeed any part of the familiar Christmas story, with the exception of the herald angels, which the poet, the nineteenth-century American Unitarian minister Edmund Hamilton Sears, uses as the springboard for a meditation on the troubled state of the world. The great hymnologist and chronicler of such things, Erik Routley, calls it “little more than an ethical song, extolling the worth and splendour of peace among men”.
Why “little more”? What more could we want? Routley is right. This song is simply a plea for peace: not even a prayer, since the appeal is addressed not to the Deity, be it Trinity or Unity, but to the whole world, implored to hear the song the angels sing and give it back to heaven. It is beautifully constructed, ending every verse with the same two words, approached from a different direction and with a different rhyme to end line six, setting up the final couplet skilfully and movingly.
It Came Upon the Midnight Clear is also another example of a notable subset in our English Christmas Carol tradition: it isn’t English.
At least, the words aren’t.
Nor is the tune.
At least, one of the tunes isn’t.
A couple of years ago I had the enormous privilege of attending the wonderful Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols in the soaring chapel of King’s College, Cambridge. We had a cousin from America staying with us at the time. Halfway through the service we turned the page to find the instruction “The congregation will stand to sing It Came Upon the Midnight Clear.” We shuffled obediently to our feet. The organ began the playover. After a bar or two my cousin turned to me and whispered “What’s going on? They’re playing the wrong tune.”
She was right. They were.
It Came Upon the Midnight Clear is one of several items in our repertoire which has always been, and still are, sung to different tunes on the two sides of the Atlantic. The same is true of Away in a Manger (though, in that case, the words and both the tunes are American, and none of it is by Martin Luther, despite the confident attribution in countless nineteenth and early-twentieth century collections: the authors made that up to publicise a celebration they were holding for the 400th anniversary of Luther’s birth).
The best example is one of the best-loved carols of all.
Phillips Brooks was an American priest who served as Bishop of Massachusetts. He was an inspiring preacher, and gave the funeral oration for President Abraham Lincoln after his assassination in 1856. After the horrors of the Civil War he went on a visit to the Holy Land, and recorded his impressions in his diary:
I remember standing in the old church in Bethlehem, close to the spot where Jesus was born, when the whole church was ringing hour after hour with splendid hymns of praise to God, how again and again it seemed as if I could hear voices I knew well, telling each other of the wonderful night of the Savior’s birth … for ever there will be a singing in my soul.
When he got home he turned this impression into a simple poem, O Little Town of Bethlehem, and handed it to his own church organist, Lewis Redner, to set to music. Redner promptly forgot all about it until the night before the first performance was due to be given by the children at his church, when, prompted by a tactful nudge from his boss, Brooks, he records “I was roused from sleep late in the night hearing an angel-strain whispering in my ear, and seizing a piece of music paper I jotted down the treble of the tune.”
That tune, St Louis, is the one you will still hear sung in America today.
So, why don’t we sing it? It was the one intended by its original author, after all?
Step forward an English genius, composer, folksong collector and antiquarian, Ralph Vaughan Williams. In the very early years of the twentieth century Vaughan Williams took on the job of music editor of a new hymnbook, The English Hymnal. He and his words editor, Percy Dearmer, wanted to include Brooks’ lyric, but either didn’t know, or more possibly didn’t like, Redner’s tune. So Vaughan Williams turned to a song he had heard sung to him in the pretty village of Forest Green in Surrey a few years before by a gentleman called Mr Garman, to words of a very different character:
I am a ploughboy stout and strong
As ever drove a team;
And three years hence asleep in bed
I had a dreadful dream.
And as the dream has done me good,
I’ve got it put in rhyme:
That other boys might read and sing
My dream when they have time.
Vaughan Williams bolted the American words to the English tune, and created a classic.
Not, perhaps, exactly the parentage we might imagine for this much-loved song when we stagger to our feet to bellow those familiar words and music once again.
But it’s just one of the many surprising, strange, intriguing and fascinating back-stories that go to make up the rich pudding that is our English carol tradition.
Happy Christmas.
Andrew Gant is the author of Deck the Hall: The Stories of our Favourite Christmas Carols