2019 Murfin Winter Holidays Music Festival—Christmas Day Part 1—It Came Upon a Midnight Clear

It Came Upon a Midnight Clear sung by Mahalia Jackson.

Note—We will celebrate Christmas Day with two classic 19th Century American carols with anti-war subtexts penned by Unitarians.  The second installment will go up later this morning.
 
It Came Upon a Midnight Clear is one of the oldest and most beloved of American Christmas carols.  It also never mentions the Christ Child but instead is all about the announcement that the angles made to the shepherds.  It was a not-so-subtle message for Americans who had just concluded a war that the author considered horribly unjust and immoral.

Rev. Edmund Hamilton Sears wrote the words for It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.

Rev. Edmund Hamilton Sears was the minster of the Unitarian Church in Wayland, Massachusetts in 1849.  It was a small congregation and a not-very-important-pulpit in the insular world of New England Unitarianism.  But like many of his peers Sears had been an ardent opponent of the just concluded Mexican War.  He considered it indefensible land grab by a powerful nation against a weak one.  It also had ramifications for his opposition to slavery.  The most voracious War Hawks intended the newly conquered lands to eventually enter the Union as slave states and thus swing the balance of power in the nation permanently to the South.  And like other Unitarian ministers, the war confirmed Sears in a growing pacifism.

The war had concluded with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo signed in February 1848 and ratified by the two nations by that May.  Under its terms Mexico lost nearly half of its territory including all or parts of the future states of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, and New Mexico.

It was still weighing heavily on Sears’ mind when his friend Rev. William Parsons Lunt of First Parish Church in Quincy, Massachusetts asked him to write something for a Sunday school pageant.  Sears played and sang the song to friends and parishioners in his own parlor on Christmas Eve of 1949.  It isn’t known to what tune it was sung.

Sears ever after called carol his “little angels song.”

The angels on high announced "Peace on Earth, Good will toward men to the Shepards who became the first to adore the infant in the manger.  But the song is about the angle's message, not the baby.

The next year Richard Storrs Willis, a composer who trained under Felix Mendelssohn, wrote the melody that quickly became most widely known tune to the song used in the United States.  With that tune it was added to the hymnals of not only the Unitarians, but Universalists, Episcopalians, Methodists, Lutherans, and most other Protestant denominations.

But in England and the Commonwealth nations It Came Upon a Midnight Clear is sung to a melody called Noel by Sir Arthur Sullivan of Gilbert and Sullivan fame. 

This morning we will listen to a magnificent version of the Willis melody by Gospel music legend Mahalia Jackson.