Auld Lang Syne—Murfin Winter Holidays Music Festival 2024-‘25

                                                                        Auld Lang Syne by Scottish singer Dougie McLean.

Although there have occasionally been other songs that made feeble attempts to displace it, New Year’s Eve belongs firmly to Auld Lang Syne and it promises to remain supreme in defiance of any and all changes in musical tastes and styles.

Most of us know that the song comes from a poem by the revered Ploughman Poet and Scottish national icon Robert Burns.  But you may not know the whole story.  

                                            The Scottish Ploughman Poet Robert Burns.

After his first blush of fame with the publication of his Kilarnock Poems in 1786, Burns began his fruitful relationship with the editor and publisher James Johnson who was preparing to publish his Scots Musical Museum.  He collected and often rewrote scores the songs of this great collection, which preserved traditional Scottish music when it could have easily vanished.  One of the songs he sent was Auld Lang Syne with the notation “The following song, an old song, of the olden times, and which has never been in print, nor even in manuscript until I took it down from an old man.”

That was not quite true on a couple of counts.  Other collectors had recorded variants and in 1711 James Watson published a version that showed considerable similarity in the first verse and the chorus to Burns’ later poem and is almost certainly derived from the same old song.  Burns changed it from a romantic song about old lovers to a nostalgic drinking song of old friends.  Most of the words in Scotts we now sing were written by Burns.

After his early death in 1796 at the age of only 37, the song took on a special significance as a legacy of the beloved poet.

John Masey Wright's and John Rogers' illustration of Auld Lang Syne in 1841.

The tune as we now sing it may or may not have been the one that Burns originally heard but became standard in the early years of the 19th Century.  It is pentatonic—based on a five note scale—Scots folk melody, originally a sprightly dance in a much quicker tempo.

Exactly when the song became associated with New Year’s is unknown.  It is possible the earlier folk versions were already sung at that time.   But it was incorporated in Hogmanay—the last day of the old year and the first of the new—celebrations by the mid-19th Century.

Nobody in the world celebrates the New Year with zest and ritual like the Scots.  You can thank those dour old Calvinists of the National Kirk of Scotland—the Presbyterians—for more completely scouring Christmas from the calendar than Oliver Cromwell and his Puritans ever dreamed in England.  If Scottish Catholics kept Christmas in their hearts, the kept their mouths shut about it and the practice faded even in their communities.  After the celebration of Christmas was no longer outright banned it was still shunned as being “too English” and did not become a legal holiday in Scotland until 1958 and only then because so many English were moving into the border areas and were employed at firms in the big cities.

The Hogmanay circle singing of Auld Lang Syne at the stroke of midnight.

Hogmanay has many quaint customs, but they center on the stroke of midnight.  Then the central room of a home hosting the celebration is cleared of furniture and guests join hands with the person next to them to form a great circle around the dance floor. At the beginning of the last verse of Auld Lang Syne, everyone crosses their arms across their breasts, so that the right hand reaches out to the neighbor on the left and vice versa. When the tune ends, everyone rushes to the middle, while still holding hands. When the circle is re-established, everyone turns under their arms to end up facing outwards with hands still joined.

The song spread rapidly around the globe thanks to the Scottish diaspora to British Empire nations—especially Canada—and to the United States.  Scottish regiments spread the song even wider and it was adapted for use by British troops generally from India to Africa, to the Middle East.

It wasn’t until the 1890’s, however, that there was printed mention of the song being used publicly at New Year’s in the United States, although it undoubtedly was sung in Scottish communities.  When the first illuminated ball was dropped in New York City’s Times Square in 1907 the song was so firmly identified with New Year’s that the crowd sang it after the ball touched down.

A New Year's Eve broadcast by Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians from the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City.

Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians really cemented Auld Lang Syne as the New Year’s Eve song.  Lombardo first broadcast a New Year’s Eve program on CBS Radio on December 31, 1928.  He continued broadcasting from the Roosevelt Room in New York City until 1959, and then moved his base to the larger Waldorf Astoria.  In 1959 the New Year’s Eve program was first aired on CBS Television and continued on that network for 21 years.  After Lombardo’s death the song was still played at all of the airings of the Times Square celebrations.

Beloved Scottish folk singer Dougie McLean has the favorite version of Auld Lang Syne in the song's home country.

Today we return to the simple, moving beauty of Burns’ creation in a performance by the great Scottish folk singer Dougie McLean.

 

What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve —Murfin Winter Holidays Music Festival 2024-‘25

Zooey Deschanel's and Joseph Gordon-Levitt's seemingly impromptu home video of them singing What are You Doing New Year's Eve?  went viral in  2011 and boosted the song to pop standard status. 

Back in the day everyone who was not a misanthrope or a shut-in went out on New Year’s Eve.  The toffs wore their white ties and tails or elegant evening gowns and furs to don paper hats and dance the night way to orchestras in sprawling Art Deco ballrooms.  At least that is what all the old movies taught the rest of the Depression and war weary population.  But those average Joes and Jills also went out and celebrated with their own funny hats and noise makers in urban ballrooms, lodge halls, piano bars, and neighborhood saloons.  And it was not just attractive young people.  Period photographs reveal that revelers included many middle-aged and older couples.

For those who were not married or already romantically involved the question what are you doing New Year’s Eve? was of vital importance.  Nobody wanted to be alone for New Year’s and everyone wanted someone to kiss at the stroke of midnight.  That is what songwriter Frank Loesser had in mind in 1947 when he made the question into a song—What are You Doing New Year’s Eve?  Although it was performed on radio shows that often featured the popular composer’s work, it didn’t become a hit until 1949 when the early doo-wap group The Orioles hit #9 on Billboard’s Retail Rhythm & Blues chart.

New Year's Eve--the dream.

Despite that success, the song did not become an instant standard or holiday favorite.  In fact, it languished seldom recorded until Nancy Wilson hit #17 on Billboard’s Christmas Singles chart in 1965.  Two years later the same recording returned to the Holiday Chart.  Wilson’s silky and sexy, take helped make the song a something of a jazz standard sung by the likes of Ella Fitzgerald and Nat King Cole.

 

Ordinary folk whooped it up in lodge halls and neighborhood joints.

But the song still didn’t register as a pop standard until the new century and streaming video from YouTube made it go viral.  In 2011 an utterly charming impromptu duet with Zooey Deschanel and actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt made a splash and ultimately attracted more than 20,600,000 hits.

 

Light One Candle by Peter Yarrow—Murfin Winter Holidays Music Festival 2024-‘25

 

Light One Candle by Peter Yarrow performed by Peter, Paul & Mary on their 25th Anniversary PBS Concert. 

Word came from his family that Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul & Mary entered hospice care during his last Hanukkah.  

Let’s hear a Hanukkah song from the largely secular and leftist Jew like so many of my friends who wrote the song in 1982 as a pacifist response to the Lebanon War which was reflected in the lyrics: 

Light one candle for the terrible sacrifice justice and freedom demand, Light one candle for the wisdom to know when the peacemaker’s time is at hand.

It also connected the Maccabean rebellion against the Seleucid Greek Empire from 140 to 63 BCE as a war of national liberation like contemporary struggles in the Third World.

The first performance of the song was at a 1982 concert in Carnegie Hall and included in annual Holiday concerts after that.  It made its appearance on an album in 1986 on No Easy Walk to Freedom.  It was a highlight of PP&M’s 25th Anniversary concert the same year.  It was also featured two decades later in reunion concerts broadcast on PBS.  After the death of Mary Travers, Peter regularly performed it in solo programs.

This year it  may speak more clearly to many of us than ever.

Light One Candle may be the most broadly popular of all more recent Hanukkah songs.

The Holly and the Ivy The Mediæval Bæbes —Murfin Winter Holidays Music Festival 2024-‘25

                                                    The Holly and the Ivy--The Mediæval Bæbes

In the midst of the Twelve Days of Christmas and street begging The Holly and the Ivy is the one of those traditional English carols that mix pagan imagery with just a light dusting of Christianity.  may be the loveliest of this genre which usually tends to festivity and wassailing.

The origin of the song is suspected of being quite old but is lost to the mists of time, probably like so many customs suppressed by Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan  ascendancy and his attack on “Papist and pagan” Christmas. 

The earliest published versions of the carol date to the early 19th Century when there was something of fad for collecting folk songs.  Several variants were discovered and published.  The earliest were in broadsides published anonymously in Birmingham, a Northern industrial center then crowded with displaced rustics dislodged from their tenancies and forced to seek employment in the textile mills and other factories, in 1814.  

                                                                The earliest printing of The Holly and the Ivy--and 1814 Birmingham broadside.

William Hone’s 1823 work Ancient Mysteries Described, included the Holly and the Ivy, both plants were among an alphabetical list of “Christmas Carols, now annually printed" and were  an alphabetical list of “Christmas Carols, now annually printed" and were in the author's possession.

The first complete version of the words came in an 1849 book review.   The anonymous reviewer introduced the lyrics of  the carol with an elaborate recommendation:

Instead of passages from Bernard Barton [the book under review], however, and Mary Howitt, we think we could have gathered more from the seventeenth century poets; and especially might larger use have been made of that touchingly simple class of religious ballads, which under the name of carols, is so rife throughout the rural districts, and the humbler quarters of England’s great towns. Many of these are only orally preserved, but with a little trouble a large number might be recovered. We have before us at this time a collection of carols printed in the cheapest form, at Birmingham, uniting for the most part extreme simplicity, with distinct doctrinal teaching, a combination which constitutes the excellence of a popular religious literature. From this little volume we will extract one which might well take the place of the passage from Milton for Christmas Day. It is called The Holly and the Ivy.

It showed up with variation in two important mid-century collections, Sylvester’s 1861 A Garland of Christmas Carols and Husk’s 1864 Songs of the Nativity.  Both were a product of the Victorian Era revival of Christmas as a popular celebration.

The words and melody as now sung were finally standardized in Cecil Sharp’s 1911 collection English Folk-Carols.  Previously the words had been set to a variety of folk melodies but Sharp identified his source as “Mrs. Mary Clayton, at Chipping Campden.”  That was a small Gloucestershire market town in England’s southwest notable for being far from the Birmingham sources.  At least three other melodies for the song had been collected in the same area.  The simple melody has a distinctive Tudor era style.

                                            Holly and Ivy together in an English winter scene.

Holly and ivy both remain evergreen through the English winter and were typically used during the hanging of the greens of pre-Christian solstice celebration and were identified with the Green Man.  The Catholic Church, always eager to adapt pagan folkways to Christian worship identified holly with Jesus Christ and ivy with his mother Mary. 

Wreaths and sprays decorating our home include artificial holly and ivy although ivy is not evergreen in North America and European holly is rare.

The song has been recorded by choirs and by some notable performers including Petula Clark, Maddy Prior, Natalie Cole, Loreena McKennitt, and Annie Lenox.

The Mediæval Bæbes in concert.

My favorite is the hauntingly beautiful version by The Mediæval Bæbes, a British musical ensemble founded in 1996 by Dorothy Carter and Katharine Blake and featuring a rotating cast of six to twelve female voices.  They recorded it on their 2003 compilation Mistletoe and Wine and in a new rendition on the 2013 Christmas album Of Kings And Angels.

 

Good King Wenceslas for St. Stephen’s Day, Wren Day and Boxing Day—Murfin Winter Holidays Music Festival 2024-‘25

 

                                    The Irish Rovers' popular and a little rowdy Good King Wenceslas earns them a warming drink reward in this video.

Note—Still catching up.

Yesterday was the second day of the 12 Days of Christmas, a day with multiple personalities as we will see.  We will celebrate with an English carol about a Bohemian princeling/saint. 

The Brits and the residents of other former pink blotches on Queen Victoria’s globe spend  Boxing Day  storming the malls and shops on what is usually the busiest retail sales day of the year. Disgruntled gift recipients hit the refund and exchange desks and others spent gift cards and even old fashion cash.   But unlike most Yanks they do it on an official National Holiday as a paid day off.  Officially December 26 is just another Bank Holiday.  But Boxing Day is a treasured tradition with long and deep roots.

On Boxing Day an early Victorian middle class family gives the postman a small gift.  The urchin sweeping the snow will also get something for his efforts.

The celebration in the British Isles owes its origins to the aristocracy, gentry, and wealthy townsmen and their households.  The master would give presents to his servants and staff, who would also have the day off work.  Sometimes the master’s family would even serve meals to their inferiors!  Needless to say, this custom was very popular among the servants, and sometimes observed resentfully by those unaccustomed to either manual labor or generosity.

It is also a remnant of an ancient tradition that may—or may not—go back to the Roman celebrations of Saturnalia and Sol Invictus, when there was a carnival-like turnaround with slaves lording over masters for a day.  The tradition continued into the Middle Ages and on into Elizabethan times, when it took on the wild excesses of street revelry.

The Martyrdom of St. Stephen, Deacon of Jerusalem by Rembrandt.  There was more than a touch of antisemitism reflected in the painting of the stoning death of the first Christian  martyr.

That revelry doomed the whole season when Oliver Cromwell and his Puritans took over.  Eventually, Boxing Day restored a controlled dollop of the old festival.  The Church of England gave it a religious cover to the day as St. Stephen’s Day.  

Stephen was the Deacon of Jerusalem the earliest days of Christianity known for his charities to the poor.  He was also the first Christian martyr, stoned to death for allegedly preaching the Trinity in the Temple.

Good King Wenceslas was celebrated on this English  biscuit tin.

The familiar carol Good King Wenceslas is a St. Stephen’s Day song meant for street begging.  In Ireland, the day is still officially called St. Stephen’s Day.

It is also known there as Wren’s Day.  Boys in homemade hats and costumes carry a caged wren—or sometime a dead one pierced by a holly sprig—proclaiming it the King of the Birds and begging for treats.  Once a fading country custom, in the cities men now re-enact it—often as a pub crawl.

Irish Wren's Day beggars 1903.

In the Bank Holidays Act of 1871, Parliament recognized Boxing Day as a Bank Holiday—an officially recognized public holiday.  While time off from work was not originally mandatory, it has become nearly universal.

The holiday spread across the Empire and is still official in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and other Commonwealth countries.  In South Africa it was re-named The Day of Goodwill in 1994.

Today small gifts are still given trades people and service workers, but in Britain the day has become all about shopping.  It is the biggest shopping day of the year and has been compared to American Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving.  Stores mark the day with huge sales.

It is also a day of sport.  Football—that’s soccer to Americans—and Rugby leagues hold full schedules of games, teams usually playing their most serious rivals.  There are also prestige horse races and for the country gentry mounted fox hunts—more recently due to a bitterly resented law, sans fox.  The toffs are no longer allowed to chase real fox, but still got to ride to the hounds chasing a scented bait.

The carol Good King Wenceslas is most closely associated with St. Stephen’s Day along with the street begging songs like We Wish You a Merry Christmas and The Wren’s Song in Ireland.  

                                                An icon of St. Wenceslas a/k/a Duke Wenceslas I of Bohemia.

Good King Wenceslas is a Christmas carol that tells a story of a Bohemian ruler going on a journey and braving harsh winter weather to give alms to a poor peasant on the Feast of Stephen.  During the journey, his page is about to give up the struggle against the cold weather but is enabled to continue by following his master’s footprints through the deep snow. 

The legend is based on the life of the historical Saint Wenceslaus I, Duke of Bohemia who was murdered in 935. Wenceslas was considered a martyr and saint immediately after his death, when a cult grew up in Bohemia and in England. Within a few decades, four biographies of him were in circulation which had a powerful influence on the High Middle Ages concept of the rex justus (righteous king), a monarch whose power stems mainly from his great piety as well as his princely position.

In 1853, English hymn writer John Mason Neale wrote the lyrics to Good King Wenceslas  collaborating with his music editor Thomas Helmore.  The carol first appeared in Carols for Christmas-Tide. Neale’s words were set to the melody of a 13th-Century spring carol Tempus adest floridum (The time is near for flowering) first published in the 1582 Finnish collection Piae Cantiones.  The very old origins of the melody give the song an appropriately medieval cast that makes it popular with modern madrigal singers.

An Irish Rovers Christmas album.

The song has been recorded many times notably by Mel Tormé and Canadian Celtic singer Loreena McKennitt.  It was modernized with a synthesizer and orchestra instrumental version by Mannheim Steamroller.  The most popular version in Britain and Ireland is by the Canadian/Irish folk quartet The Irish Rovers which we are happy to share today.  

Candlelight The Maccabeats—Murfin Winter Holidays Music Festival 2024-‘25

                                                                                 Candlelight by The Maccabeats.

This might be the most popular contemporary Hanukkah song with over 15 million YouTube views since it was released more than 20 years ago by The Maccabeats.  It has since become a mainstay in Jewish religious education and music classes for its hip retelling of the Maccabean rebellion against the Greeks and the customs surrounding the observance of the Miracle of the Temple Lamp.

A hip retelling if the story of the Maccbees who whooped Seleucid Greek ass and reconquered Jerusalem after a long, bloody war.  Hanukkah celebrates the miracle of the Temple Lamp burning for eight days although only one day's worth of ritually purified oil was on hand.

Candlelight was the first of what became annual holiday videos by The Maccabeats, then students at the Orthodox Yeshiva University in New York City.  The 14 member a cappella group was organized by Julian (Chaim) Horowitz in 2007.  By 2010 the were in the university’s graduate school when they released their first CD, Voices from the Heights which was underwritten by a grant from the school.  The album initially sold only 5,000 copies but their Hanukkah video attracted two million hits in its first ten days.  The group was invited to sing at both the Israeli Knesset and twice at Barack Obama’s White House.

Now all graduated, members married, started secular careers, and moved all over the country but they continue to meet virtually weekly to rehearse and record.  A quartet of the members makes personal appearances.  

In 2015 they released an EP collection of their first five Hanukkah songs, A Maccabeats Hanukkah.  

All 14 members of the Orthodox Jewish  a capella group The Maccabeats. 

Candlelight is a parody of Mike Tompkins’ a cappella music video for Taio Cruz’s Dynamite.  The video was directed by fellow Yeshiva student Uri Westrich who left medical school to pursue a career in filmmaking and continues to direct all of The Maccabeats’ videos.

The Miracles of Light—Murfin Verse for Christmas/Hanukkah Calendar Coincidence

This year Christmas Day was also the first night of Hanukkah, not unheard of, but relatively rare falling together about every 20 years.  The First Night of Hanukkah is 25 Kislev in the year 5785 in the Hebrew Calendar. 

Christmas, as most people but willful fundamentalists know, is celebrated around the time of the Solstice because the early Church wanted to co-opt the return-of-the-sun festivals long observed and treasured by the pagans—the catchall name for the country people with pre-Christian faiths.  The actual birthday of Jesus, a/k/a the Christ Child, if it was a historical event as recounted in the Gospels, is unknown but thought by some Biblical scholars to likely have been in the Spring when shepherds typically stayed out in the fields with their flocks to protect the new born lambs from wolves.

Elements of the Christmas story, especially the Star leading the Magi to the stable, echoed the symbolism of the return of the light in the pagan traditions.  And Christ/Jesus himself, his tiny head ringed by a halo in icons and paintings, marked the arrival of the Light of God and hope for humanity.

Hanukkah represents another miracle of light.  When Judah Maccabee, his brothers, and followers entered Jerusalem after a long and victorious guerilla rebellion against the Greco-Syrian Seleucid Empire ruled by Antiochus IV Epiphanes and his Hellenized Jewish allies.  The found the Temple of David profaned by an idol to the god/king   Antiochus and the unclean rituals performed by his priests.  In the Holy of Holies, the seven-branched golden candelabrum called the Menorah, essential to worship and which must be kept lit, was found with only enough oil to burn for one day.   It would take more than a week to prepare and ritually purify more oil.  The Maccabees lit the flame anyway and it miraculously burned for eight days, long enough for the new oil to be prepared.

Because it is not described in the Torah or prescribed in ancient law like Passover, Yom Kippur, and Rosh Hashanah, Hanukkah is officially considered a minor Jewish holiday.  But its cultural importance is far greater even than its religious significance.  Because of the many persecutions of Jews through the centuries and because the ritual could safely be performed in the privacy of the home and away from prying eyes, Hanukkah became a celebration of hope for deliverance from oppression as the Maccabees delivered the Temple from the defilers.  Stories about observances even in Nazi extermination camps have added special significance to the holiday for many.

In Europe and the U.S. the rise of Christmas from a holy day to a long season that overwhelms and dominates everything else even as it has become more and more secularized, many Jews ramped up their own observances of Hanukkah so their children would not feel left out by the excitement and presents of Christmas.  Many non-Orthodox and secularized Jews, as well as the many dual-faith families, have even adopted or a so called Hanukkah bush or even embraced Christmas as the secular holiday of Santa and sales alongside of Hanukkah.

I know, it’s complicated.

But we have an undeniable connection between Saturnalia, Solstice, Hanukkah, Christmas, and other observations this time of year around the world.  I call them all together the Festivals of Light and several years ago celebrated them all in a poem which is included in my collection, We Build Temples in the Heart published in 2004 by Skinner House Books of Boston.   It is one of two of my seasonal poems that is fairly widely used in Unitarian Universalist services this time of year.

Miracle of Light

When the sky has swallowed the sun,

     left us in icy darkness

     save the brief gray memory of light

     escaping from its stifled yawn.

 

When hope and heat and harvest

     have been banished into night

     and dread, despair and death

     grip our forlorn hearts—

          Then, just then a light returns.

 

Druidic fires tor to hillock

     call again the sun

     and shyly does it come once more.

 

The awful gloom of tyranny

     is banished by a zealous few

     so that a Temple drop of Macabean oil

     may burn a mystic week.

 

Some account a sudden brilliant star,

     a nova in Judean skies

     to mark a coming messenger 

     of hope and faith and love.

 

And though the gloom may crowd us still

     the light may lift our hearts

     until this spinning, turning ball

     we ride around the sun.

          brings us again to Spring.

—Patrick Murfin

I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day —Murfin Winter Holidays Music Festival 2025-‘24

                                                                        Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.

 

Note--Christmas Day happened and the day took over.  I never got planned entries in my Murfin Winter Holidays Music Festival.  So I am scrambling to catch back up, but these are very busy days.  Following are three posts that should ha gone up yesterday.

Our Christmas Day carol is my own personal favorite.  I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day is unusual in that there is no reference to the Christ child, manger, Holy Family, shepherds, Magi, or even the Herald Angels.  Instead, it focuses on the message of those angels amid the ghastly carnage of war.  It was written not by noted Unitarian hymnist Samuel Longfellow, but by his brother Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, then America’s most honored and adored poet who had created national epics like The Courtship of Miles Standish, The Song of Hiawatha, and Evangeline as well as the school recital pieces The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere and The Village Blacksmith.

                                      

                                     Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1868.

Longfellow was 56 years old, teaching at Harvard, and living in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1863.  He had lost his beloved second wife, Frances Elizabeth Appleton, two years earlier in a grizzly accident when her dress caught on fire.  To compound his sorrow the Civil War was raging.  Like many New Englanders he was an ardent opponent of slavery but had also embraced pacifism since the Mexican War.  He was deeply conflicted about the war.  His eldest son, Charles Appleton Longfellow, had enlisted in the Union Army in March against his father’s wishes and was commissioned as a Lieutenant.  Charles was severely wounded in November at the Battle of New Hope Church in Virginia.  The young man’s life hung in the balance.

But just before Christmas Longfellow got word that his son would survive.  On Christmas morning, hearing the local church bells ring, the poet sat down and wrote I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.  It was as much an anguished plea for peace as it was a conventional Christmas hymn.

The poem was first published in Our Young Folks, a juvenile magazine published by Ticknor & Fields of Boston in February 1865 as the war was entering its bloody final months.

It was not set to music until an English organist, John Baptiste Calkin, used the poem in a processional accompanied with a melody Waltham had used for another hymn in 1848.  Although other settings were used, Calkin’s became for many years the standard and remains the version most heard in Britain and Commonwealth countries.

In published texts of the song two of Longfellow’s verses that most directly referred to the Civil War are usually omitted making the song more universal. 

Song writer Johnny Marks, composer of Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer was a prolific holiday music specialist but his haunting setting for I Heard the Bells on Christmas Eve was a departure from his usual seasonal novelty songs.  He considered it his greatest accomplishment.

In 1952 Christmas music specialist Johnny Marks departed from his usual novelty songs for children like Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer to create a lovely and reverent new melody for Longfellow’s words which have become the new standard in the United States.  In 1956 Bing Crosby had a mid-level hit with the song and joked to Marks “You finally got a decent lyricist.” 

Burl Ives became almost as identified with Christmas music as composer Johnny Marks.

Other notable recordings of the Marks version were made by Kate Smith, Frank Sinatra, Harry Belafonte, The Carpenters, and Burl Ives whose version we enjoy today.

Adeste Fideles (O Come All Ye Faithful)—Murfin Winter Holidays Music Festival 2024-‘25

 

                                                                        Andrea Bocelli performs Adeste Fideles with a choir in a TV special.

Note—We need another for Christmas Eve.  After a brief serenity for  Mary, Joseph, and the infant comes the noisy hullabaloo of the Announcement carols.

Adeste Fideles (O Come All Ye Faithful) is one of the most exuberant of the announcement carols and is a perennial favorite for both choir performance and congregational singing at Christmas Eve services.  It is based on two Old Testament verses said to foretell the coming of the Messiah—Psalms 98, 96:11-12 and Genesis 3:17-18 but like other popular carols it is sung as if it is an announcement of the birth of Christ by angels on high.

Mystery surrounds the creation of Adeste Fideles in Latin for use in the Catholic mass.  Proposed authors include St. Bonaventure—highly unlikely—the English Catholic and Jacobite John Francis Wade, anonymous Cistercian monks, and even a reining European monarch, King John IV (João IV) of Portugal.

Wade signed the oldest printed version of the Latin text printed while he was in exile in France in 1751.  It was included in a volume of reproductions of his manuscript copies, Cantus Diversi pro Dominicis et Festis per annum (Dominican songs and festivals of the year.)  The text was also said to have hidden messages recognizable to the covert supporters of the Stewart pretender after the Jacobite Rebellion was crushed.  Those coded messages are obscure and doubtful, however, and it is most likely that Wades signature attests to his skilled calligraphy and is not a claim to authorship.

The version published by Wade consisted of four Latin verses. But later in the 18th Century, the French Catholic priest Jean-François-Étienne Borderies wrote an additional three verses in Latin now normally printed and sung as the third to fifth of seven verses.

King John (João IV) IV was known as the "Restorer of Portugal" for reclaiming the country's independence from Spain and re-establishing the Portuguese monarchy.  A staunch ally of England against Spain, he also ruled over the country during the period of its greatest extent as a world-wide empire.  Could he have also authored Adeste Fideles?

The connection to King John—or the members of the Portuguese Province of the Cistercians—is stronger.  It is bolstered by a claim by the Duke of Leeds that he first heard it sung at the Portuguese embassy in London in 1795.  The carol was soon popularly known as The Portuguese Song.  King John had musical interests and was the acknowledged writer/composer of Church music including the Lentin hymn Crux Fidelis.  The King’s massive library said to contain the original manuscripts to Adeste Fideles was destroyed by the Lisbon earthquake and fire of 1775, but other copies were preserved and found at his former Ducal Vila Viçosa palace and have been dated to 1741, well before Wade’s publication. 

If Adeste Fideles in Latin was firmly Catholic, a polar opposite--English Dissenter Isaac Watts--made the first English version.

The first English words were by Isaac Watts a dissenting clergyman and prolific hymnist published in 1719 in Watts’ collection The Psalms of David: Imitated in the language of the New Testament, and applied to the Christian state and worship with a notation that the music was taken from “Tunes of the Old Psalmbook.”  Also indicating that the Latin version was known well before Wade. By the late 18th Century, the lyrics had been printed with music several times.

Despite its Catholic and Papish origin and official scorn for its disreputable dissenter source in English, the carol was so popular that it was soon included in orthodox Anglican services.

The version most commonly sung today is from Lowell Mason’s 1848 The National Psalmist published in Boston with a tune he named Antioch and attributed as “arranged from Handel.”  It was not in fact arranged by Handel, but Mason borrowed the first four notes from the chorus Lift Up Your Heads from The Messiah.  Modern scholars have identified other possible sources including Charles Wesley’s O Joyful Sound published in 1833.

Due to its popularity as a choral piece O Come All Ye Faithful is the most published Christmas hymn in North America.  In addition to innumerable choir performances, it has also notably been recorded by Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, Perry Como, Andy Williams, The Supremes, Johnny Cash, Neil Diamond, Pat Boone, Nat King Cole, Vic Damone, Mariah Carey, Whitney Huston with a gospel choir in the movie The Preacher’s Wife, and by the a cappella group Pentatonix.

Andrea Bocelli's popular album My Christmas included Adeste Fideles.

Today we enjoy a version by Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli with a choir.