Around 1964 - '69, when I was in elementary school, we used to sing The Twelve Days Of Christmas in season. When we got to the fifth day, my true love always gave to me “five golden rings”. Later on, when I heard the song elsewhere, it was always “five go-old rings”. That’s the only way I have ever heard the song since.
So what I’d like to know here is, did it change? Is it another one of those things like Smokey Bear, who was Smokey the bear for about two years around 1960?
Which version of the lyric were you originally taught, and which do you think sounds better? I’ve always thought “five golden rings” sounds much better and inherently more musical. Moreover, breaking the word “gold” into two notes seems clumsy when the word “golden” is contextually equivalent. It’s the /n/ sound in the word “golden”. Edgar Allan Poe could never have written The Bells without the letter “n”.
Back in the '60s, I learned it with “golden,” which I agree sounds better. But I imagine both versions have been used through the years.
Lucy Worsley recently (I guess) filmed a documentary on the history of Christmas carols. “The Twelve Days of Christmas” was one she considered. You might try looking for this show on the PBS and BBC websites (or on YouTube).
I’ve heard both, I suppose its just whatever the people singing need for the break. The high numbers are sung fast, because there’s so many words, the lower numbers are sung slow, as we return to the building that the song begins with.
Then its also all about what we want gift we culturally want to sing with: we want 5 gold rings, on nice piece of rich GOLD for each finger. GoldEN rings? A little cheap there gift giver. However, if we assume the song, for the beginning at least, is about gifts of birds for holiday meal, then 5 Golden Ring[-tailed pheasants] is just fine.
No, the truckers referred to LEOs as Smokey because they often wore/wear those broad brimmed Smokey the Bear style hats. A police chopper is a “bear in the air”.
At least according to this, “gold” and “golden” versions of the song both date back centuries, so it’s not really possible to say which came first. I saw one suggestion that “golden” became more common in North America compared to Europe sometime in the middle of the 20th century. Maybe “gold” is making a resurgence here because of general anglophilia?
The programme did discuss how Frederic Austin added extra notes to the melody for ‘gold’. Not everything that Lucy Worsley says is necessarily true, but in this particular case she does actually seem to be correct.
He was still THE bear in this image from the 1960 edition of World Book. Sometime over the next five or ten years, the USFS started telling us that he had never had any other name than Smokey Bear.
