I’ve just put the finishing touches to some powerpoint slides comprising the lyrics of some Christmas carols for a community event tomorrow and I had to raise a query with the person organising it, who sent me the lyrics - the text they provided had the second verse of O Little Town Of Bethlehem as:
Whereas I’m sure I’ve always knowin it as:
It works either way in terms of syllables and scansion, but sounds horribly foreign to me the first way. What concerns me most is that I can’t find a single source on the web with the lyrics as I remember them. Can it really be that I have been singing this, probably the most well-known and oft-repeated of all christmas carols, wrong, for the best part of forty years? How could I have sung it with the verses transposed and not noticed others singing it the other way all around me?
Or am I just going mad, and experiencing some kind of false memory - if it’s that, it’s utterly compelling and disturbing in the seamless way it fits in with my experience…
I’m pretty sure I’ve always heard it the first way. Checking my church’s hymnal, that’s the way it’s printed. But, your church must have its own hymnals too, right, and you’ve been used to them? If I were you I’d check it against the songbook you’ve always used if possible.
(I’d check my Oxford book of carols for you but it’s at home, and I’m at my BIL’s house. I’ll look tonight when I get home if you like.)
Apropos of nothing, I’ve always thought of O Little Town as a carol of only second-class prominence, at best.
I’m not sure what’s best known… I’d guess Silent Night, or perhaps (depending on how you define Christmas Carol) White Christmasn, Deck the Halls, Joy to the World, Rudolph or O Come All Ye Faithful.
If you think about it Mangetout, you wouldn’t have morning stars proclaiming the holy birth before Christ is born of Mary. To do so would be a bit of a stretch.
I’ve always heard it the other way around ending with “And peace to men on earth.”
I also checked an old piano music book of carols and the verse in question is entirely absent - which is interesting - I wonder if it is a modern insertion…
O morning stars together
Proclaim the holy birth
And praises sing to God the King
And Peace to men on earth Because Christ is born of Mary
And gathered all above
While mortals sleep, the angels keep
Their watch of wondering love
Any way its sung, it is a beautiful song with a haunting melody. This and It Came Upon a Midnight Clear are two of my favorites.
It might be fun to sing it the alternative way-keep the audience on their toes.
It was written in 1868 by Phillips Brooks, Episcopal clergyman (and later the Bishop of Massachusetts for the last two years of his life), and all the texts I’ve been able to find give the first version in the OP. Perhaps it was reset by someone (for whatever reason,) and your church has preserved the rearrangement?
Full five verses as written by Brooks (copyright has expired, mods! :)):
In my church’s (United Church of Canada) new hymnal, the last line is “And peace to all on earth”. They’ve made all the pronouns gender neutral, in every hymn. It’s amusing to listen to half the congregation (singing from their memories) sing “men” while those reading sing “all”. There was quite a bit of debate over the lyric changes when they were producing the new hymnals.
I don’t know, but asking around a bit more, nearly everyone I know is familiar with the version to which I am accustomed - only a small number of my contacts know it the other way and only one (the person I referred to in the OP) claims never to have heard it the way I remember it.
I think it might just be that the rearranged version is the one that caught on nationally here in the UK - I’m pretty sure that it will be the way I remember it on any recorded media here.
Another vote for the first order. I’d also like to give an honourable mention to the cover version of this carol that can be found on the Bob Rivers website as part of his Twisted Tunes collection. The song is performed to the tune from “House of the Rising Sun” and IMHO it works beautifully.
It’s the rearranged version that we sing in the US too, but I did check my old book of carols and it was the original way. I wonder when and how it got changed? It doesn’t seem to make much difference to the song, so why was it done?
I’ve always heard it the first way - but if it helps, I think of the verse as “God our King” which is apparently wrong.
And eleanorigby, I don’t want to be kept on my toes for Christmas carols. They should be exactly as I remember it - without gender neutrality. (Other places, of course. But I want the “sons of earth” to be raised when the herald angels sing.)
I think that you’re right on this. An important point not yet mentioned in this thread is that the hymn is generally sung to different tunes in the US and UK.
The cyberhymnal.org page (WARNING: MIDI file plays when page is loaded) for OLToB gives three tunes:
[ul]
[li]St. Louis, written in 1868 by Lewis Redner, who was the organist at Phillips Brookes’s church (the “standard US tune”). [/li][li]Forest Green, arranged by Ralph Vaughan Williams in 1906[sup]*/sup.[/li][li]Ephratah written by Uzziah C. Burnap in 1895 (with which I am unfamiliar).[/li][/ul]The Wikipedia entry for OLToB mentions a fourth tune by H. Walford Davies, usually performed only by choirs rather than congregations.
My copy of The Penguin Book of Christmas Carols, originally written in the UK in 1965, gives the OP’s second order of lyrics. I was wondering if perhaps the rearrangement occurred in 1906 when Vaughan Williams set it to Forest Green, but then I came upon this site, which gives the OP’s first version as the original and then says:
i.e. the OP’s remembered (second) version. The notes page at the same site contains commentary from 1924, that implies that the rearrangement was a mistake by the publishers of the 1903 collection.
