All Through The Night: A Song History

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"All Through the Night" is the English name of the Welsh air "Ar Hyd y Nos." The tune first appeared in print in Edward Jones's Musical and Poetical Relicks of the Welsh Bards (1784), arranged for solo voice and harp with one verse in Welsh and one in English.[1][2] Later collections reprinted it, including William Bingley's 1804 book on North Wales and, across the Atlantic, the New York collection Riley's Flute Melodies (1820).[1] The Traditional Tune Archive calls it "the most famous Welsh air, often sung as a lullaby."[1]

Painting of the Welsh mountain Cader Idris rising above a wooded river valley

Richard Wilson, Cader Idris, with the Mawddach River, oil on canvas, about 1774. The Cleveland Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).

The Welsh words usually credited to the song today are later than Jones's printing: BBC Music Magazine attributes them to John Ceiriog Hughes (1832–1887), a railway clerk and later station-master who collected traditional melodies and made a life's work of writing fresh Welsh lyrics to fit them.[3][4] The familiar English text, a gentle night-time song of comfort, is by Harold Boulton.[4] The song remains popular with Welsh choirs and is also sung as a Christmas carol.[4] Modern recordings include a duet by Olivia Newton-John and Michael McDonald and a version on Cerys Matthews's 2010 album Tir.[4]

The melody also had a long life in churches. In 1817 Marianne Nunn fitted a John Newton text to it for a London hymnbook. Reginald Heber heard the air played on a harp, probably during a visit to Llangedwyn in Wales in 1820, and wrote his hymn "God That Madest Earth and Heaven" for it; the hymn was published after his death in 1827.[2] According to the hymnologist Erik Routley, Heber's words and the Welsh air were not paired in a hymnal until The English Hymnal of 1906, which used a harmonization by Ralph Vaughan Williams.[2] Under the tune name AR HYD Y NOS, Hymnary.org now finds it in more than 340 hymnals, carrying newer texts as well as Heber's.[5]

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Sources

  1. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Ar Hŷd y Nôs".
  2. Hymnology Archive: "God That Madest Earth and Heaven / AR HYD Y NOS".
  3. Dictionary of Welsh Biography: "Hughes, John Ceiriog (1832–1887)".
  4. BBC Music Magazine (classical-music.com): "What are the lyrics to 'All through the night'?".
  5. Hymnary.org: "AR HYD Y NOS".