Beautiful Star Of Bethlehem: A Song History

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Notes by Don Brandon on Hymnary.org credit the song to R. Fisher Boyce and say he wrote it around 1938 near Link, Tennessee[1]. Boyce, whose full name was Robert Fisher Boyce, was a native of Link, in southern Rutherford County, born there on 25 November 1887[2]; he died in 1968[3]. By the early 1900s he was singing in quartets; he later trained at one of the music normal schools that the James D. Vaughan shape-note publishing house ran in Lawrenceburg and went on to teach singing schools in his own area[3]. He also gave voice lessons and made a living from dairy farming, insurance and nursery sales, and he was deacon and song leader at Mt. Carmel Baptist Church when the song was written[2]. The story retold by the Rutherford County Historical Society has the words coming to him in the dairy barn of his farm in the Plainview community while he sat on a milking stool, with his daughter Nanny Lou later helping him set down the music[2]. In the collector Mike Yates's telling, Boyce woke one Sunday with the tune already in his head and finished the song in an empty milking barn, and Yates places it in the early 1930s, so the year differs between accounts[4].

Sassetta painting of the Magi and their retinue on horseback riding down a pale hillside

Sassetta (Stefano di Giovanni), The Journey of the Magi, tempera and gold on wood, ca. 1433–35. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Shown for its subject; it has no connection to the song.

Boyce sold the song to the Vaughan company for a one-time fee, according to the Hymnary.org notes, and Adger M. Pace arranged it for the Vaughan Radio Quartet, which is why Pace is so often named as its writer[1]. Hymnary.org's main credit line, however, lists Pace as author, with the tune under Boyce's name[1]. Vaughan published the song in 1940, printing it in its songbook Beautiful Praise and later in Favorite Radio Songs; the Rutherford County Historical Society notes that the Boyce family never received royalties[2]. The 1941 collection Singing Star printed it as its first number with the words under Pace's name and the music under Boyce's[5], while the hymnal Voices Together (2020) gives both words and tune to Boyce, lists Pace as harmonizer, and carries a 1940 copyright renewed in 1967 by James D. Vaughan Music Publisher[6].

The Max Hunter Folk Song Collection holds a recording of J. W. Breazeal singing it in Springfield, Missouri, on 27 April 1958[7], and in August 1980 Yates recorded Evelyn and Douston Ramsey at their home in Sodom Laurel, Madison County, North Carolina, who told him it was always sung there at Christmas[4]. Emmylou Harris included it on her Christmas album Light of the Stable[8], the Judds, Patty Loveless and Bill and Gloria Gaither have all recorded it[2], and folk revival singers such as Finest Kind and the duo of Eliza Carthy and Jon Boden have taken it up as well[4].

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Sources

  1. Hymnary.org: "Beautiful Star of Bethlehem".
  2. Rutherford County Historical Society (Frank Caperton, 2015): "Beautiful Star of Bethlehem written in Rutherford County".
  3. Hymnary.org: "R. Fisher Boyce".
  4. Mainly Norfolk: "Beautiful Star of Bethlehem".
  5. Hymnary.org: "Singing Star (1941), no. 1: Beautiful Star of Bethlehem".
  6. Hymnary.org: "Voices Together (2020), no. 275: O Beautiful Star of Bethlehem".
  7. Missouri State University, Max Hunter Folk Song Collection: "Beautiful Star of Bethelhem" (Cat. #0086).
  8. SecondHandSongs: "Beautiful Star of Bethlehem by Emmylou Harris".