Brightest And Best: A Song History

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"Brightest and Best of the Sons of the Morning" is an Epiphany hymn by Reginald Heber (1783–1826), a meditation on the Magi's journey that opens with an echo of the morning stars of Job 38:7[1]. It first appeared in The Christian Observer in November 1811, one of a group of hymns for the Sundays and holy days of the church year printed under the initials "D.R."[1][2] Heber, then rector of Hodnet, near Shrewsbury, and later Bishop of Calcutta, spent years assembling a hymnal arranged around the church calendar, but he died in India in 1826 before it could be published[3][1]. His widow, Amelia, saw it through the press as Hymns Written and Adapted to the Weekly Church Service of the Year (London: John Murray, 1827), with this hymn placed at Epiphany[1].

Hieronymus Bosch painting of the three kings presenting gifts to Mary and the infant Jesus beneath a green canopy

Hieronymus Bosch, The Adoration of the Magi, oil and gold on oak, ca. 1475. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). The visit of the Magi, the subject of Heber’s hymn.

Not every editor welcomed it. John Julian's Dictionary of Hymnology observed that "few hymns of merit have troubled compilers more than this," noting that some critics thought it amounted to worshiping a star while others found its lilting meter too close to a dance; several early editors dropped it from later editions of their books[2]. Percy Dearmer later blamed Hymns Ancient & Modern, which left it out in 1861, for leaving a large share of Victorian congregations unfamiliar with it[1]. Julian nonetheless counted it among the most widely used of Heber's hymns[2], and a number of modern hymnals, beginning with the Lutheran Book of Worship (1978), print "stars" for "sons" in the opening line[1][3].

In the United States the text went its own way. A version that added a new first stanza beginning "Hail the blest morn" and turned Heber's opening verse into a refrain is first known from New York's Brick Church Hymns of 1823, and the minor-mode folk tune STAR IN THE EAST that came to carry it was first printed, as far as is known, in the sixth edition of Japheth Coombs Washburn's Temple Harmony (1826)[1]. Its most influential printing was in William Walker's Southern Harmony (1835), in a spare three-part setting with open fifths, and Walker reset it for four voices in his Christian Harmony (1867)[1]. In a 1989 review, David Warren Steel noted that Southern Harmony was still the book of an annual "Big Singing" in Benton, Kentucky, begun in 1884[4]. The other tune most commonly sung to the text in the United States is MORNING STAR, said to have been written in 1892 by James P. Harding, longtime organist of St. Andrew's Church in Islington, London, as a choir anthem for the Gifford Hall Mission there and first taken into a hymnal in the American Episcopal Church Hymnal of 1894[1].

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Sources

  1. Hymnology Archive (Chris Fenner): "Brightest and best of the sons of the morning".
  2. Hymnary.org: "Brightest and best of the sons of the morning".
  3. Discipleship Ministries (Hawn): "History of Hymns: Hymn honors Christ child as the 'Brightest and Best'".
  4. University of Mississippi (David Warren Steel): "The Southern Harmony: A Review".