Gentle Mary Laid Her Child: A Song History
"Gentle Mary Laid Her Child" is a Canadian carol. Its words are by Joseph Simpson Cook (1859–1933), a Methodist minister born in County Durham, England, who served a string of Ontario pastorates between 1881 and 1925 and wrote verse and articles for church papers[1]. The text was a prize-winner. In October 1919 the Canadian Methodist weekly The Christian Guardian announced a Christmas carol contest in two stages, first for words and then for music, with prizes of twenty, ten and five dollars; more than two hundred entries came in from across Canada, from Newfoundland and from a few places in the United States[2]. Cook's poem took first place, and the paper printed it with the results on 5 November 1919, commending its "simplicity and heart-touching qualities"[2]. A hymnal companion quoted on Hymnary.org instead dates its first appearance to the paper's Christmas issue, so the sources differ on that detail[3].
Gerard David, The Nativity, oil on wood, early 1480s. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Shown for its subject; it has no connection to the carol.
The contest's own winning tune, by Emma Louise Ashford, was published that December, though none of the prize-winning settings appears to have been taken up afterwards[2]. The carol's first hymnal printing came in The Hymnary of the United Church of Canada (1930), where Cook's five four-line verses became three eight-line stanzas, the last of them filled out with a newly written quatrain, changes probably made by Cook himself, and set to TEMPUS ADEST FLORIDUM in a harmonization by Ernest MacMillan that is still the usual one[2]. That melody comes from Piae Cantiones, a collection of Latin songs printed at Greifswald in 1582, where it carried a song about spring; John Mason Neale and Thomas Helmore brought it into English use in 1853 with "Good King Wenceslas," which is how most singers know it[2][3].
Hymnary.org now counts the text in some sixty hymnals[3]. Because some singers find the lively spring melody a poor match for so tender a text, editors have tried other settings, among them Melchior Vulpius's WEIMAR in the Episcopal Hymnal 1940, Stanley Osborne's GWYNNE in the Canadian Anglican and United Church Hymn Book of 1971, and, in the United Church's Voices United (1996), a melody by the author's daughter, Alta Lind Cook[2]. The pairing with TEMPUS ADEST FLORIDUM remains the familiar one[2].
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