Here We Come A-Wassailing: A Song History

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"Here We Come A-Wassailing" is an English house-visiting song, number 209 in the Roud Folk Song Index, a number under which Roud groups many different wassail songs.[1] Wassailing meant going from house to house, usually on January 5, asking for food, drink and hospitality, a custom mentioned in England as early as the twelfth century.[1] The word itself comes from the Old English wes hael, meaning "be in good health."[1] The hymn database Hymnary.org catalogs it as the "Wassail Song," with "a-caroling" given as an alternative reading of the opening line.[2] PBS calls the "Here We Come A-Caroling" version a variant of the English carol and links it chiefly with the United States.[3]

Etching of carol singers gathered at a window at night, one reading from a sheet by lamplight

Adriaen van Ostade, The Carol Singers, etching, c. 1668. Dutch carol singers rather than English wassailers, shown for the custom of singing at the door.

The song was in print by 1861, when Joshua Sylvester included it as "The Wassailers' Carol" in A Garland of Christmas Carols, Ancient and Modern, taken from a crudely printed carol sheet that he judged to date from the early 1700s.[4] The Traditional Ballad Index gives 1868, citing Husk, as its earliest date for the song.[1] In 1871 Henry Ramsden Bramley and John Stainer made it No. 37 in the second series of Christmas Carols New and Old, with the words given as traditional and the tune as a traditional Yorkshire air.[5]

Collectors kept finding the song in the field: Lucy Broadwood heard a version at Anston, South Yorkshire, in 1893, and Ralph Vaughan Williams noted a version near Doncaster that he published in 1919.[6] On the folk revival side, the Watersons put it on their first album, Frost and Fire, in 1965.[6] Maureen Sellers includes "Here We Come A-Wassailing" in Simply Christmas, a 60-page book of Christmas tunes in mountain dulcimer tablature, all in DAD tuning, published by Fingers Of Steel.[7]

Our books that contain the song "Here We Come A-Wassailing"

Sources

  1. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Here We Come A-Wassailing".
  2. Hymnary.org: "Wassail Song".
  3. PBS: "Here We Come A-Caroling".
  4. Hymnology Archive: "A Garland of Christmas Carols, Ancient and Modern" (Joshua Sylvester, 1861).
  5. Choral Public Domain Library: "Christmas Carols New and Old (John Stainer)".
  6. Mainly Norfolk: "Here We Come A-Wassailing".
  7. Fingers Of Steel: "Maureen Sellers, Simply Christmas".
  8. Image: Adriaen van Ostade, The Carol Singers, etching, c. 1668. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

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