Joy To The World: A Song History
Isaac Watts did not write “Joy to the World” as a Christmas song. It comes from his 1719 collection The Psalms of David Imitated in the Language of the New Testament, where he recast the closing verses of Psalm 98 as a Christian hymn under the heading “The Messiah’s Coming and Kingdom.”[1][2] Watts treated the psalm’s summons to universal rejoicing as a promise already fulfilled in Christ, and his verses can be read as celebrating Christ’s reign as well as his birth. As a Calvinistic Independent, Watts belonged to a group that did not observe Christmas as a festival; the hymn became a carol only through later use.[1][2]
Bernard van Orley, Virgin and Child with Angels, oil on wood, ca. 1518. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).
The tune, ANTIOCH, has a more tangled history. A melody of this kind was already circulating in British tune books of the early 1830s: Charles Rider’s Psalmodia Britannica (about 1831) printed it under the name COMFORT, and Thomas Hawkes’s Collection of Tunes (1833) marked it “Author unknown.”[1] Lowell Mason, the American music educator, adapted it in his Occasional Psalm and Hymn Tunes (1836), labeled it “arranged from Handel,” and set it to Watts’s words, beginning the pairing Americans know today; he revised it again in later collections.[1][3] Several phrases do recall moments in Handel’s Messiah, but the tune has never been found among Handel’s works, and the Hymnology Archive concludes that Handel should not be named as its composer.[1][3] Some references, Hymnary.org among them, still describe the melody as drawn from Messiah.[2]
Sung to ANTIOCH, Watts’s psalm grew into a fixture of the Christmas season, above all in the United States, and Hymnary.org lists it in more than two thousand hymnals.[1][2] Many of those books leave out the line about a curse, which has no counterpart in the psalm itself.[2]
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