Mary Had A Baby: A Song History

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"Mary Had a Baby" is an African American spiritual, and its subject is an unusual one for the genre: C. Michael Hawn observes that the birth of Christ was not a common theme in spirituals, though he notes exceptions and cites one hymnologist's list of more than a dozen Nativity spirituals and variants[1]. Where the song began is not known, and Hawn describes its origins as obscure[1]. In the sources consulted here, its documented history starts at the Penn School on St. Helena Island, South Carolina. A December 1919 report in Musical America on the folklorist Natalie Curtis-Burlin describes elderly island women starting old refrains as they worked at the school's weekly sewing circle; the refrain that opens her arrangement was heard there, younger islanders sang the song as a somewhat modernized major-key tune, and her arrangement blended the major and minor versions[2]. Frank Damrosch's Musical Art Society scheduled that arrangement, with a second Christmas spiritual she had collected, for its first concert since the war, and Hawn records the New York performance in 1919[1][2].

Lorenzo Monaco painting of Mary and Joseph kneeling beside the glowing Christ child in a stable, with the ox and donkey behind

Lorenzo Monaco, The Nativity, tempera and gold on wood, ca. 1406–10. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Shown for its subject; it has no connection to the spiritual.

A fuller record came in 1925 with Saint Helena Island Spirituals, 113 transcriptions of songs sung by groups at the Penn School, made by Nicholas George Julius Ballanta-Taylor, a musicologist, organist and composer born in Freetown, Sierra Leone[1][3]. Hawn counts four versions of "Mary Had a Baby" in the book and identifies one of them (song 47) as the form found in hymnals; he also quotes the sociologist Thomas Jackson Woofter's 1930 view that such variants arose elsewhere and were simply better preserved on the island, where they converged[1]. Yale's Gullah Geechee Spirituals Project has since published a new engraving, with audio, of another of the book's versions (song 48), transcribed from the oral tradition of St. Helena Island in present-day Beaufort County[4]. According to Hawn, James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamund Johnson's Book of American Negro Spirituals (two volumes, 1925 and 1926) included a popular arrangement based on a different variant, which Paul Robeson helped to popularize, and William L. Dawson's choral setting of 1947 became one of the most widely sung[1].

In church use, Hymnary.org lists the text in fourteen hymnals and gives its source as a spiritual[5]. Hawn, who counts about ten hymnals in the United States that include it, considers Dawson's arrangement the most likely influence on the way congregations sing it today[1].

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Sources

  1. UMC Discipleship Ministries (C. Michael Hawn): "History of Hymns: 'Mary Had a Baby'".
  2. Musical America (13 December 1919, p. 36): "The Musical Art Society to Present Two Negro Christmas Songs at its First Program Since War".
  3. College of Charleston, Avery Research Center (William Lawrence papers): "Complete copy of Saint Helena Island Spirituals, 1925".
  4. Yale University, Gullah Geechee Spirituals Project (EliScholar): "Mary Had a Baby (no.3)".
  5. Hymnary.org: "Mary Had a Baby" (text).