O Little Town Of Bethlehem: A Song History
Phillips Brooks, rector of the Church of the Holy Trinity in Philadelphia, spent 1865–66 travelling abroad, and on Christmas Eve 1865 he was in Bethlehem, riding out through the fields around the town and attending the service at the Church of the Nativity.[1][2][3] Three years later he drew on that memory for a simple carol for his church’s Sunday-school service on December 27, 1868.[1] Brooks, renowned as a preacher, went on to Trinity Church, Boston, in 1869 and became Episcopal bishop of Massachusetts in 1891; the carol he finished in Philadelphia remains famous.[3]
Detroit Publishing Co., Market Place, Bethlehem, Holy Land, photochrom print, between ca. 1890 and ca. 1900. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. No known restrictions on publication.
The American tune, later named ST. LOUIS, was written by Lewis H. Redner, Holy Trinity’s organist, who put off the job until the night before the service. By his own account the melody came to him in the small hours; he recalled that neither he nor Brooks expected the carol to “live beyond that Christmas of 1868.”[1][4] The words were first printed in a Sunday-school hymnbook of the Diocese of Ohio in 1870, and words and tune appeared together in The Church Porch (1874), which gave the tune its name. One stanza from the original leaflet soon dropped out of the hymnbooks; Redner remembered some light-hearted worry that it leaned toward Catholic doctrine on Mary.[1][5]
Redner’s tune is still the one most often heard in the United States, but in Britain the carol is usually sung to a different melody.[5] In December 1903, during his first weeks of folk-song collecting, Ralph Vaughan Williams noted a tune from a Mr. Garman of Forest Green, Surrey, sung to a moralizing country ballad called “The Ploughboy’s Dream.” As music editor of The English Hymnal (1906), he set Brooks’s words to it and named it FOREST GREEN after the village.[1][4][6]
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