On Christmas Night All Christians Sing: A Song History
The words of this carol are usually credited to Luke Wadding, a seventeenth-century Irish bishop of Ferns, and an earlier form of the text appeared in A Smale Garland of Pious and Godly Songs, a collection associated with him and printed at Ghent in 1684.[1][2] Discipleship Ministries notes that the book's own wording leaves the authorship of its individual pieces open, and sources differ on whether the carol's printed history really starts there, since one folklorist quoted by Mainly Norfolk traced the earliest known text only to a nineteenth-century broadside.[1][2] The text went on to circulate on early nineteenth-century ballad sheets from London and Birmingham and in an 1847 chapbook, A Good Christmas Box.[2]
Guillaume Vrelant, Leaf from a Book of Hours: Annunciation to the Shepherds, tempera, liquid gold and grisaille on vellum, c. 1470–1480. The angel's news to the shepherds, shown for the carol's subject; it has no connection to the carol.
The tune now called Sussex Carol came from Harriet Verrall of Monk's Gate, near Horsham in Sussex, who sang it for Ralph Vaughan Williams on 24 May 1904.[1][2] It was printed in the Journal of the Folk-Song Society in 1905, though Lucy Broadwood had already noted a version of the tune in 1892, and Cecil Sharp later published a variant text to a different melody in English Folk-Carols (1911).[1] Vaughan Williams wove the Verrall tune into his Fantasia on Christmas Carols, first heard in 1912, set it for choir in Eight Traditional English Carols (1919), and served as music editor of the Oxford Book of Carols (1928), where it also appears.[1][2]
Folk-revival singers have kept the carol in circulation, from Tony Wales on a 1957 Folkways album of Sussex songs to later versions by Shirley Collins, the Albion Band, and Maddy Prior with the Carnival Band.[2] Larry Conger includes it in Nine Lessons And Carols, a 27-page Christmas collection of his fingerstyle mountain dulcimer arrangements in DAD tuning, published by Fingers Of Steel.[3]
Sources
- Discipleship Ministries: "History of Hymns: 'On Christmas Night'".
- Mainly Norfolk: "On Christmas Night / The Sussex Carol (Roud 597)".
- Fingers Of Steel: "Larry Conger, Nine Lessons And Carols".
- Image: Guillaume Vrelant, Leaf from a Book of Hours: Annunciation to the Shepherds, tempera, liquid gold and grisaille on vellum, c. 1470–1480. The Cleveland Museum of Art.