The Cherry Tree Carol: A Song History

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"The Cherry Tree Carol" is one of the few Christmas carols among the Child ballads: it is No. 54 in Francis James Child's The English and Scottish Popular Ballads and number 453 in the Roud Folk Song Index.[1][2] Its story is short. Out walking with Joseph, the pregnant Mary wants some of the cherries they come upon; Joseph answers that whoever fathered her child can fetch them, and the child in her womb tells the tree to let her have its fruit.[1] Child traced this to the apocryphal Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew (chapter 20). There, on the flight into Egypt, Mary longs for fruit from a palm, Joseph grumbles that it is too high, and the infant Jesus makes the tree bend. Child noted that the English carol always makes the tree a cherry, while Catalan and Provençal versions make it an apple.[3] As the Ballad Index points out, the legend sets the miracle after the birth, not before it.[1]

Carved and painted wooden group of Mary and the Christ Child on a donkey, with Joseph and angels bending down a palm tree for them

The Miracle of the Palm Tree on the Flight to Egypt, walnut with gesso, paint and gilding, Spanish, about 1490–1510. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). The palm-tree legend that the carol retells with a cherry tree.

The episode also turns up in medieval English drama. Child found it, Joseph's jibe included, in the fifteenth of the so-called Coventry Mysteries, where the cherry tree also blooms out of season.[3] That name is a long-standing mistake. The manuscript, now British Library Cotton Vespasian D.8, was labelled Ludus Coventriae by Sir Robert Cotton's librarian, who wrongly took it for Coventry's plays. Scholars now place it in East Anglia, call the collection the N-Town plays, and note that its main scribe wrote the date 1468 at the end of one play.[4] A modern edition of the N-Town Nativity notes that no other surviving English Nativity play has the cherry-tree episode.[5] The old label lingered: A. L. Lloyd, in a 1968 sleeve note, still called it a fifteenth-century Coventry play, and he described the carol as one much reprinted on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century broadsides and in penny songbooks.[2]

The carol also took root in North America, where collectors found it in the Appalachians, New England, the South and Canada.[1] Olive Dame Campbell and Cecil Sharp printed two Appalachian versions in 1917, from Mrs. Tom Rice at Big Laurel, North Carolina, on August 17, 1916, and from Mrs. Jane Gentry at Hot Springs, North Carolina, a week later.[6] Jean Ritchie of Kentucky learned it from "Uncle" Jason Ritchie and recorded it on Carols of All Seasons (Tradition, 1959). In Britain, A. L. Lloyd recorded it in 1956 and Shirley Collins on her first LP, Sweet England, in 1959.[2]

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Sources

  1. The Traditional Ballad Index: "The Cherry Tree Carol".
  2. Mainly Norfolk: "The Cherry Tree Carol".
  3. Project Gutenberg: "The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Volume 2," by Francis James Child.
  4. Alexandra F. Johnston, University of Toronto: "Introduction to N-Town".
  5. TEAMS Middle English Texts, University of Rochester: "The N-Town Plays: Play 15, Nativity".
  6. Internet Archive: "English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians," by Olive Dame Campbell and Cecil J. Sharp (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1917).