The Holly Bears A Berry: A Song History

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This Cornish carol is also known as the Sans Day Carol or St Day Carol, a name that points to St Day in the Cornish parish of Gwennap, the place where someone noted down its melody along with its opening three stanzas.[1] The Oxford Book of Carols credits the Rev. G. H. Doble for the carol, which W. D. Watson had passed on to him after hearing it from Thomas Beard, an elderly man at St Day.[1] The same book identifies St Day, or St They, as a Breton saint, and the Ballad Index stresses that the title is a place name, not a reference to All Saints or to a carol without a day.[1][2]

Watercolor of a sprig of spiky green holly leaves on cream paper

Holly Leaves, British watercolor, 19th century. Shown for its subject; it has no connection to the carol.

The Oxford Book of Carols, first published in 1928, printed it as carol no. 35, adding a fourth stanza translated from a Cornish-language version, Ma gron war'n gelinen, that appeared in print after the English verses were collected.[1] The Ballad Index describes the Cornish words in Kennedy's Folksongs of Britain and Ireland as a revivalist translation from the English.[2] Ralph Dunstan's The Cornish Songbook also printed it in 1929.[2][3] The Ballad Index treats it as a close relative of "The Holly and the Ivy," with which it shares its holly theme and some verses, and names an older carol in Greene's The Early English Carols as its forerunner.[2][3]

Folk revival singers took it up widely: Jean Ritchie recorded it in 1959, the Watersons in 1965, and Maddy Prior with the Carnival Band in 1987, while Kate Rusby recorded it as "First Tree in the Greenwood" in 2011.[3] The Oxford book filed it under both the Nativity and the season from Passiontide to Eastertide, and A. L. Lloyd and Norma Waterson both described it as a spring carol.[1][2][3] Maureen Sellers includes it, in DAD tuning, in Simply Christmas, a 60-page book of dulcimer tablature in her "Simply" series, published by Fingers Of Steel.[4]

Our book that contains the song "The Holly Bears A Berry"

Sources

  1. Internet Archive: "The Oxford Book of Carols" (first published 1928; 1964 reset edition).
  2. The Traditional Ballad Index: "The Holly Bears a Berry".
  3. Mainly Norfolk: "The Holly Bears a Berry / The Sans Day Carol (Roud 514)".
  4. Fingers Of Steel: "Maureen Sellers, Simply Christmas".
  5. Image: Holly Leaves, British watercolor, 19th century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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