Playlist

* Hail Smiling Morn The Little John Singers and pub singers 2:36

* Green Grow’th the Holly Rasma Bertz and friends 1:08

* Snow on the Rooftops Kathy Reid-Naiman :44

* Ding Dong Merrily on High ?? 1:38

* Jingle Bells square dance Lawrence V. Loy w. the Pleasant Valley Boys 3:05

Music notes

Hail Smiling Morn This song was written in 1810 by Reginald Spofforth of Southwell Nottinghamshire. According to musicologist Ian Russell who recorded this: “Although the lyrics are secular and do not refer to Christmas, it is easy to see how this most popular of tavern glees became identified with the feeling of exhilaration associated with Christmas morning in many rural communities.”

This is a 1992 field recording of the Little John Singers, a seasonal pub-crawling group based in the small village of Hathersage, west of Sheffield in South Yorkshire. They began in 1969 as a group of friends who were concerned that the traditional local carols were in danger of being lost in the overwhelming ubiquity of pop music and its familiar Christmas standards.

They compiled a repertoire of Christmas songs that had been passed down word of mouth over several generations, many of which are from 18th century “West Gallery” singing when music was only recently re-allowed by the Church of England after Puritan-era prohibition. You can read about that in the introduction to my Dec 3, 2022 posting.

The Little John Singers then began going to regional pubs and seniors’ facilities with lyric sheets that they sold with the proceeds going to charity, to encourage people in to sing along with them. They are not a choir – they do not sing from written music, hold practices, or have a conductor. Their object has always been just to get everyone singing the traditional old songs to keep them alive. They are not alone in that. Many old hymns and carols have survived as Christmas season pub-songs in the South Yorkshire and North Derbyshire area.

This recording was made by Ian Russell at the Scotsman’s Pack, the Little John Singers’ village pub in Hathersage. Russell’s recordings from there and other pubs are credited with having brought this music to the attention of British folk singers, and via them to the general public. Now a number of these old songs that had only survived in the Sheffield area are included in many people’s personal holiday customs in England and beyond. Those songs are no longer in danger of becoming forgotten.

I got this recording from the Smithsonian Folkways CD album English Village Carols, but I also have copies of Dr. Russell’s six original cassettes that he published of his field recordings. (Thank you, Denis Donnelly!)

Hail smiling morn, smiling morn,That tips the hills with gold, that tips the hills with gold,Whose rosy fingers ope the gates of day,Ope’ the gates, the gates of day,Hail! Hail! Hail! Hail! (X2)

Who the gay face of nature doth unfold,Who the gay face of nature doth unfold,At whose bright presence darkness flies away, flies away,Darkness flies away, darkness flies away,At whose bright presence darkness flies away,Darkness flies away,Hail! Hail! Hail! Hail! Hail! Hail! Hail! Hail! (X2)

Green Grow’th the Holly is one of the songs that is attributed to the English renaissance monarch King Henry VIII, but unlike Greensleeves which is also frequently attributed to him, he probably did indeed write write both the original words melody and this fuguing arrangement. I don’t know if the baroque ornamentation was included in his composition. I understand that, at the time, that was usually improvised by singers.

When Henry first wrote this is not known, but the British Library has a copied manuscript made sometime between 1511-13 when Henry was still in his early twenties, although it is from someone else’s hand. The original lyrics were first published in 1522. These are an evolution of those original ones, which was a chivalrous courtly love song that made no mention of God. I don’t know when this more seasonal version developed.

The song is performed here by Rasma Bertz, Jane Arny, and ManyaSadouski, and is from Rasma’s self-published album Winter’s Light. Rasma grew up here in Victoria, BC, but now lives in Wales and is a professional book conservator, archivist and genealogical researcher.

Green grow’th the holly So doth the ivy Though winter blasts blow ne’er so high Green grow’th the holly

Gay are the flowers Hedgerows and ploughlands The days grow longer in the sun Soft fall the showers

Full gold the harvest Grain for thy labor With God must work for daily bread Else, man, thou starvest

Fast fall the shed leaves Russet and yellow But resting buds are snug and safe Where swung the dead leaves

Green grow’th the holly So doth the ivy The God of life can never die Hope! saith the holly

Snow on the RooftopsThis tiny children’s song was written and is performed here by Canadian Kathy Reid-Naiman, and is from her self-published 2009 album Sing the Cold Winter Away, available from her website.

Kathy says that she “grew up singing in harmony with her two sisters, in the shadow of their jazz guitar playing dad.” She began writing children’s songs in about 1980 when her own children were young, and went on to become a children’s performer and music teacher, travelling to schools and libraries throughout Ontario. She says that she tries to make children’s music so accessible that adults will secretly confess to listening to it just for themselves.

Snow on the rooftops, snow on the treesSnow on the green grass, snow on me.

Snow on my mittens, snow on my noseSnow on my head and snow on my toes.

Whirling, twirling, swirling aroundDown and down and down and down

Ding Dong Merrily on HighI don’t know where I got this hammer dulcimer and harp version of the familiar Christmas carol from. I rip songs and tunes from various sources - records, CDs, and these days, also from YouTube - and put them into thematic files on my computer. I keep a record of what I have collected and where I got them from in Word documents. But this tune has been in my Nativity instrumentals file for a real long time, but I have no record of having collected it. If a track comes from a CD or the YouTube music file has source and attribution information embedded in the file. This doesn’t have that, so I guess I got it from a vinyl record, but that’s all I know about this recording.

But I do know about the source of the melody. The tune for Ding Dong Merrily on High comes from a Renaissance dance tune called Branle de l’Official (The official’s branle, which is a type of energetic dance). In the early 20th century, Charles Ratcliffe Woodward, an Anglican priest and scholar of hymnody, and Charles Wood, a Cambridge musician, created a number of new Christmas carols by composing new texts for forgotten old melodies. Ding, Dong was one of them. In their musical research they uncovered the tune in Orchésographie, the landmark dance treatise by Thoinot Arbeau published in 1588.

Jingle BellsThe square dance version of the Christmas perennial is called by Lawrence V. Loy, with music by Carson Robison and his Pleasant Valley Boys. It comes from a 10” 78rpm released in 1946. I don’t recall who I got this digital copy from, but it would have been from one of the Christmas music collectors who like to share their discoveries with other collectors either online or via traded CDs.

Under its original title, One Horse Open Sleigh, Jingle Bells is one of a flurry of secular Christmas songs written in the late 1850s that also includes Up on the Housetop and Jolly Old Saint Nicolas.

But actually, Jingle Bells wasn’t intended to be a seasonal song. The song is about having a flashy vehicle, driving it recklessly, and using it to pick up loose women like Miss Fanny Brice. It just happens to be set in the winter because it was inspired by Boston’s rowdy annual one horse sleigh (cutter) races from Medford Square to Malden Square in the days from before Boston’s streets were plowed after a snowfall. It was written in 1857 by James Pierpont, but is often misattributed to his father, the famous abolitionist and poet John S. Pierpont. However, the elder Pierpont, a stern Unitarian minister, did not approve of his ne’er-do-well son nor his music.

The song was not an immediate success, even after he revised it in 1859 to the tune and lyrics with which we are now familiar, and changed its title to the jauntier Jingle Bells. However it gained fame through a 1902 Edison recording by a barbershop quartet, and gained immortality when Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters’ lively swing version became a huge popular hit in 1949.

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