Silent Night
Here We Come A-Caroling
Jingle Bells
Up on the House Top
We Wish You a Merry Christmas
Good King Wenceslas
Deck the Halls
God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen
Jolly Old St. Nicholas
Christmas Is Coming
O Tannenbaum
(With liberal plagiarizing from Wikipedia!)
Music was an early feature of the Christmas season and its celebrations. The earliest chants, litanies, and hymns were Latin works intended for use during the church liturgy, rather than popular songs. The 13th century saw the rise of the carol written in the vernacular, under the influence of Francis of Assisi.
In the Middle Ages,
the English combined circle dances with singing and called them carols.
Later, the word carol came to mean a song in which a religious topic is
treated in a style that is familiar or festive. From Italy, it passed
to France and Germany, and later to England. Christmas carols in English
first appear in a 1426 work of John Audelay, a Shropshire priest and poet, who lists 25 "caroles of Cristemas", probably sung by groups of wassailers, who went from house to house. Music in itself soon became one of the greatest tributes to Christmas,
and Christmas music includes some of the noblest compositions of the
great musicians.
During the Commonwealth of England government under Cromwell, the Rump Parliament prohibited the practice of singing Christmas carols as Pagan and sinful. Like other customs associated with popular Catholic Christianity, it earned the disapproval of Protestant Puritans.
Famously, Cromwell's interregnum prohibited all celebrations of the
Christmas holiday. This attempt to ban the public celebration of
Christmas can also be seen in the early history of Father Christmas.
The Westminster Assembly of Divines
established Sunday as the only holy day in the calendar in 1644. The
new liturgy produced for the English church recognized this in 1645, and
so legally abolished Christmas. Its celebration was declared an offence
by Parliament in 1647. There is some debate as to the effectiveness of this ban, and whether or not it was enforced in the country.
Puritans generally disapproved of the celebration of Christmas - a trend
which continually resurfaced in Europe and the USA through the
eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
When in May 1660 Charles II restored the Stuarts
to the throne, the people of England once again practised the public
singing of Christmas carols as part of the revival of Christmas customs,
sanctioned by the king's own celebrations. William B. Sandys's Christmas Carols Ancient and Modern
(1833), contained the first appearance in print of many now-classic
English carols, and contributed to the mid-Victorian revival of the
holiday. Singing carols in church was instituted on Christmas Eve 1880 (Nine Lessons and Carols) in Truro Cathedral, Cornwall, England, which is now seen in churches all over the world.
The tradition of singing Christmas carols in return for alms or charity began in England in the seventeenth century after the Restoration.
Town musicians or 'waits' were licensed to collect money in the streets
in the weeks preceding Christmas. The custom spread throughout the
population by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries up to the present
day. Also from the seventeenth century, there was the English custom,
predominantly involving women, of taking a 'wassail bowl' around to their
neighbours to solicit gifts, accompanied by carols. Despite this long
history, almost all surviving Christmas carols date only from the
nineteenth century onwards, with the exception of some traditional folk
songs such as "God Rest You Merry Gentlemen", "As I Sat on a Sunny Bank" and "The Holly and the Ivy."
The 1850s saw the advent and rise of the "popular" Christmas song. Until
then, Christmas music was almost strictly of the religious
type...carols, hymns and "church" selections. Popular secular Christmas songs from mid-19th century America include "Jingle Bells", "Jolly Old Saint Nicholas" and "Up on the House Top".
"Silent Night" (German: Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht) is a popular Christmas carol, composed in 1818 by Franz Xaver Gruber to lyrics by Joseph Mohr in the small town of Oberndorf bei Salzburg, Austria. It was declared an intangible cultural heritage by UNESCO in March 2011. The song has been recorded by a large number of singers from every music genre.
The melody was composed by Franz Xaver Gruber, schoolmaster and organist in the nearby village of Arnsdorf. Before Christmas Eve, Mohr brought the words to Gruber and asked him to compose a melody and guitar accompaniment for the church service. Both performed the carol during the mass on the night of December 24.
The original manuscript has been lost. However a manuscript was discovered in 1995 in Mohr's handwriting and dated by researchers at ca. 1820. It shows that Mohr wrote the words in 1816 when he was assigned to a pilgrim church in Mariapfarr, Austria, and shows that the music was composed by Gruber in 1818. This is the earliest manuscript that exists and the only one in Mohr's handwriting.
http://youtu.be/PGjByOI9Iqw
"Here We Come A-wassailing" (or "Here We Come A-caroling") is an English traditional Christmas carol and New Years song, apparently composed c.1850. The old English wassail song refers to 'wassailing', or singing carols door to door wishing good health,[3] while the a- is an archaic intensifying prefix; compare A-Hunting We Will Go and lyrics to The Twelve Days of Christmas (e.g., "Six geese a-laying").
According to Readers Digest; "the Christmas spirit often made the rich a little more generous than usual, and bands of beggars and orphans used to dance their way through the snowy streets of England, offering to sing good cheer and to tell good fortune if the householder would give them a drink from his wassail bowl or a penny or a pork pie or, let them stand for a few minutes beside the warmth of his hearth. The wassail bowl itself was a hearty combination of hot ale or beer, apples, spices and mead, just alcoholic enough to warm tingling toes and fingers of the singers".
While not strictly speaking a "Christmas" tune, James Lord Pierpont's 1857 composition "Jingle Bells" became one of the most performed and most recognizable secular holiday songs ever written, not only in the United States, but around the world.
In 1935, Benny Goodman and His Orchestra reached No. 18 on the charts with their recording of the song. In 1941, Glenn Miller and His Orchestra with Tex Beneke, Marion Hutton, Ernie Caceres and the Modernaires on vocals had a No. 5 hit with "Jingle Bells" on RCA Victor.
Then,
in 1943, Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters recorded "Jingle Bells" as
Decca 23281 which reached No. 19 on the charts and sold over a million
copies.
"Up on the House Top" is a Christmas song written by Benjamin Hanby in 1864 in the town of New Paris, Ohio. It has been recorded by a multitude of singers, among the most notable Gene Autry.
According to William Studwell in The Christmas Carol Reader, "Up on the House Top" was the second-oldest secular Christmas song, outdone only by "Jingle Bells",
which was written in 1857 (although the latter was originally intended
as a Thanksgiving song). It is also considered the first Yuletide song
to focus primarily on Santa Claus. In fact, according to Readers Digest Merry Christmas Song Book Hanby was the first to offer up the idea that Santa and his sleigh land on the roof of homes. Benjamin Russell Hanby was born in 1833 near Rushville, Ohio, the son of a minister involved with the Underground Railroad. During his short life he wrote some 80 songs before dying of tuberculosis in 1867.
In 2005, the song was brought back to life with a new recording by Kimberley Locke. The recording broke a Billboard
record when it made the largest leap into the Top 5 in the AC chart's
history, moving from 32 to 5 in only a week. It was also the second
longest Billboard holiday AC chart topper in the chart's history, sitting at #1 for 4 consecutive weeks.
"We Wish You a Merry Christmas"
is a popular, secular sixteenth-century English carol from the West
Country of England. The origin of this Christmas carol lies in the
English tradition wherein
wealthy people of the community gave Christmas treats to the carolers
on Christmas Eve, such as figgy puddings that were very much like modern
day Christmas puddings. It is one of the few English traditional
carols that makes mention of the New Year
celebration and is often the last song carolers sing to people,
allowing them a welcoming and joyful sound made so that others
have happy spirits at Christmas time.
"Good King Wenceslas" is a popular Christmas carol that tells a story of Good King Wenceslas braving harsh winter weather to give alms to a poor peasant on the Feast of Stephen (the second day of Christmas, December 26). During the journey, his page
is about to give up the struggle against the cold weather, but is
enabled to continue by following the king's footprints, step for step,
through the deep snow. The legend is based on the life of the historical
Saint Wenceslaus I, Duke of Bohemia or Svatý Václav in Czech (907–935).
In 1853, English hymnwriter John Mason Neale wrote the "Wenceslas" lyrics, in collaboration with his music editor Thomas Helmore, and the carol first appeared in Carols for Christmas-Tide, 1853. Neale's lyrics were set to a tune based on a 13th century spring carol "Tempus adest floridum" ("The time is near for flowering") first published in the 1582 Finnish song collection Piae Cantiones.
"Deck the Halls" or "Deck the Hall" (which is the original title) is a traditional Yuletide/Christmas and New Years' carol. The melody is Welsh dating back to the sixteenth century, and belongs to a winter carol, Nos Galan. The lyrics first appeared in Welsh Melodies, a set of four volumes authored by John Thomas with Welsh words by John Jones (Talhaiarn) and English words by Thomas Oliphant, although the repeated "fa la la" goes back to the original Welsh Nos Galan and may originate from medieval ballads. The series Welsh Melodies appears in four volumes, the first two
in 1862, the third in 1870 and the final volume in 1874. As can be seen
from the translation of Nos Galan below, Deck the Hall(s) is not a
translation but new words to an old song.
The tune is that of an old Welsh air, first found in a musical manuscript by Welsh harpist John Parry Ddall
(c. 1710–1782), but undoubtedly much older than that. The composition
is still popular as a dance tune in Wales, and was published, with both
Welsh and English lyrics, in the 1784 and 1794 editions of the harpist
Edward Jones's Musical and Poetical Relics of the Welsh Bards. Poet John Ceiriog Hughes later wrote his own lyrics. A middle verse was later added by folk singers. In the eighteenth century the tune spread widely, with Mozart using it in a piano and violin concerto and, later, Haydn in the song "New Year's Night."
Originally, carols were dances and not songs. The accompanying tune would have been used as a setting for any verses of appropriate metre. The connection with dancing is made explicit in the English lyrics by
the phrase "follow me in merry measure" as "measure" is a synonym for
dance.
The Welsh melody with English lyrics appeared in the December 1877 issue of the Pennsylvania School Journal, with the melody, described as a "Welsh Air" appearing in four-part harmony, and unattributed lyrics. Charles Wood arranged a version, the words from Talhaiarn; translated by
Thomas Oliphant. Oliphant died in 1873 and the English version of the
1881 publication (The Franklin Square Song Collection) is also attributed to Oliphant.
"God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen", also known as "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen",
is an English traditional Christmas carol. The melody is in the minor
mode. It was published by William B. Sandys in 1833, although the author
is unknown. However, in the
earliest known publication of the carol, on a circa 1760 broadsheet, it
is
described as a "new Christmas carol", suggesting its origin is actually
in the mid-18th century. It appeared
again among "new carols for Christmas" in another 18th century source, a
chapbook believed to be printed between 1780 and 1800.
Like so many early Christmas songs, the carol was written as a direct
reaction to the church music of the 15th century; although there are repeated lyrical references to religious themes!
It is referred to in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, 1843: "...at the first sound of — 'God bless you, merry gentlemen! May nothing you dismay!'— Scrooge
seized the ruler with such energy of action that the singer fled in
terror, leaving the keyhole to the fog and even more congenial frost."
"Jolly Old St. Nicholas" is another Christmas song whose origins are disputed. Its authorship is often credited to Wilf Carter, a Canadian country music singer, songwriter, guitarist, and yodeller, popular in the 30s and 40s. However, since the song is mentioned in earlier works (such as Susan Gregg's Christmas Orphans, pub. 1916), this attribution is unlikely. The song has also been credited to Benjamin Hanby, author of "Up on the House Top", at some point in the 1860s, although this too may be in dispute.
The song is traditionally performed to a melody originally written by James Lord Pierpont (which he used for the original version of "Jingle Bells"). This melody was, in turn, loosely based on Johann Pachelbel's "Canon in D Major".
"Christmas Is Coming" is a nursery rhyme and Christmas carol (frequently sung as a round). The music to this song was composed by Edith Nesbit Bland in the late nineteenth century. The author of the lyrics is unknown but the popularity of this early traditional Christmas song has been handed down from generation to generation in the form of a nursery rhyme.
The musical version of the rhyme was popularized by The Kingston Trio as "A Round About Christmas", on their album The Last Month of the Year. A calypso sounding version of the carol was featured on a Christmas album John Denver and the Muppets: A Christmas Together and a loose, jazzy piano-based arrangement was featured in the musical score of A Charlie Brown Christmas.
"O Tannenbaum" ("O Christmas Tree") is a German song. Based on a traditional folk song, it became associated with the Christmas tree by the early 20th century and was sung as a Christmas carol.
The modern lyrics are credited to Leipzig organist, teacher and composer Ernst Anschütz, written in 1824. A Tannenbaum is a fir tree. The lyrics do not actually refer to Christmas or describe a decorated Christmas tree. Instead, they refer to the fir's evergreen qualities as a symbol of constancy and faithfulness.
Anschütz based his text on a 16th-century Silesian folk song by Melchior Franck, "Ach Tannenbaum". Joachim August Zarnack (de) (1777–1827) in 1819 wrote a tragic love song inspired by this folk song, taking the evergreen, "faithful" fir tree as contrasting with a faithless lover. The folk song first became associated with Christmas with Anschütz, who added two verses of his own to the first, traditional verse. The custom of the Christmas tree developed in the course of the 19th century, and the song came to be seen as a Christmas carol. Anschütz's version still had treu (true, faithful) as the adjective describing the fir's leaves (needles), harking back to the contrast to the faithless maiden of the folk song. This was changed to grün (green) at some point in the 20th century, after the song had come to be associated with Christmas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lS4wTuvR7Ik
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