Day 10 - O Little Town of Bethlehem (Forest Green)
The words for the carol O Little Town of Bethlehem were written in 1868 by Phillips Brooks, rector of the Church of the Holy Trinity in Philadelphia. He had spent a year traveling abroad from 1865-1866, which (according to Chris Fenner at the Hymnology Archive) "included a visit to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, where he participated in a service lasting from the late hours of Christmas Eve through early hours of Christmas morning, 1865. This experience was the seed of his desire to write a hymn on the subject."
Brooks wrote O Little Town of Bethlehem for his Sunday service on 27 December 1868, and called on his organist, Lewis H. Redner to write a tune for it. Busy with his own musical duties, Redner left the fulfillment of this tune request till the night before Brooks' Sunday service. Redner wrote, "I was roused from sleep late in the night hearing an angel-strain whispering in my ear, and seizing a piece of music paper I jotted down the tune as we now have it, and on Sunday morning before going to church I filled in the harmony. Neither Mr. Brooks nor I ever thought the carol or the music to it would live beyond that Christmas of 1868."
This perennial Christmas favorite was first published, text and tune together, in William R. Huntington’s The Church Porch: A Service Book and Hymnal for Sunday Schools (1874), with Redner’s tune dubbed ST. LOUIS. This is how the carol is most often heard in the United States.
In the United Kingdom, O Little Town of Bethlehem is sung to the tune FOREST GREEN, a folk tune collected from a Mr. Garman in Surrey, England, and transcribed by Ralph Vaughan Williams. The original song is entitled The Ploughboy's Dream:
I am a ploughboy stout and strong as ever drove a team,
Now three years since I slept in bed I had an awful dream . . .
At this same time Vaughan Williams was working as editor of The English Hymnal (1906), with part of his duties being the collection and preservation of English folk tunes. It was his decision to adopt the tune of The Ploughboy's Dream, now dubbed FOREST GREEN, with his own harmonization, to the text of O Little Town of Bethlehem and to include it in The English Hymnal. The rest, as they say, is history!
O Little Town of Bethlehem (Forest Green) - David van Ooijen (guitar)
O Little Town of Bethlehem (Forest Green) - Winchester Cathedral Choir
O Little Town of Bethlehem (Forest Green) - Timothy J. Campbell (organ)
O Little Town of Bethlehem (Forest Green) - Magical Strings
No comments:
Post a Comment