Christmas songs from Singing Together 1973 – 1975

Blogmas Day 2

So, yesterday I looked at the first three years of my Primary school experience as I moved from school to school on an annual basis. This post reflects upon the last three years as I settled into the only school I ever felt a part of. Once again, we have songs from a wide variety of cultures that, looking back, probably helped to shape my eclectic approach to music all these years later. Some of the songs will be instantly familiar, some will jog memories, and some will have disappeared into the ether and possibly the internet altogether. Why is that I wonder? Well, fashions change and many songs that were on the lips of people 75 or 100 years ago are now forgotten by all but the cultural magpies. Incredible though the internet has been at reconstructing our history, it is only as good as the people who want to write about it. As before, if a song fails to register on a search, I will put the sheet music on here in the hope that someone can play and hopefully post the tune somewhere.

Autumn 1973

St Andrew’s School Rochester 2nd Year Juniors

As ever, there were five festive themed tunes from five different cultures. We start off with All Bethlehem’s a-blazing which comes from Spain. This is another song that has slipped down the back of the internet, and I don’t remember it from the lyrics, good though they seem to be, so below is the sheet music.

Lullabies seemed to be popular, especially at Christmas time, and from Mexico we have O Sleep My Pretty Baby. It was not the type of song that would have appealed to me too much at the time, but having found it on YouTube and listened to the lovely rendition below, I can imagine that some of the more adept singers at St Andrew’s would have done very well with this. It is definitely a song for a child to sing but there is also an instrumental version by Yolanda Kondonassis on the harp that is ethereal.

Next, we return to England for Up! Good Christen Folk, a carol based on bells as a couple of the more famous ones, Ding Dong Merrily on High and Carol of the Bells, are. Again, the tune doesn’t stir any memories, but in this version from King’s College Cambridge it sounds gorgeous. At various points as you can hear, you have to stretch a single word over four beats, which I do remember annoying me on any song, because I couldn’t see any point to it. To be fair I still can’t!

Next is an absolute favourite of mine that I recognised instantly as soon as I turned over Sting’s 7″ single, Russians, and put the stylus on the B Side. At the time, I had no idea why I knew it, but all these years later I found out. Gabriel’s Message is a brilliant singalong carol, from an Old Basque Melody apparently, and I don’t know why it doesn’t appear far more regularly at carol services. Good though Sting’s version is, I have chosen the Charlotte Church rendition from her Christmas album, Dream a Dream, which I cannot recommend highly enough.

Our final stop on the global odyssey in 1973 was Czechoslovakia from where the Cuckoo Carol hails. Well, it might hail from there, but it doesn’t seem to have made it onto the world wide web. There are other songs bearing that or a similar title, but this particular one doesn’t seem to appear on YouTube at all. As before, it’s over to you.

Autumn 1974

St Andrew’s School Rochester 3rd Year Juniors

Excelsis! Gloria! is a carol that mentions the Walloon language so it’s reasonable to suppose that it comes from Belgium. However, the Singing Together booklet doesn’t give this information, and it seems like it dispensed with the origins of each song on the listing from here on in. This is quite frustrating given the assistance it was in pinning down the derivation of the songs. However, it probably wouldn’t help me because this is another song that the internet forgot. I typed in the first line of the lyrics to find more details, but the only hit I got was from someone who had got them from Singing Together. Over to you for the sheet music below.

The next carol is The Cherry Tree Carol, which, according to The Child Ballads has fourteen verses. Luckily we were only expected to sing five! The Child Ballads, by the way, was one of a set of 305 ballads collected by Francis Child in the 19th Century. It’s quite a fascinating story which you can find here if you are interested. So, I went on to YouTube to find recordings and this time I was in luck. There are any number of recordings from a diverse range of artists. I chose the Shirley Collins recording from 1959 which seemed most representative of what we might have sung.

The Carnal and the Crane is a conversation between two birds about the birth of Jesus and is Child Ballad 55, following directly on from the previous song, Child Ballad 54. As with the previous song some cutting down was required as the original version had no less than 30 verses! I chose a version by Maddy Prior, famous for her work with Steeleye Span, a folk group that had one Top 10 hit with the song All Around My Hat in 1975. The album this comes from features Christmas music which her band plays on Renaissance Instruments that were common in the 15th Century. It was definitely a tune that jogged some memories. Presumably it was in there somewhere because it was a song I enjoyed singing.

The Search for Lodging is the exchange between Joseph and the Innkeeper when they get to Bethlehem and are looking for a place that Mary can give birth. As with most of these two character songs I can imagine that we took it in turns with half the class taking Joseph and the other half taking the Innkeeper. The original carol comes from Mexico and was sung in Spanish with the title Pedida de la Posada or perhaps simply Las Posadas. As with a couple of other tracks, I have found some difficulty in tracking down the English lyrics, so this time I thought I’d choose the Spanish version so you can hear the lovely tune which does sound vaguely familiar.

The final carol for this year was Jesu is Crying which does not appear anywhere as far as I can tell, even in the form of lyrics, so the sheet music is below.

So that is it for 1974, a fairly unremarkable year with no instantly familiar carols I’m afraid.

Autumn 1975

St Andrew’s School 4th Year Juniors

So, on to my final year of junior school. The Autumn Term wasn’t one I remember with any fondness, the only one of my 9 terms at St Andrew’s that I can say that about. I was moved to the other class (we had two in each year group) which was, I think, seen as the top class. Unfortunately, it was a class where I didn’t really fit in as I was very much the outsider in a tight knit group. Luckily for me, I was moved back to my old class with my friends in the New Year as the school realised quite quickly that I was struggling. Anyway, was there anything to hold my interest in the Christmas songs of Autumn 1975? Well, straight off the bat we have The Carol of the Drum, also known as The Little Drummer Boy with its instantly recognisable ‘Pa rap pa pa pum’ refrain. I absolutely loved this carol and still do as it carries memories of getting lost in the music when everything else around me was becoming more difficult. It is a song that you can’t help getting lost in, or at least I couldn’t! Here is a live version of the track from Charlotte Church’s fantastic Dream a Dream album.

Masters in this Hall is an English Carol written by William Morris to an old French tune. It was one that I recognised instantly as soon as the music started playing. It’s a fantastic tune and one I must have enjoyed at the time to have such a clear recollection all these years later. It’s stirred another memory, vague though it may be of the classroom I was sitting in at the time, a room I hadn’t been able to picture in my head for years. The version I have chosen is by The Robert DeCormier Singers. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

The next carol is the Tyrolean Cradle Song, another lovely tune in a term packed with them. This one doesn’t stir any obvious memories, but it’s definitely a carol that I can imagine being sung as an alternative to Away in a Manger as it covers a similar subject area.

The next carol in this book and another anthropomorphised carol of my Singing Together journey is Hey Little Bull. As children we often enjoy songs and stories where animals are given human personalities or thoughts and this is a good example. Once again, it is a tune that I definitely remember. It’s catchy and easy to follow and in that sense an archetypal Singing Together song. I had difficulty finding a vocal rendition but YouTube came up with one of those oddities that it seems to specialise in. Here we have a recording from Great Moor Primary School in 1981 that someone has fortunately been able to save for posterity on YouTube as it’s the only version I can find that has singing!

We now move on to the final song in this journey through Christmas via Singing Together. It contains the story of the shepherds recounted in the bible and in many carols. Thinking of bible readings, I was chosen to read from one of the gospels for our Christmas service that year. Commander Starkie, the headmaster, chose readers in the most unusual way you could imagine. He made us go down the stairs from his office to the next landing and read a script out. If he could hear us through a closed door without us shouting then we were in. My loud voice for once paid dividends and I remember being very proud when I read the lesson at the end of that term. Anyway, back to the song. It isn’t one I remember, but given the strike rate on the rest I can definitely say it was a good term’s work from the Singing Together compilers.

So that’s it. Thirty songs over two days, most of which I have been able to find in some form on the internet. Some were instantly recognisable from later years and, quite unexpectedly, some rushed back to the forefront of my mind as soon as I heard the first few notes. In some cases, they even brought back memories of my old classrooms. For me, music is a time travelling device like no other as I can associate people and places with the different songs so readily. I hope you have enjoyed reading these articles for the first two days of Blogmas and that some of the carols brought back memories for you. If you can fill in any of the gaps I would be incredibly grateful, so any musicians who would be able to play the tunes for me once again, please get in touch.