Song of the Day 12/24: Henry Rollins and Stephen Colbert, “Carol of the Bells”

There’s a reason this sounds nothing like a Christmas carol — it wasn’t written as one.

In 1914 Ukrainian composer Mykola Leontovych was commissioned to create a song for choir based on traditional Ukrainian folk chants. He wrote “Shchedryk”, intended to be sung a cappella by mixed four-voice choir, based on four notes he found in an anthology. The story related in the original song took place at the New Year — April in pre-Christian Ukraine — about a bird that flew into a house to announce that the new year would be bountiful. Here’s the Bel Canto Choir of Vilnius performing the original.

The song fell out of favor in its homeland after the founding of the USSR, but Americans heard it during a 1919 concert tour by the Ukrainian National Chorus. In 1936, Peter J. Wilhousky arranged it for the NBC radio network’s orchestra, adding English-language words about bells because the melody reminded him of hand bells. By the 1940s various it was showing up on the radio by a wide range of artists.

Let’s face it, the melody doesn’t exactly scream “Happy New Year” any better than “Merry Christmas,” and its martial feel makes it a natural for heavy-metal interpretations, something Stephen Colbert took to an extreme a few years back with guest Henry Rollins.