Song of the Day 12/22: Alison Krauss, “The Wexford Carol”

Guest post by Nathan Arizona

Sure, you’ve got your “Silent Nights” and your “O Holy Nights” and your “Adeste Fidelises.” They’re the stars of Christmas music. But some of the best Christmas songs help fill the frosty air even if we don’t know their names.

They’ve always known their names in Sussex and Coventry in England and County Wexford in Ireland. If you listen to much Christmas music you’ve surely heard them, maybe on one of those holiday albums you break out each year. They’re often sung in choirs, but don’t work so well piped into shopping malls.

These carols go back farther than most of the greatest hits, kept alive through generations proud of the local connection. They were ripe for finding when professorial types sought music from villagers to write down and record. They were simple tunes that told the Nativity story without the official Church connection found in the hymns of, say, Charles Wesley.

A Bishop Wadding collected “The Sussex Carol” in “A Small Garland of Pious and Godly Songs” (we’re nothing here if not pious and godly). But it stayed local until 1919 when collectors Cecil Sharp and Ralph Vaughan Williams, the noted composer, found the song in separate villages. Vaughan Williams, who learned his from a Mrs. Harriett Verrell of Monk’s Gate, shaped the carol for concerts and recordings that have made it part of the canon.

“The Wexford Carol” is from County Wexford in Ireland. It might go back to the Middle Ages but was probably written in English, not Gaelic. Wexford, just across the Irish Sea from England, was a rare English-speaking Irish county. The song is often associated with Wadding, but in 1922 a Catholic priest named W. H. Grattan Flood claimed to be the first to write it down. His version is the one we have now.

“The Coventry Carol” was sung as part of a mystery play in that city in the 16th century. Mystery plays traveled England telling stories from the Bible. It received a lot of attention when it was performed in Coventry in the ruins of the city after a German World War II bombing. The words are not exactly cheerful, though we know it mainly by its pleasant music. It’s a lullaby to babies about to be killed in Herod’s Slaughter of the Innocents.

I’ll start with Alison Krauss’ version of “The Wexford Carol” because it’s so beautiful I want to get right to it. She’s in the recording studio with Yo-Yo Ma for his Christmas album “Songs of Joy and Peace.” There was a tradition of only men singing the Wexford Carol, but thank goodness that ended.

Here are two different ways of singing “The Sussex Carol,” first from The Choir From King’s College. The arrangement is by the late Sir David Willcocks, who has a Delaware connection — he wrote a mass for Christ Church Christiana Hundred in Greenville.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PF2lWZEB9BU

Maddy Prior, lead singer of Steeleye Span, gave us this version.

“The Coventry Carol” (aka “Lully, Lulla, Lullay”) is here performed by the choral group Voces8. The soprano in the red dress is pretty amazing.