The 11th in our daily series of Christmas carols repeated from previous years. This was last published on December 12, 2020.
AMONG TCW’s well-informed, thoughtful and witty readers are some in America. Take a bow, Audre Myers, Mina Christina, D. A. Christianson and others I may not know about. I have chosen today’s carol in your honour as it is much better known across the Atlantic than in Britain, yet it has its roots in England.
The words of Joy to the World were written by an English clergyman, Isaac Watts, and published in 1719. Unusually for a carol, it is based not on the New Testament accounts of the birth of Jesus, but on a psalm, No 98, which is more about Christ’s second coming than the first.
These are the words:
1 Joy to the world! the Lord is come;
Let earth receive her King;
Let ev’ry heart prepare him room,
And heav’n and nature sing,
And heav’n and nature sing,
And heav’n, and heav’n and nature sing.
2 Joy to the earth! the Saviour reigns;
Let all their songs employ,
While fields and floods, rocks, hills, and plains
Repeat the sounding joy,
Repeat the sounding joy,
Repeat, repeat the sounding joy.
3 No more let sin and sorrow grow,
Nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make his blessings flow
Far as the curse is found,
Far as the curse is found,
Far as, far as the curse is found.
4 He rules the world with truth and grace,
And makes the nations prove
The glories of his righteousness,
And wonders of his love,
And wonders of his love,
And wonders, wonders of his love.
Watts was an extraordinary man. He was born in Southampton in 1674 while his father was in prison for his nonconformist sympathies, in other words his refusal to embrace the established Church of England. (His father was released and went on to have seven more children.) Isaac was learning Latin by the age of four, Greek at nine, French (which he took up to converse with his refugee neighbours) at 11 and Hebrew at 13. Several wealthy townspeople offered to pay for his university education at Oxford or Cambridge, but these institutions would not admit nonconformists and Isaac refused to give up his beliefs. Instead he went to the Dissenting Academy at Stoke Newington (now part of north London) in 1690.
After graduating, Watts took work as a private tutor and lived with the nonconformist Hartopp family in Stoke Newington. Through them, he became acquainted with their immediate neighbours Sir Thomas Abney and his wife Mary. At their request he moved in with them and stayed with the household for the rest of his life, another 36 years. By the time of his death in 1748, at the age of 74, he had written 750 hymns, many based on the Psalms, and as a result is recognised as the ‘Father of English Hymnody’. His other works include Jesus Shall Reign Where’er the Sun, When I Survey the Wondrous Cross and Our God Our Help in Ages Past (changed by John Wesley to O God Our Help in Ages Past).
It was the Founding Father Benjamin Franklin who published Watts’s hymns in America in 1729, and they soon became popular. But it was more than a hundred years before Joy to the World was set to the melody which is usually sung today. This tune is often credited to Handel, but it is more of a pastiche of Handel phrases put together by an American musician, Lowell Mason, the composer of more than 1,600 hymn tunes. He published his arrangement of Handel’s melodic fragments in Occasional Psalms and Hymn Tunes (1836) and named the tune Antioch.
Joy to the World has been recorded by so many artists that it would probably be easier to list those who haven’t. Among the star names are Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, Johnny Cash, Nat King Cole and Mariah Carey.
Here it is in an arrangement by the English composer John Rutter performed at the First-Plymouth Church in Lincoln, Nebraska.
After this article was published in 2018, commenter D. A. Christianson added the information that this is a Congregational Church, a descendant of the Pilgrim/Dissenter churches. He wrote: ‘Of course, they approved of neither celebrating Christmas or music in church. They’ve changed a bit. :-)’
Last year I found a real one-off, an irresistible country version by the United States Navy Band. I love the fact that they are in full dress uniform.
This year’s addition is a wonderfully joyous performance by the band of Kingsboro Temple of of Seventh-day Adventists in Brooklyn, New York. It’s 14 minutes long and it sounds as if they kept going after the filming ended.
