Playlist
* We Three Kings The Sackville All Stars 6:16
* Bring a Torch, Jeanette Isabella Fernando Ortega 3:20
Music notes
We Three KingsThis familiar Christmas carol was written by Deacon John Henry Hopkins Jr, editor of the Church Journal in New York City. Since Hopkins Sr. was an Episcopal bishop, and Hopkins Jr. and his brothers were all church officials in various places, Christmas Day itself was an inconvenient day for the family to hold its annual family holiday gathering. So it was always held on the Epiphany (January 6) at their parent’s home in Burlington, Vermont.
As a gift for his nephews and nieces, in 1857 Uncle John wrote both the words and music of this carol for them to sing for the adults at that year’s family gathering. Children’s “theatricals” were very popular at that time, and he purposely set the song in a key that is good for children (and basses) to sing.
I can imagine him giving his manuscript of the song to the children in confidence when he first arrived so they could surprise the adults with it in the context of a Christmas pageant. (Actually, they may have staged a Christmas pageant every year, but a brand new song that no one had ever heard before would have been quite a treat.) They could secretly have practiced it and other Nativity songs out in the barn, and scoured their grandparents’ house for bits and pieces of clothing, costume jewelry, and other stuff to make attire for their performance. It may not have happened that way, but that is how I imagine it occurring.
Anyway, that first performance was a big hit with the family, which encouraged Hopkins to write more Christmas hymns and carols for the kids and publish a songbook with them. Unfortunately, Hopkins proved to be a one hit wonder as a songwriter, but he had better success as an author, journalist, book illustrator and stained-glass window designer. But his one hit was certainly a big one: It was the first American Christmas song to cross the Atlantic to Britain, and now is one of the world’s most well-known Christmas carols.
The recording of it is one of several jam sessions that were recorded to create an album for the now-defunct Sackville Records, a Toronto-based jazz label. The musicians are all now deceased but they truly all were major jazz stars in their time. They are Jim Galloway on the soprano saxophone, Ralph Sutton on piano, Milt Hinton on bass, and Gus Johnson on drums.
As I understand it, the musicians mostly toured the jazz club circuit independently but all happened to be in Toronto at the same time. That enabled the founders of Sackville Records, John Norris and Bill Smith, to book them together a recording gig. The album is The Sackville All Star Christmas Record, and all of its tracks were recorded on two days in March 1986. It is now one of the best-selling jazz Christmas albums of all time.
Bring a Torch, Jeanette Isabellais performed here by Fernando Ortega, who is primarily known as a singer-songwriter of contemporary Christian music. He was born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico, near the banks of the Rio Grande, and started learning piano at eight years of age. This is from his 2008 album Christmas Songs.
The melody and words for Un flambeau, Jeannette, Isabelle are included in a manuscript written by Joseph Bastide, an Avignon surgeon, at the beginning of the 18th century. At the time the region was part of the Papal States, and the people spoke the local dialect called Provençal Occitan. The manuscript documented noëls that his friend Nicolas Saboly had collected or written himself. Saboly had trained to be a priest, and became one, but ending up finding that his true calling was as the Cathedral’s organist and choirmaster, as well as a religious poet and composer. He worked almost entirely in his native dialect, and his poetry and songs are now considered an important part of the heritage of that region.
It is not clear whether this is entirely Saboly’s own composition, or is a folk noël that he collected, or a folk or other kind of melody for which he wrote Provençal noël-style lyrics, or something in between. In any event, as soon as Bastide’s transcription of Saboly’s songs was published in 1662 they were translated into Parisian French, and this song went viral, and not just as a noël. Within four years Charpentier used this melody for a pub song in a revival of Molière’s farce Le médecin malgré lui (The physician in spite of himself). Perhaps the tune had returned to its natural habitat.
