In the summer of 1975, dance musicians Fred Breunig and Steve Woodruff moved to southern Vermont and teamed up with the singing duo of John Roberts and Tony Barrand. Nowell Sing We Clear was first performed in December of that same year. I conceived of it as a traveling road show which could visit small communities on a regular basis to broaden the range of music and custom to which people had access in the joyous midwin ter season. The program explores and reveals the active and still vital themes of the birth of Jesus and the celebration of the return of the light at the winter solstice. The combined interests and skills of the performers in contra and morris dancing and in ballads and bawdry afforded an unusual approach to Christmas music.
Tony Barrand.

This recording is a compilation of songs from the first three volumes of Nowell Sing We Clear spanning the period from January 1977 to February 1985. Some of the songs were recorded in our living room, and others during a concert in Guilderland Center, NY, sponsored by Old Songs, Inc. It was a pleasant surprise to discover how consistent the sound and performance quality is. Perhaps the world doesn’t change as much as we think it does. Of course, we’re dealing here with Christmas and Chrstmastide, a time which has affected us in pretty much the same way for a long time. It has always been our hope that the tradition of Nowell Sing We Clear will become part of your Christmas tradition.
Bill spence, Front Hall Records.

When we combined our first three LP recordings onto a CD (GHM-202 The Best of Nowell Sing We Clear, 1975-1986), some songs were not included. A few omissions (such as “Green Grow the Rushes-O”) left behind disappointed, even irritated, fans. This recording began as an effort to take a fresh look at some of these missing songs, but we also included a lot of other material, both traditional and newly composed.

Carol for Christmas Eve
We’ve recently taken a careful look at one of the important 19th century collections: Christmas Carols New and Old, Second Series edited by Henry Ramsden Bramley and John Stainer (London: Novello, Ewer and Co., 1871). “Listen, Lordings Unto Me” is #28 from page 40.

From Far Away
Also from Bramley & Stainer (#40, pp. 86-87) is “From Far Away” with lyrics by William Morris and a setting by Rev. J.B. Dykes. As John Roberts questioned at a Nowell rehearsal: “How have these carols with such great choruses escaped notice for more than 130 years?”

The Twelve Days of Christmas
This version is from the Copper family of Rottingdean in Sussex with our own arrangement inspired by a treatment on John Kirkpatrick’s 1997 “Wassail” tour of Northern England (see Fellside Recordings FECD125).

Six Jolly Miners
Recorded at the Black Bull in Ecclesfield in 1973, it is sung in the Sheffield pub-caroling tradition. Children used to go in for “Jolly Minering,” with costumes decorated with “motties” (numbered metal pierced tallies which colliers exchanged for their coal allowance). The song has also turned up in Pennsylvania and Nova Scotia.

Sherburne/Milford
Sherburne (“While Shepherds Watched”) and Milford are from the Original Sacred Harp.

I Heard From Heaven Today
From Ruth Crawford Seeger, American Songs for Christmas, Garden City, NY, Doubleday, 1953.

The Shepherds Amazèd
We use a setting by Andy Davis of an 18th century “West Gallery” hymn learned from the Mellstock Band’s CD, Tenants of the Earth (1996, WGS281). They report it was found in church band manuscripts from Marsh Baldon, Oxfordshire, and Bridport, Dorset.

Derwent Wassail
Keith Kendrick blended his own tune to a set of verses culled from the Oxford Book of Carols, edited and arranged by Percy Dearmer, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Martin Shaw, first published in 1928. Learned from Keith’s CD, Well Seasoned, Wild Goose Studios WGS317. Used by permission.

Joys Seven
The Oxford Book of Carols has been an indispensable source for us from the beginning, and is where we found this version of “The Joys of Mary.”

Somerset Wassail
Also from the OBC, this carol was collected by Cecil Sharp ca. 1908 from wassailers in Drayton, Somerset in what the English call the “west country.” Going out on a limb, Sharp speculated that the “Great Dog” referred to a Danish invasion of nearby Langport which would have happened one thousand years earlier.

The Derby Ram
Another version of the Christmas visiting custom invoking the image of an enormous ram. Guisers go out with a mock ram, an animal figure created by someone covered with a blanket while holding a ram’s head on a stick. John’s text is culled from multiple sources.

Beautiful Star of Bethlehem
We took this American country/gospel/bluegrass “oldie” by A.J. Phipps from an unlikely source: the BACCApella singers of the BACCApipes Folk Club in Haworth, near Keighley, Yorkshire. Our setting is by Andy Davis.

Homeless Wassail
For many, Christmas is not an easy time. Ian Robb wrote this carol capturing the plight of the homeless in the season of plenty. Used by permission.

Bring the New Year In
“The rich take all the money for the poor will take the earth.” Pete Coe perfectly represents the theater and politics that have often been part of many kinds of folklore and, perhaps, the mummers plays especially. Words & Music by Pete Coe, Backshift Music, PRS/MCPS. Used by permission.

Green Grow the Rushes-O
This widely known secular carol about the twelve days of Christmas may have been primarily responsible for re-recording songs missing from our Best of Nowell Sing We Clear, 1975-1986 CD. One Philadelphia radio host was so distressed that “Green growsÉ” was left off that John made him his own one-song CD for use on-air in December.

Song for the New Year
Another of Ian Robb’s politically astute new carols, this one with a strong anti-war message. We took the liberty of re-writing Ian’s reference to a “life free from classes” so American audiences might not take it as a request for an easier time in college. Used by permission.

With this, our fourth recording of traditional midwinter carols, we welcome Andy Davis to our ensemble. We find, somewhat to our surprise, that we are still finding an abundance of fresh material for our show, and we are delighted to present some of these “new” songs here.

The Ram Song is a Devon version collected by Peter Kennedy (Folksongs of Britain and Ireland). A rudimentary mummers’ play is still sometimes performed with the song in the area around Sheffield, in Yorkshire. This region is also the home of a strong local tradition of Christmas caroling in village pubs. Rolling Downward comes from this repertoire.

It was believed that the wren’s song betrayed St. Stephen, hiding from pursuit, to martyrdom. Thus on St. Stephen’s Day, December 26, a wren was traditionally killed, and a group of boys would carry it in procession from house to house. Hunting the Wren is our reworking of the wrenning song found in many parts of Britain (and in America, where it survives as Billy Barlow). The Wren Boys’ Song is Irish, from James Healy’s Ballads from the Pubs of Ireland.

Over the Hill and Over the Dale is by J.M. Neale, a setting to a tune from the Piae Cantiones, a book of Latin carols compiled in Finland in 1582. Neale composed English texts for several of them, Good King Wenceslas being the best-known. Piae Cantiones also gives us The Boys’ Carol, with a translation of the original text from Elizabeth Poston’s Penguin Book of Christmas Carols.

Turning to the New World, Poston’s Second Penguin Book of Christmas Carols gives us Come and I Will Sing You, from Oregon. Carol is from the pen of the Maine shape-note composer, Supply Belcher. The Cherry Tree Carol comes from the Ritchie family of Kentucky. Old Christmas is a Texas fiddle tune from Ruth Crawford Seeger’s Christmas Songs.

Shooting is a visiting custom from South Carolina, described in Harnett Kane’s Southern Christmas Book. This book also describes La Guignolee, another New Year visiting custom from French communities in Missouri. We learned this English version, The Rag Dance Song, from George and Gerry Armstrong of Chicago. Pays d’ Haut is a well-known French-Canadian reel.

Finally, Welladay is from William Chappell’s Popular Music of the Olden Time. We generally perform this in trilogy with The Boar’s Head Carol and The Praise of Christmas, so we also include these here. Both are to be found in The Oxford Book of Carols, which we heartily recommend to all as the best and single most comprehensive source of carols of all kinds.
– John Roberts & Tony Barrand, August 1988

The Truth from Above
This is the text and tune from the Oxford Book of Carols [#68] edited by Percy Dearmer, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Martin Shaw (Oxford University Press, 1928). The setting is from Vaughan Williams.

Babe of Bethlehem
Christmas Carols New and Old edited by Rev. Henry Ramsden Bramley and Sir John Stainer (London: Novello & Co., 1871, #XXXI, pp. 66-67).

The First Nowell
I first heard this at a Wassail party near Burnley in Lancashire. It’s the familiar Yorkshire tune to the song “Young Banker” from the Frank Kidson MSS, popularized by the Watersons.

The Cherry Tree Carol
New Oxford Book of Carols [NOBC] #128-I, p.440-1.

London
We are indebted to Nym Cooke’s invaluable compilation, Awake to Joy: Christmas Carols for Part-Singing, (Lyme, NH: Toad Hill Music Engraving for the Compiler, 1995) both for Timothy Swan’s setting of “London” (from his New England Harmony, Northampton, MA, 1801) and for his suggestion that Swan may have based the text on the first verse of William Billings’ “Shiloh,” (also in Awake to Joy) from which we took a second verse.

The Blessings of Mary
NOBC #131-III, p.460-461 collected by Richard Chase from Will Brady of Carthage, NC (Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 48, No. 390, 1935).

I Saw a Maiden
NOBC 109-II, p. 389. This Edgar Pettiman’s (1865-1943) setting of a Fifteenth century text (Sloan Manuscript, British Library 2593) using a Basque tune.

Chariots
John Kirkpatrick was commissioned to write a couple of new carols for a “Wassail” tour organized by Folkworks in the north of England in 1995. One was this new classic, through-composed for band, solo voices and a small choir.

The Holly and the Ivy
Sometimes to the annoyance of our friends and family, who always want to hear “their favorite,” we have learned and performed several different versions of this carol. This one was an internet gift. David de la Barre sent me a scanned copy of a four-part setting labeled only as an “Old French Melody, 1861.” He had it from Take Joy: The Tasha Tudor Christmas Book, (New York: Philomel Books, 1966).

Joy to the World
From Mike Bailey and Rollo Woods, West Gallery Carols and Anthems, published by the singing group, The Madding Crowd, 1991, pp. 11-15. The anthem is by Thomas Shoel of Montacute, Somerset based on Isaac Watts’ Psalm 98. This setting is from Nosworthy TN2, similar to others in MSS from Widecombe.

Christèmas Hath Made An End or Well-a-Day
Also known as “The Yorkshire Gooding Carol,” this was sung by children door-to-door bearing a tree on Christmas morning. Our setting is based on the one from the NOBC #154, p.530-1.

Ditchling Carol
According to Vic Gammon (“Hail Happy Morn: Two Sussex Church Band Carols in Old Harmony,” English Dance and Song, 49, no. 3, pp. 11-13) the setting here was the work of Peter Parsons who died in 1901. Gammon collated the text from several local MSS. Since the release of this recording, we have discovered that the poem is the work of William Robert Spencer (1769-1834), a grandson of the 3rd Duke of Marlborough. He published it in his Poems (1811).

Time to Remember the Poor
A remarkable tune from Kidson’s Yorkshire collection, this time from his Traditional Tunes (pp. 170-171; see above #3). The text is found on broadsides though we couldn’t improve on the set used by Dave Townsend and the Mellstock Band on their recording Tenants of the Earth.

Stevens Family Waysail
From the collector, Gwilym Davies, in his article “I’ll give you the Waysailing Bowl, the Gloucestershire Waysailing Bowl,” English Dance and Song, 50, No. 4, pp. 2-3.

Sound, Sound Your Instruments of Joy
A new setting by New England composer Bruce Randall from Nym Cooke’s Awake to Joy: Christmas Carols for Part-Singing. Additional verses are from NOBC (p. 321).

A Happy New Year
Collected by Cecil Sharp from Frederick Grossman of Langport in Somerset in 1909 [#368B, p. 506 in Vol. II of Cecil Sharp’s Collection of English Folk Songs, Maud Karpeles (Ed.), Oxford University Press, 1974].

Alison Burns sent us a copy of her arrangements of traditional and original carols and songs, The Merits of Gold (see http://aliburns.co.uk/books/). It was richly rewarding to explore the collection and we have used four selections in this album. We adapted Alison’s original creation Sing Nowell as a show-opener.

William Morris wrote Masters in This Hall in 1860 and set his lyrics to a French carol tune obtained by his friend, publisher Edmund Sedding, from the organist at Chartres cathedral. When Nowell Sing We Clear was first developed in 1975, we learned this and several other songs from the invaluable 1938 edition of The Oxford Book of Carols.

It was common in English churches between 1700–1850, where the style of hymnody now known for being performed in the “West Gallery” developed, for the music to be played instrumentally as well as sung. Awake! Behold! was collected in Eversley, Hampshire by Rose Yeomans and arranged in four parts by Roger Watson. We are most grateful to Sarah Morgan for sending us this arrangement, which her trio Craig Morgan Robson had adapted and recorded a cappella on their delightful CD Stranded. For our instrumental “symphony” here, Andy’s son Arthur Davis guests on trumpet.

We took The Old Hark Hark, a version of the popular hymn “Hark! Hark what news the angels bring,” from The New Oxford Book of Carols. The hymn was first published in 1732, and was written down in this form by the English folksong collector H.E.D. Hammond in 1919 as sung by the Walton (Buckinghamshire) waits. The song is a favorite among the carol singers in the South Yorkshire pubs.

I Saw a Ship. This fine poem by a Mrs. Addington was entered in a 1940 competition for new carols sponsored by The Sunday Times of London. The tune is by Alison Burns, and she thinks the poet was 18–19 years of age.

Andy Davis found the Catalonian carol Cold December, with its first two verses, in The International Book of Christmas Carols. We adapted the English text to correspond to the original Catalan rhyming pattern. Our friend Susan Digiacomo, Professor of Anthropology at Universitat Rovira in Barcelona, sent us translations of two other verses, one of which we also adopted.

Mummers Night in Oshawa, about homesick Newfoundland Mummers who moved to Oshawa in Ontario to find work, is by A. Frank Willis, a popular Canadian entertainer who performed as a one-man band. He died in 2011 but lives for evermore on YouTube.

The Watersons recorded Apple Tree Wassail in 1975 on For Pence and Spicy Ale. This blessing of fruit-bearing trees was common in the English counties of Devon and Somerset, firing gunpowder among the branches and putting a piece of toast on the roots, sometime around the New Year or Epiphany. Peter Kennedy notes that in many places in Somerset it took place on “old style” Epiphany, January 17. John thought the addition of a “village fiddler” would be just the ticket for this song, and Fred obliged.

There are probably more musical settings of Nahum Tate’s “While shepherds watched their flocks” (first published in 1700) than any other Christmas song, carol or hymn. “Zadoc” is a Cornish (West Gallery?) version. The setting is very like that of “New Jerusalem,” an American shape note piece by Jeremiah Ingalls of Newbury, VT. We tried to take the good bits from each of them to form New Zadoc. It remains an open question whether Ingalls knew “Zadoc” before writing “New Jerusalem.”

The traditional lyric of O the Holy Holly is an interesting mix of two songs relating aspects of Jesus’ birth and childhood: “The Cherry Tree Carol” and “The Holly and the Ivy.” It was collected by Thomas Miners of Camborne in Cornwall from a Mr. Landry and published without a tune in the Journal of the Folk Song Society. Alison Burns composed this tune, and we have adapted her arrangement for voices and instruments.

We first encountered the Basque carol O Bethlehem in Elizabeth Poston’s The Penguin Book of Christmas Carols. Verses 1 and 3 are from Poston and verse 2 was adapted from The International Book of Christmas Carols.

We tried Alison Burns’ setting for this carol, “O Grand and O Bright” in The Merits of Gold, but felt it was not quite right for our voices. The text and tune came from a Gloucestershire singer, Betty Aldridge, collected by our friend Gwilym Davies whose efforts had previously given us the “Stevens Family Waysail” which we recorded on Just Say Nowell. We used the original text, “How Grand and How Bright” written by William Henry Havergal (1793–1870), to expand the carol. Then, honoring the county of John’s birth, we settled on the title by which the song was commonly known, The Worcestershire Carol.

Colin Cater penned Penny for the Ploughboys for the visits by the ploughboys and the Molly dancers at the turn of the year, as the fields were prepared for the new crops. His 2009 book, also titled with the seasonal cry A Penny for the Ploughboys, contains many of his songs and relates his own story as the old ways of the English countryside became a focus for his own music.

Stay and I’ll Sing! is yet another cumulative song celebrating the twelve-ness of the midwinter season. We learned it from the remarkable collection of songs edited by Ruth Crawford Seeger as American Folksongs for Christmas, where it is called “The Twelve Apostles.” The Seeger family led by Peggy recorded it on the LP/CD set of these songs.

Over the years we have sung several versions of “The Derby Ram,” from a midwinter visiting custom in Derbyshire. The song celebrating the gargantuan proportions of this magical animal has spread far and wide, as far as Australia and even to a New Orleans Dixieland version. This one, which we call The Derby Ram Goes to Sea, comes from Joanna Colcord’s Songs of American Sailormen, from Capt. John Robinson who had published it in an article in The Bellman in 1917. Stan Hugill also gives a version in Shanties of the Seven Seas.

Alison Burns wrote both the words and tune for The Door of the Year, a new wassail to be used at the turn (the “Door”) of the year.

Andy Davis composed the tune and made the arrangement for Villagers All, the carol which gives us our title for this CD. From Kenneth Grahame’s classic The Wind in the Willows, it is sung by the field-mice at Mole End in Chapter 5. Andy introduced it at a rehearsal and we were all blown away. John was the first to recover enough to say “I want to sing it!”, and fortunately it was in his key.

—Tony Barrand & John Roberts

Hail, Smiling Morn!, Old Foster, and Jacob’s Well are from the Yorkshire pub Christmas singing traditions found in several parts of the city of Sheffield. Our versions are taken from The Joy of Christmas: Words & Music of Traditional & Local Carols, compiled and presented by Worrall Male Voice Choir, privately published, ca. 1980.

Sweet Chiming Bells is from the same source, though it was originally another setting of “While Shepherds Watched.” We loved the tune and the chorus but didn’t feel the verses suited them very well. The solution was to add the poem “A Song for Christmas Eve” by Clara Broughton Conant from Kriss Kringle Recitations, Dialogs and Songs for Christmas, compiled by Hal J. Weigle (Chicago: Meyer and Brother, 1914). Over the years, our “fifth man,” friend and sound technician, Steve Voorhees, has produced Christmas related curiosities on his perennial search of yard sales and antique stores. Compared with LPs of “Calypso Christmas” and “Christmas Rap” this little book of poems and stories yielded pure gold.

The Carol of the Creatures is from Sydney Carter, liturgical songwriter and creator of the much loved “Lord of the Dance.”

Shepherds, Arise! is from the repertoire of the Copper family of Rottingdean in Sussex. The setting we think is by Alan Whear in the shape-note style.

The Holly and the Ivy, as recorded here, is one of several versions collected by Cecil Sharp, this one from a Mrs. Hazeltine of Camborne, Cornwall. (See Cecil Sharp’s Collection of English Folk Songs edited by Maud Karpeles, Oxford University Press, 1974.)

Another in the series of carols we have explored from the custom of “hunting the wren” belonging to St. Stephen’s day (December 26th), The Cutty Wren is a song I learned a long time ago from a 45 r.p.m. recording of the Ian Campbell Folk Group. “Cutty” is an Irish and northern English dialect word meaning “little.”

A Mr. Wiltshire of Cambridgeshire in England sang The Joys of Mary for Ralph Vaughan Williams. He sang it as “The Nine Joys of Mary”: we give seven joys, the number most commonly found in the English tradition. (See Folk Songs Collected by Ralph Vaughan Williams, edited by Roy Palmer, London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1983).

I think we learned this version of The Bitter Withy from the singing of our friend Louis Killen.

The March of the Kings (“Marche des Rois Mage,” “Marcho di Rei”) is a traditional Provenal carol probably intended for the fifes and drums. The tune is best known for its adaptation by Georges Bizet as incidental music for Daudet’s “L’Arlesienne.” To make a singable version, we blended verse #1 from the translation in International Carols with verses #2 and #3 from The New Oxford Book of Carols (edited by Hugh Keyte and Andrew Parrott, Oxford University Press, 1992).

We loved this “Crawn” version of the widespread carol I Saw Three Ships on first sight. It was collected in 1895 from a Humber estuary boatman on the east coast of England, and ultimately published by Baring-Gould in his Garland of Country Songs in the same year. It finally makes sense out of the puzzle of why three ships appear in the Christmas narrative at all. Legend has it that the skulls (“crawns” = “craniums” = “crowns”?) of the “Kings” or “Wise Men” were taken and lodged in the cathedral at Cologne.

Hail Happy Morn was found by Dave Townsend in the Thomas Hardy manuscripts and it is used with permission. It is part of the repertoire which is now known as “West Gallery Music.” This multiple-part singing and instrumental style of hymnody seems to have been the precursor of what became “shape-note” music in the U.S. This was originally a two-part setting; we have added lines to suit our voices.

Old Christmas Return’d (or Hospitality Reviv’d) and Carol for the New Year are taken from William Chappell’s invaluable chronological study Popular Music of the Olden Time (1859, reprinted by Dover Publications, Inc., 1965).

Yet another New Year’s Eve wassail song to add to our collection, We’ve Been a While A-Wandering was found in The New Oxford Book of Carols. It is from Yorkshire.

Part of the pleasure obtained from twenty-one years of delving into the vast Christmas repertoire of songs and carols is the discovery of different versions of songs that people know well. They’re not always received with joy by our audiences who don’t necessarily appreciate having to adjust to another song when they’ve just got to know and love the old one. We Wish You a Merry Christmas is a medley of carols collected in the English Midlands. (See Songs of the Midlands edited by Roy Palmer, EP Publishing Limited, 1972).

Tony Barrand