"O Little Town of Bethlehem" is a popular Christmas carol. The text was written by Phillips Brooks (1835–1893), an Episcopal priest, Rector of the Church of the Holy Trinity, Philadelphia. He was inspired by visiting the Palestinian city of Bethlehem in 1865. Three years later, he wrote the poem for his church and his organist, Lewis Redner, added the music. Redner's tune, simply titled "St. Louis", is the tune used most often for this carol in the United States.
In the United Kingdom, and sometimes in the U.S. (especially in the Episcopal Church), the hymn tune "Forest Green" is used instead. "Forest Green" was adapted by Ralph Vaughan Williams from an English folk ballad called "The Ploughboy's Dream" which he had collected from a Mr. Garman of Forest Green, Surrey in 1903. Adapted into a hymn tune, it was first published in the English Hymnal of 1906.
Another version by H. Walford Davies, called "Wengen" (or sometimes just "Christmas carol"), is usually performed only by choirs rather than as a congregational hymn. This is because the first two verses are for treble voices with organ accompaniment, with only the final verse as a chorale/refrain harmony. This setting includes a recitative from the Gospel of Luke at the beginning, and cuts verses 2 and 4 of the original 5-verse carol. This version is traditionally used at the service of Nine Lessons and Carols in Kings College, Cambridge.
William Rhys-Herbert included a new hymn-tune and harmonization as part of his 1909 cantata, Bethany.
Famous quotes containing the words town and/or bethlehem:
“No annual training or muster of soldiery, no celebration with its scarfs and banners, could import into the town a hundredth part of the annual splendor of our October. We have only to set the trees, or let them stand, and Nature will find the colored drapery,—flags of all her nations, some of whose private signals hardly the botanist can read,—while we walk under the triumphal arches of the elms.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Shall I tell you who will come
to Bethlehem on Christmas Morn,
Who will kneel them gently down
before the Lord, new-born?”
—Unknown. Words from an Old Spanish Carol (l. 1–4)