minstrel: [Fwd: [MK8]Holiday Song Histories]

[Monica Hultin]

This is what my copy of the Shorter New Oxford Book of Carols (Edited by
Hugh Keyte and Andrew Parrot, 1993, has to say about Deck the Halls.

>Deck the Hall

Welsh Traditional.  

"Nos Galan" (New Year's Eve) is one of the many texts to which this tune was
formerly sung.  It belongs to the competitive canu penillion tradition, in
which merry makers would dance in a ring around a harpist, extemporizing
verses in turn and dropping out when invention failed.  The harp originally
played the "answering" bars, (fa la la - Monika) but nonsense syllables came
to be substituted as harpers became less common.
The NOBC setting is adapted from the 1784 edition of the harpist Edward
Jones's 'Musical Poetical Relics of the Welsh Bards." (with Dad-lea used
instead of fa la la in the third line- Monika).
Text III, obstinately popular,  (The text we commonly used, 1. Deck the
Halls with boughs of Holly, 2. See the blazing Yule before us, 3. Fast away
the old year passes - Monika), has minimal connection with the Welsh text
and dates from an American publication of 1881.

Unfortunately, my book doesn't give a reference for the American Publication.
The New Oxford Book of Carols may have more info, but I can't afford a copy
of it.  It can be found in larger libraries.

Monika

>Tangwystyl:
><<> Deck the Hall
>
>Good question. This isn't in my edition of the Oxford book (which tends to
>omit purely secular songs). The "standard" _Welsh_ lyrics to this tune
>("Oer yw'r gwr sy'n methu caru etc.") were composed by John "Ceiriog"
>Hughes and first published in 1873 in Brinley Richards' "Songs of Wales"
>(Boosey & Co., Ltd., London). In this edition, they were accompanied by
>English lyrics coposed by John Oxenford that are of the same general
>sentiment as Hughes' Welsh lyrics (and the more commonly known modern
>English lyrics) but do not correspond precisely to either.
>
>Since the tune is uniformly known as "an old Welsh tune" I would tend to
>assume that the various English versions followed upon the popularizing of
>the tune by Hughes and thus date to the late 19th century or later, but I
>can't find any collection in my own library that assigns an actual author
>to the "Deck the halls" words.>>
>
>The tune also appears under the title "Nos Galan" in one of Jones' Relics 
>of the Welsh Bards collections, either 1794 or 1804.  There are Welsh 
>lyrics appropriate to the New Year.  I don't have my copy handy, so I can't 
>say how they compare with the lyrics by Hughes, but I can dig them up and 
>post them if anyone's interested.
> - Vivien 
>
>
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