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"Christmas Is Coming" is a traditional nursery rhyme and Christmas song frequently sung as a round. It is listed as number 12817 in the Roud Folk Song Index.
| | This article needs additional citations for verification .(December 2017) |
"Christmas Is Coming" is a traditional nursery rhyme and Christmas song frequently sung as a round. It is listed as number 12817 in the Roud Folk Song Index.
The following are common representative lyrics:
- Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat
- Please [do] put a penny in the old man's hat
- If you haven't got a penny, [then] a ha'penny will do
- If you haven't got a ha'penny, [then] God bless you!
Although the lyrics begin appearing in print in 1885 [1] and 1886, [2] they are presented without an author and in a way of cataloging something that was already mostly common knowledge of the time. Some sources have variants of these lyrics and additional verses. [3] [4] [5]
The common melody paired with the lyrics is usually simply listed as a traditional English carol, while some sources curiously list the author Edith Nesbit Bland as its composer. [6] [7] [8]
Another common melody, usually listed as a traditional English carol, is differentiated by an arrangement of it made by Walford Davies, published in 1914. [9] The lyrics have also been paired with the melody of the English dance tune "Country Gardens". [4] [10]
A few field recordings were made of traditional versions of the song, [11] [12] [13] including one sung by Jack Elliot of Birtley, Durham to Reg Hall in the early 1960s, [14] which is archived within the British Library Sound Archive. [15]
The Kingston Trio recorded the song as "A Round About Christmas", on their album The Last Month of the Year released in 1960. [6] [16] [17] A calypso sounding version was featured on the 1979 album John Denver and the Muppets: A Christmas Together [18] and a loose, jazzy piano-based arrangement was featured in the musical score of A Charlie Brown Christmas . [19]
The rhyme also became the basis for the song "Christmas Is a-Comin'", written by Frank Luther and performed by Bing Crosby, among others. [20]
"Scarborough Fair" is a traditional English ballad. The song lists a number of impossible tasks given to a former lover who lives in Scarborough, North Yorkshire. The "Scarborough/Whittingham Fair" variant was most common in Yorkshire and Northumbria, where it was sung to various melodies, often using Dorian mode, with refrains resembling "parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme" and "Then she'll be a true love of mine." It appears in Traditional Tunes by Frank Kidson published in 1891, who claims to have collected it from Whitby.
"Hush, Little Baby" is a traditional lullaby, thought to have been written in the Southern United States. The lyrics are from the point of view of a parent trying to appease an upset child by promising to give them a gift. Sensing the child's apprehension, the parent has planned a series of contingencies in case their gifts don't work out. The simple structure allows more verses to be added ad lib. It has a Roud number of 470.
"Pussy Cat, Pussy Cat" or "Pussycat, Pussycat" is a popular English language nursery rhyme. It has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 15094.
"Lily of the West" is a traditional British and Irish folk song, best known today as an American folk song, listed as number 957 in the Roud Folk Song Index. The American version is about a man who travels to Louisville and falls in love with a woman named Mary, Flora or Molly, the eponymous Lily of the West. He catches Mary being unfaithful to him, and, in a fit of rage, stabs the man she is with, and is subsequently imprisoned. In spite of this, he finds himself still in love with her. In the original version, the Lily testifies in his defense and he is freed, though they do not resume their relationship.
"Solomon Grundy" is an English nursery rhyme. It has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 19299.
"I Saw Three Ships (Come Sailing In)" is an English Christmas carol, listed as number 700 in the Roud Folk Song Index. The earliest printed version of "I Saw Three Ships" is from the 17th century, possibly Derbyshire, and was also published by William Sandys in 1833. The song was probably traditionally known as "As I Sat On a Sunny Bank", and was particularly popular in Cornwall.
"We Wish You a Merry Christmas" is an English Christmas carol, listed as numbers 230 and 9681 in the Roud Folk Song Index. The famous version of the carol is from the English West Country.
The Roud Folk Song Index is a database of around 250,000 references to nearly 25,000 songs collected from oral tradition in the English language from all over the world. It is compiled by Steve Roud. Roud's Index is a combination of the Broadside Index and a "field-recording index" compiled by Roud. It subsumes all the previous printed sources known to Francis James Child and includes recordings from 1900 to 1975. Until early 2006, the index was available by a CD subscription; now it can be found online on the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library website, maintained by the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS). A partial list is also available at List of folk songs by Roud number.
"Fair Margaret and Sweet William" is a traditional English ballad which tells of two lovers, one or both of whom die from heartbreak. Thomas Percy included it in his 1765 Reliques and said that it was quoted as early as 1611 in the Knight of the Burning Pestle. In the United States, variations of Fair Margaret were regarded as folk song as early as 1823.
The Farmer's Curst Wife is a traditional English language folk song listed as Child ballad number 278 and number 160 in the Roud Folk Song Index.
"Little Tommy Tucker" is an English language nursery rhyme. It has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 19618.
Here We Come A-wassailing, also known as Here We Come A-Christmasing,Wassail Song and by many other names, is a traditional English Christmas carol and New Year song, typically sung whilst wassailing, or singing carols, wishing good health and exchanging gifts door to door. It is listed as number 209 in the Roud Folk Song Index. Gower Wassail and Gloucestershire Wassail are similar wassailing songs.
"The Twelve Days of Christmas" is an English Christmas carol. A classic example of a cumulative song, the lyrics detail a series of increasingly numerous gifts given to the speaker by their "true love" on each of the twelve days of Christmas. The carol, whose words were first published in England in the late eighteenth century, has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 68. A large number of different melodies have been associated with the song, of which the best known is derived from a 1909 arrangement of a traditional folk melody by English composer Frederic Austin.
"Down in Yon Forest", also known as "All Bells in Paradise" and "Castleton Carol," is a traditional English Christmas carol dating to the Renaissance era, ultimately deriving from the anonymous Middle English poem known today as the Corpus Christi Carol. The song was originally associated with Good Friday or the Corpus Christi Feast rather than Christmas, but some more recent variants have additional verses which reference Christmas. It is listed in the Roud Folk Song Index as number 1523.
The song "All Around my Hat" is of nineteenth-century English origin. In an early version, dating from the 1820s, a Cockney costermonger vowed to be true to his fiancée, who had been sentenced to seven years' transportation to Australia for theft and to mourn his loss of her by wearing green willow sprigs in his hatband for "a twelve-month and a day", the willow being a traditional symbol of mourning. The song was made famous by Steeleye Span, whose rendition may have been based on a more traditional version sung by John Langstaff, in 1975.
"The Derby Ram" or "As I was Going to Derby" is a traditional tall tale English folk song that tells the story of a ram of gargantuan proportions and the difficulties involved in butchering, tanning, and otherwise processing its carcass.
"The Farmer's Boy" is a traditional English folk song or ballad, listed as number 408 in the Roud Folk Song Index. It has been arranged as a military march.
"The Maid of Amsterdam", also known as "A-Roving", is a traditional sea shanty. It has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 649.
Cob coaling, cob-a-coaling or cob calling was a traditional Bonfire Night custom practiced in the Yorkshire-Lancashire border region, which involved groups of people going door-to-door in groups and singing a song in return for Bonfire Night supplies. In more recent times, singers collected firewood and money for fireworks, but "coaling" refers to the coal that would previously have been collected. The Cob Coaling Song is listed as number 9234 in the Roud Folk Song Index.
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