Saturday, December 06, 2008

Does no one remember the Christian lyrics for "Carol of the Bells"?

Growing up in the '70s, one of the staples of my family's Christmas revels was the We Wish You a Merry Christmas album from Ray Conniff and the Ray Conniff Singers. You may think it isn't part of your own celebration, but if you have lived in the United States during one or more Christmas seasons and have set foot anywhere that Christmas recordings were being played, you've probably taken in at least one number from this album. It's quite popular with the malls and those radio stations that start playing holiday music on Thanksgiving Day and keep going through the night of Dec. 25th. But don't hold that against Ray Conniff or his singers! It's a well-produced album with nifty, creative arrangements -- albeit staged within a fake-holiday-party context that bears a slight whiff of "cheesy" fragrance -- and a nice mix of secular and religious songs.

As a teenager, I once ran across a cassette at my grandparents' house that featured me, at age 4, trying not only to sing these songs, but to reproduce the full ensemble arrangement with my lone voice. The medley with "We Three Kings of Orient Are" includes me making a segue between songs by oddly belting out the first word in the phrase, "STAR of wonder, STAR of light... ." As an adult, I was so happy when I discovered the CD version (our old vinyl version was beyond worn out by now), I bought one for myself, one for my parents, and one for my brother. Every year we load it into the car's CD player before heading to East Texas, though we're surely going to sing all the songs ourselves as a quartet-on-wheels both coming and going.

So it amazed me when I sang in a barbershop chorus as an adult and discovered that the song I'd always known as "Ring Christmas Bells," with beloved lyrics like "Ring, Christmas bells, merrily ring / Tell all the world Jesus is king," was known to most people as "Carol of the Bells" and had totally different, essentially nonsensical lyrics. It was painful learning to sing such inanity as, "Ding dong, ding dong / That is their song," and even lines like "All seem to say, throw cares away / Christmas is here, bringing good cheer" leave me cold. It seems almost a parody of the version I know, although I realize it's likely that the better-known version predates it.

Around 1996, I was singing with a church chorus when they prepared a Christmas program, and was disappointed that even they seemed familiar only with the pallid version that urges generalized "good cheer" for no particular reason. Don't get me wrong; I am not one of those people who sees some kind of "war on Christmas" or has a problem with expressions like "Happy Holidays." It simply seems sad to me that this far more inspiring version of the song doesn't seem to have made its way even into Christian circles, much less into holiday settings that play other religious Christmas carols and other selections from this very album. Tonight I Googled various phrases from the song, figuring that surely by now someone had posted the lyrics online. Incredibly, they had not, so I will do so here; there is no attribution for the lyrics on my CD or album, so if they are of known authorship, I hope someone will see this and alert me. :)

Ring, Christmas bells,
merrily ring
Tell all the world
Jesus is king

Loudly proclaim
with one accord
the happy tale
bound [*] from the Lord

Ring, Christmas bells,
Sound far and near
Comfort the old
Jesus is here

Carol the news [**]
to old and young
Tell it to all
in every tongue

Ring, Christmas bells,
merrily ring
tell all the world
Jesus is king

Ring, Christmas bells,
toll loud and long --
your message sweet
peal and prolong

Come all ye people
Join in the singing
Repeat the story
told by the ringing

[ring, ring, ring, ring]

Ring, Christmas bells,
throughout the earth
Tell the good news
of Jesus' birth

Loudly proclaim
with one accord
the happy tale
bound [*] from the Lord


Ring, Christmas bells,
merrily ring
Tell all the world
Jesus is king

Ring, Christmas bells,
merrily ring
Tell all the world
Jesus is king

Loudly proclaim
with one accord
the happy tale
bound [*] from the Lord

Ring, Christmas bells,
sound far and near
Comfort the old
Jesus is here

Carol the news [**]
to old and young
Tell it to all
In every tongue

[ring, ring, ring, ring, ring ...]

transcription is mine
[*] this word is unclear, even after several listening tries; I put what I always thought it said
[**] the word rendered "carol" may be "herald," which would fit as well