Our Kind of Spirituals, No 17: The Sussex Carol

This carol was adapted from one composed by a 17th-century Irish Franciscan bishop named Luke Wadding for a collection called the Smale Garland of Pious and Godly Songs. Ralph Vaughan Williams, who consolidated so many English-language folk songs, collected it.

The text makes reference to Christmas night, but I usually hear it on Christmas Eve and Christmas morning — on a record called Archguitar Christmas, by Peter Blanchette, who has had an extraordinary career playing Bach and much else on an eleven-stringed instrument of his own devising, which he calls the archguitar. It’s not too late for downloading.

Glad to have a chance to take The Shorter New Oxford Book of Carols off the piano.