God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen

The comma is doing real work in the title. The phrase is not addressed to merry gentlemen. It is a wish, in older English, that God keep you merry, meaning keep you in peace and good health, and the gentlemen are the people being wished it. The oldest version anybody has found sits in an anonymous manuscript from the 1650s and opens "Sit yow merry gentlemen" instead. The earliest known printing is a broadsheet dated to about 1760, and a review in the Monthly Review of November 1764 refers to the carol by name, which is the first date anybody can be sure of.

It reached the modern world through William Sandys, an English solicitor and antiquarian who collected carols and published Christmas Carols Ancient and Modern in London in 1833. That book saved a good deal of English carol singing from disappearing, and it also, by Sandys's own account, tidied some of it up. Ten years later Dickens put the carol into A Christmas Carol, where a boy sings it at Scrooge's keyhole and gets chased off. George Eliot quoted it in Silas Marner in 1861. Long before either of them, a writer in the Gentleman's Magazine of March 1824 was complaining that the only carol heard in London any more was some croaking ballad singer bawling out this one.

There are two tunes, and this page carries the one people mean. The other, usually called the Cornish tune, was in print by 1833 and the Oxford Book of Carols still called it the usual version in 1928, and it has all but vanished. The minor key melody written out here first appears in print in a piano rondo by Samuel Wesley reviewed in 1815, then in a parody published by William Hone in 1820 whose third line is not quite ours, and in the form everybody sings in Chappell's collection of 1855.

The minor key is the whole character of it, and the carol never resolves that by turning major. The verse falls three times, each line dropping from the fifth down to the seventh degree and settling back on the tonic, and then the refrain climbs. Both sources compared for this page write the seventh natural everywhere in the melody. The sharpened one lives in the harmony, under the two held B chords, which is why this feels darker to sing than it does to strum.

On a mandolin it runs from the E at the second fret of the D course to the open E course, one octave, and every note in it is a quarter or a half except the two that carry the first "comfort". That makes the carol a good place to work on holding a steady beat while the left hand walks: the melody moves in even steps almost the whole way, so any unevenness in the picking hand shows up immediately. Count the pickup in before you start it, because the last bar is short by exactly one beat and it comes back around on you.