Joy to the World

Isaac Watts wrote the words in 1719, as a Christian reading of Psalm 98, and fitted them, his preface says, to the common meter tunes of the old psalm book. The tune everybody sings now came more than a century later, from the American composer and arranger Lowell Mason. He first printed it in 1836, in his Occasional Psalm and Hymn Tunes, under the name ANTIOCH and marked "From Handel", and the version that stuck is his 1848 one, in The National Psalmist. It is now the most published Christmas hymn in North America: hymnary.org counted it in 1,387 hymnals in 2009.

Whether Handel had anything to do with it is an old argument. The first four notes are the first four of the chorus "Lift up your heads" in Messiah, and a phrase in the third line matches the arioso "Comfort ye". Handel scholars now call those resemblances chance. Tunes very close to ANTIOCH were printed in England in the early 1830s under the name Comfort, one of them marked "Author Unknown", which suggests the melody was around before Mason wrote his name to it.

The opening is the D major scale falling one octave, d, c sharp, B, A, G, F sharp, E, D. After it the tune climbs back to d, runs down from it twice in four quick steps, and then sits on repeated F sharps and repeated E's, each run of them lifting a step at the end, before the last line comes home.

On a mandolin in D that falling scale is the same four frets on two courses: fifth, fourth, second and open on the A course, then fifth, fourth, second and open on the D course. Learn it as one shape played twice. The long notes, the A in the second bar, the B, c sharp and d of the climb back up, and the A and G a few bars from the end, are dotted halves at this page's doubled values, long enough to fill with tremolo once the opening sits under the fingers.