The First Noel

The carol is usually said to be Cornish, and the claim rests on the two men who first printed it, both of whom collected in Cornwall. Davies Gilbert, a Cornish politician and scientist who later became president of the Royal Society, included it in the 1823 edition of his collection of old West Country carols. William Sandys printed it with its tune in 1833, in his own collection of Christmas carols ancient and modern. The folk song scholar Anne Gilchrist found no record of the melody before Sandys.

The tune is unusual for an English folk melody. The verse is one phrase sung twice, the refrain is a variation of the same phrase, and all three end on the third of the scale rather than the tonic, which is why the carol always sounds as if it could go around once more. Gilchrist suggested it may have begun as a harmony part, a treble line sung above some other carol, that people went on remembering after the tune it went with was forgotten. It is a guess, and a good one.

Nearly every congregation sings it from John Stainer's four part harmonization, printed in his Christmas Carols New and Old in 1871, and the melody in it is the one on this page. The words spell it Nowell in most English hymnals and Noel in most American ones.

On a mandolin in D the carol stays inside one octave, from the open D course up to the d at the fifth fret of the A course, and the hand never moves. Every phrase of the verse climbs the same way, D, E, F sharp, G, A, B, C sharp, d, over three bars, which is the D major scale in the order a beginner learns it, and then walks back down to the F sharp. The high C sharp is the fourth fret of the A course, and it comes back often enough that the second finger settles there.