We Three Kings

John Henry Hopkins Jr. wrote both the words and the music in 1857, for a Christmas pageant at the General Theological Seminary in New York, where he was the first music teacher. Carols of the time usually had one author for the words and another for the tune, so that alone set it apart. He called it Three Kings of Orient. It was sung among his family and friends for a few years before he printed it in 1863, in his book Carols, Hymns, and Songs, and it became the first Christmas carol from the United States to be sung widely.

Hopkins was born in Pittsburgh in 1820 and died in 1891. Hymnary.org's biography says he played flute and bugle in the orchestra of the school his father founded in Vermont, and graduated from the University of Vermont in 1839. He wrote the carol for voices in parts: the three kings each take a verse alone, naming the gold, the frankincense and the myrrh, and all three sing the first and last verses together. The Episcopal hymnal took it in 1916, and The Oxford Book of Carols in 1928 called it "one of the most successful of modern composed carols." Hymnary.org now counts it in 257 hymnals.

The verse is in E minor and the refrain in G major, and that change is what gives the carol its shape. The first line of the verse is sung twice, the same eight notes, falling from the B down to the low E. The refrain lifts on a long "O" and sits on the G, and its first line is sung twice as well. Both keys share the same signature, so nothing on the page changes but the notes the tune leans on.

On a mandolin in E minor the carol runs from the open D course to the d at the fifth fret of the A course, and it never leaves first position. It is in 6/8, so pick it the way the jigs on this shelf are picked: down, up, down, down, up, down across each bar, with the downstroke landing on both beats. Most beats are a quarter and an eighth, and there the quarter takes the down, the up passes over the strings without touching them, and the eighth takes the next down. The runs of three even eighths in the verse, F sharp, G, F sharp, then d, c, B and A, B, A, get all three strokes.