First things first: in this essay I introduce my new lyrics and adapted tune for an underrated song by the underrated British songwriter, Sydney Carter. Why I worked on this project and how it relates to wider concerns, I will take up as we proceed. If you only want to hear the song, you can skip ahead to it and skip all the commentary.
But trigger warning! I am the sort of geek who actually cares about schisms among subtypes within subtypes of Calvinists during the 1800s--believe it or not, this was important for ending slavery and the future of US higher education. I also worry about which fractions of the left have the best analysis of how Gramsci related to Lenin. And I can be equally … let’s just say “passionately idiosyncratic” … about fine points of music, such as whose interpretations of Bob Dylan lyrics miss the point, and thus by extension how the songs should be sung.
All this mirrors my engagement (theological, political, and musical) with “Every Star Shall Sing a Carol" that I air out below.
A Little Bit About Sydney Carter
90% of Carter’s reputation is based on his lyric “Lord of the Dance,” set to the tune of “Simple Gifts.” This drives me crazy on two counts: first, because I am barely interested in this lyric at all except for usually being annoyed with how it's used. Second, because I do love a Carter lyric that he set to a similar tune. It's about George Fox (founder of the Quakers) and hardly anyone who isn't a Quaker knows it.
Another 5% of Carter’s reputation is based on “Crow on the Cradle,” which I barely rank in his top ten, but which was covered in the 1960s by Joni Mitchell (just released, and sadly credited it to Ewan MacColl) and Judy Collins. (BTW, we could pursue MacColl’s “Ballad of the Carpenter” as a companion to my comments below about what makes a good song about Jesus.)
That leaves only 5% percent of the oxygen in the room for all of Carter’s best songs put together—including “Every Star” which has long been one of my favorite Christmas hymns and in general deserves double the attention as the other two put together. This is my geek’s reflection, based on singing it long enough to understand it inside and out, in the process forming strong opinions about it, and then trying to refresh it for a new generation.
The New Millennium Peace Version
My version builds on Carter's, but by now has became nearly half mine due to many additions, subtractions, and revisions. It’s as if the original started as the ancestor of both a beagle and a sheepdog, but now has become two different breeds of song. Click on the photo to hear me singing it:
Every star shall sing a carol
Every rock on every shore
Greet the dawn of new beginnings
Sing of hope for all who mourn
Glory to god, peace on earth; Hear the angels’ song.
When the powers that rule creation
Had a cradle on this earth
Holy was the human body,
Holy was the human birth.
Who can tell what other bodies
God may hallow for a home?
Here, today, we welcome Jesus
Brother of our blood and bone
We will beat our swords to plowshares
Till the soil and plant good seed
Lion and the lamb together
Work by day and sleep in peace
Who can count how many crosses,
Long ago or happening still
Crucify another prophet
On another bloody hill?
Babylon the great is falling
Ugly tree bearing bitter fruit
Now begins God’s new creation
Now the axe is laid to the roots.
Every star and every planet
Every creature great and small
Sing with us the angel chorus
Sing of hope and grace for all.
Glory to God, peace on earth; Hear the angels’ song.
Here are the lyrics, downloadable as a pdf. I almost never sing all of these verses, but rather pick and choose for specific occasions, as discussed in the pdf.)
Things I Wanted Less Of And Why
Why should you care that I wrote these new lyrics? Let’s compare them to the original. Here are the original lyrics and a nice reflection. It’s easy to find YouTube recordings. If the original form were not commendable, I would not be writing any of this. It's beautiful in sound and structure, and just the right length.
But problems arise. In Carter's original refrain, where my version has switched to people singing with angels about promoting peace and fighting Babylon, Carter said this:
“God above, Man below, holy is the name I know.”
By the 1980s when I learned the song, it was an obvious deal-breaker to sing “Man below.” A simple fix of substituting “we below" doesn't ring well to my ear, in part because it's linked with another question—related to switching for “man” to “us” but thornier—about when it's also a deal-breaker to sing about an all-powerful male God.
True, sometimes there are solid reasons to extend images of power and hierarchy. For example, we could posit that Carter’s image, “King of Creation,” might pass muster if we alternated it with something like “Mother Earth Goddess.” Or we might recall how Martin Niemöller was jailed by Adolph Hitler for preaching a sermon called “God is My Führer”—his point being “my leader is God (not Hitler!)” Some early Christians said "Jesus (not the Roman Emperor) is my Lord" in comparable ways, with comparable risks.
True, sometimes this same logic sometimes makes sense for people pushing back against abusive males (“God is my father, and I take my orders from Jesus!”) or choosing the correct master if “you cannot serve two masters, both God and mammon.”
Still, even thought this can all be fine—at times—we also know perfectly well that “King” and “Mother Earth” don’t express the same thing at a visceral level, and also that if we simply split the difference and say “God,” the undertow will include a "God" that stays masculine. (Yes, I know my lyrics didn't solve that problem.) And at another visceral level, although hymns often do switch interchangeably among “Lord,” “King,” and “Father," few would wish to extend this to “Führer,” “Boss,” “Generalissimo, or “Slave master." However, there are shades of gray in the popularity of "Master" images that we should think harder about-- and by extension we should think hard about all of them! Anyway, we certainly wouldn't want to say Führer so often (say, a fifth as much as we say "Master" now?) that it became naturalized.
The main point is this: if we have to slow down in the middle of a song to ponder whether we're justified saying "Lord" or "Master" in that particular case, we are probably not caught up in the music but instead distracted.
So the challenge goes beyond working around “Man” and “King”—which I did by avoiding “Man” and swapping “the powers that rule creation” for "King." It extends to rethinking the whole controlling imagery.
Carter's Trinitarian Scheme
Carter is flowing within (not fretting about as I just did) a theology which humans are “below” (paired with mother earth) and a male God is based up in the sky. The first person of the Trinity (whatever we call him/her/it when we don't use “Father”) is the power of the universe, active on infinite planets. Jesus is a so-called “Cosmic Christ” who is mystically identical with this sky-God. In this theology the concrete human Jesus tends to dissolve into an abstract quality of “Christ-ness,” similar to how some Christians conceive the third person of the Trinity (often called the Holy Spirit).
This is largely straight-ahead Anglican trinitarian theology, despite some Quaker spirituality infused into the sound.
True, Carter nuances this nicely with his God in a cradle to signal that “holy is the human birth” and to focus on a Jesus who is “brother of our blood and bone"-- in my mind this points away from ranking the other brothers and sisters (us) hierarchically. Carter also offers a pointedly non-exclusivist Jesus, ruling out any notion that “we” brothers and sisters have the “real leader” while others do not, even if they live on other planets. These are parts of the song that drew me to it, and I've tried to keep underlining them.
Nevertheless, at the end of day, Carter’s God who is up in the sky, and his Cosmic Christ who lives on several planets, is not a theology I can fully get behind. Even though his lyric is lovely and I appreciate what it is trying to do, I tried to uproot some of this along with "Man."
I suppose that for some people, this will make my version inferior, because I’m not very trinitarian by orthodox standards. However, others will probably prefer my version for the exact same reason. (A church where I often attend even avoids the so-called “Lord’s Prayer," not to speak of the orthodox creeds, in order to steer away from red flags far less acute than what Carter's original version offers). My so-called “low Christology” echoes Carter’s Quaker instincts to stress Jesus as “our blood and bone”—although also as teacher and role model in profound senses that should not be sneered at as too many trinitarians do.
To summarize, it's not good enough for me simply to evade knee-jerk reactions to “Man,” nor end up distracted by a semi-King in the sky (“hmm, should we give that a pass this time?”) plus “cosmic-ness” ("yikes, does that make any sense?"). I want a version I can get behind whole-heartedly. And I can’t rally behind it until it passes two bars.
Less Fake Joy, More Social Justice
First is my kill-joy approach to fake Christmas cheer. Sentimental Christmas songs rarely cheer me up-- they make me even more depressed or freshly enraged. And I viscerally hate statements about being joyful that one hears in churches—assertions-meet-instructions that feel forced to me—if they do not ring true, which is often. Prosperity gospel preachers are the paradigmatic offenders that people love to hate, but sadly the problem is far more pervasive, especially at Christmas.
For example, many versions of “Joy to the World”—featuring “the Lord” ruling in a notably hierarchal way over “his” highly feminized earth who is “receiving her King”—have rung false to me, plunging me into a foul mood before the end of the service and making me run to my car and turn up something dark and angry.
Second, I need to hear about earthly social conflicts alongside cosmic harmonies. That's not because all songs must always do this, it's in order to ring true with the topic we are supposedly singing about. (Remember how I threatened to bring Gramsci into this reflection? Here he comes back-- although, again, not because everything is class struggle, but for the following reason.) If we can’t—when considering Christmas or by extension Jesus more generally—relate these things to their context of Roman occupation and slavery, their themes of imperial taxation, and the centrality of people singing about peace and deliverance, we miss something primary and essential.
Likewise, if we can’t connect the story about being “born in a stable since there was no room at the inn” to homelessness and inadequate medical care—if the only take-away is positive thinking about kids in angel outfits while the “tidings of peace” are abstract and depoliticized—then we miss something basic to what makes these stories worth caring about. These stories lead, by extension, toward questions about what sorts of Christianity are worth affiliating with at all. If the politics are lacking and the music doesn’t ring true, Christian participation may not be worth our precious time. In fact, the liberal-trending churches I attend do tend to talk about the homelessness/health care connections--sometimes even the empire and slavery parts-- but in my experience the music often detracts from this rather than deepening it.
On both fronts, I was drawn to the promise of “Every Star”—which is higher than most hymns—but it only got me halfway to where I wanted to go.
So little by little, I started adding things: ecological ideas, a “lion will lie down with lamb” verse evoking Isaiah the prophet and by implication dog-eat-dog capitalism, a “blessed are the peacemakers” verse, and singing about the fall of Babylon.
All of this is highly relevant to the Christmas narratives-- although this was not something I was taught as a kid, and I probably I would have left Christianity long ago if I hadn't learned it later. If my lyric doesn't "read naturally" as appropriate for "Christmas," compared to Carter's lyric, maybe that's part of my point. Both Carter's lyric at the time he wrote it, and more emphatically my changes, are part of a debate about what counts as normal Christmas music.
Meanwhile the verses evoke Bob Dylan and Bob Marley as well as John the Baptist and John the Revelator, with a hope that a wide range of listeners might see how these nuances resonate together.
We could reflect more on these things. But the key question is whether the song works, or not-- without any of commentary I've already given, not to speak of more. As a sort of conclusion let's come back to my revised refrain:
Glory to God, peace on earth, hear the angels' song.
This changes three things with one stroke—the “Man” problem, the “Cosmic Christ in the sky” mixed bag, plus my growing sense that the tune could benefit from being less repetitive (so that I now alternate between two tunes for the verses). The chorus echoes Carter’s tune, but with now angels and people singing together about peace and justice.
If you like this new millennium version of Carter's underrated gem and have ideas for circulating it more widely, please let me know. I hope to record it a better version before long, but for now the perfect is the enemy of the good, and the one above will have to suffice.
Note: This was first published as part of my 12 Songs for Christmas series in 2020, and is tagged accordingly.
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