Tuesday 30 December 2014

O LITTLE TOWN OF BETHLEHEM...



Had your tea and stuffed your face with Christmas
mince pies?  Good!  Now kick off your shoes, rest your
feet on the back of a menial whilst she's down on her knees
scrubbing the floor, and relax to the dulcet tones of JIM
REEVES as he performs O LITTLE TOWN OF
BETHLEHEM.  ("Oi!  You missed a spot!")

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I forgot that this would be sung using the American tune of 'O, Little Town' which isn't as good as ours in my humble opinion. But kudos to you,Kid, for even playing a festive tune which, as we all know, is now illegal to do. What a strange time late December is - the decorations are still up but Christmas is talked of in the past tense. When I was a kid we'd have Christmas dinner not just on Christmas Day but every day into early January and it still felt like Christmas into the new year - of course being off school helped with that feeling. When somebody asks me "how was your Christmas ?" at this time I reply that it STILL IS Christmas. I was in Tesco yesterday buying a new digital radio (my "old" one - a mere 2 years old - started acting oddly on Christmas Eve and finally packed up on the 29th) and I wished the woman who served me "merry Christmas" to which she replied "you too" :)

Kid said...

Curiously, CJ, the tune to Jim's version is the one I heard in school when I was a kid. I Googled the 'British' version and it's not really familiar to me, although I do know that some carols had different tunes depending on which side of the pond they came from. I'm sure there's another one (on the Andy Williams Christmas album) which has a different tune to the one I know, but I can't recall which one it is. As for Jim's carol, I prefer it to the one I just heard on YouTube, but I suppose whichever version you like best is down to the one you heard as a kid.

Anonymous said...

That's very interesting - I've just finished reading a book (e-book actually) about the origins of Christmas carols and 'O, Little Town' was one of them. It didn't say anything about the American tune being in the UK and said the British tune was added to the lyrics later on - it's an American carol written in the 1860's so the American tune is the original one. I've only known it by its' British tune and thought it was the same for everyone in the UK !

Kid said...

Interesting indeed. The British tune means nothing to me, but the moment I hear the American one (which I thought was British, obviously), I'm right back in my primary school classroom (or dining hall) again, listening to it at Christmas.



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