I Sing of that Night in Bethlehem.

When I was very much younger than I am now, a very good friend recorded me a fabulous, 120 minute tape of mostly Irish Christmas music. A great number of tunes from the Chieftains Bells of Dublin CD. Tommy Makem's increasingly hard to Christmas CD was on it. Some Medieval and Renaissance carols (I suspect the Boston Camerata?) make an appearance. The Irish Tenors are there. Some one-off tunes whose origins are lost to the mists of time balance out the rest. It was a rich, highly traditional, mostly religious, very warm and classic Christmas mix that was the Christmas tape for a number of years. Years of use took its toll on the poor thing, and advancing technology meant that I could not listen to it any more-- a thing which was a great sorrow not only for me,  but for all my younger sisters, for whom it had also been the Christmas tape.... so after several years of missing not only the music, but that particular mix of the music, I bought a digital converter, and recorded it to my computer. And made CDs for all and sundry. And I have listened to it, and remembered how much I enjoyed it, and how many songs on there have become so much apart of Christmas, that I do not realise that they are not exactly the most common of carols... Such as the old Irish carol, Don Oíche Úd i mBeithil. 

I am quite surprised to see that I have not posted this particular song before, as it has long been one of my favourites on that whole tape of Good Music. There are a good many version of this out there, from a very beautiful version by the Monks of Glenstal Abbey, to popular singer Moya Brennan, but this is the first version I heard, and while sentimentality might have something to do with it, I still think it is the best version of it. The recitation at the beginning is basically a poetic English translation of the song, but I can tell you very little more about it, save that it is traditional, and very popular... and that the guy who does the recitation, Burgess Meredith, is apparently the same guy who plays Rocky's coach in the Rocky movies.This is something I did not know until I went poking around trying to find some sort of a history to go with the song. Why the Chieftains made such an odd choice will probably always remain a mystery, but man, he does recite it well: