I hope you all had a refreshing Christmas and are about to have a great start to the coming new year! If you’re like me, Christmas songs have been playing for the past few weeks; and if you stop to think about it, every song we know and sing has an origin story: “Amazing Grace” was written by John Newton (an English slave trader-turned-abolitionist); the hymn “It Is Well With My Soul” was written by Horatio Spafford as his ship passed over the place where his four daughters had drowned in a shipwreck. Every song has a story, and the Carol of the Bells is no different.
The Carol of the Bells has been recorded well over a hundred times in the past decades, and it is one of the “classic” and loved Christmas carols – except that it didn’t start out as a Christmas song, but rather a spring song. I don’t usually like to offer little more than links, but explaining the history of the song and the fate of its Ukrainian composer is best told in the following video:
The Ukrainian Origin of “Carol of the Bells”: The Story of Shchedryk
As explaining a song without singing or playing it is a bit like explaining a story with no details, I would rather leave you with a few music video links to my favourite versions:
I hope that you can take the time to learn the history behind the famous song and enjoy these versions.
Stephanie Huesler 