O Little Town of Bethlehem

On Christmas Eve 1865, an American clergyman named Phillips Brooks rode a horse the six miles from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, went out before dark to the field where tradition places the shepherds, and later attended a service at the Church of the Nativity. Three years passed before he wrote anything about it. When he did, in 1868, it was a short poem for the children of his own Sunday school in Philadelphia. His organist set it to music overnight. The carol then travelled to Britain and acquired a completely different tune, which is why the melody in your head depends largely on which side of the Atlantic you learned it.

Origins

Brooks (1835 to 1893) was rector of the Church of the Holy Trinity on Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, and by the end of his life one of the best known preachers in the United States. His Holy Land journey of 1865 to 1866 produced letters home describing the ride to Bethlehem and the fenced field with a cave in it where, he wrote, "they say the shepherds saw the star".

For the Christmas Sunday school service of 1868 he wrote five stanzas and handed them to Lewis H. Redner (1831 to 1908), the church's organist and Sunday school superintendent, asking for a simple tune. Redner put it off. By his own later account he was still stuck the night before the children were to sing it, then woke in the small hours with the melody in his head, wrote down the treble line, and filled in the harmony on Sunday morning before leaving for church. The children sang it on 27 December 1868. Brooks named the tune "St. Louis" after Lewis Redner; Redner had wanted to call it "St. Phillips".

The words were first printed on a leaflet for that 1868 service and reached wider circulation in The Sunday School Hymnal of 1871. The fourth of the five original stanzas is dropped from most modern hymnals.

Meaning & Interpretation

The carol is built on quietness. Where most Christmas songs reach for angels, trumpets and shepherds running, this one describes a town asleep and stars moving silently overhead. The second verse printed here makes the point explicit: "No ear may hear His coming." Brooks was writing about an event he thought of as enormous and almost unnoticed at the same time.

"The hopes and fears of all the years / Are met in thee tonight" is the line most often quoted, and it does a lot of work in eight words, folding centuries of expectation into a single night in one small place. The last verse turns outward and becomes a request rather than a description: "Be born in us today." That shift, from scene-setting to prayer, is the same move Away in a Manger makes when it stops describing the stable and starts asking Jesus to stay by the child's cradle.

Why do Britain and America sing different tunes?

American congregations sing "St. Louis", the tune Lewis Redner wrote overnight in December 1868 for Brooks's own Sunday school. British and Irish congregations sing "Forest Green", an English folk melody that Ralph Vaughan Williams collected in 1903 from a singer named Henry Garman in the village of Forest Green, Surrey, where it was known as "The Ploughboy's Dream". Vaughan Williams renamed it after the village, paired it with Brooks's words, and published the result in The English Hymnal of 1906. Each tune took hold in its own country's hymnbooks and neither displaced the other. Away in a Manger has the same transatlantic split, with "Mueller" in America and "Cradle Song" in Britain.

Who was Phillips Brooks?

Phillips Brooks was an American Episcopal clergyman, born in Boston in 1835. He led the Church of the Holy Trinity in Philadelphia from 1862, moved to Trinity Church in Boston in 1869, and was made Bishop of Massachusetts in 1891, two years before his death. He was famous in his lifetime as a preacher rather than a hymn writer, and this carol is the only thing he wrote that most people now know.

How many verses does O Little Town of Bethlehem have?

Brooks wrote five. The version above gives the first, third and fifth, which are the ones most commonly sung. The fourth stanza, about children praying to the blessed Child, is left out of most hymnals, and some collections also trim the second. British and American hymnbooks differ slightly in wording as well as in tune.