Folk Songs

Notes

A Christmas carol, locally associated for some decades with the singer's family. Six stanzas only were recorded, the remainder being obtained from a family notebook. The text, whose author remains unknown, is non–alliterative (see below) and therefore likely to be of the nineteenth century. Its attention is centred more upon the Crucifixion and Resurrection than the Nativity itself. The tune was referred to as 'Y Ceiliog Du' ('The Black Cockerel').

During recent centuries the writing and singing of Christmas carols, and attending the early morning Christmas plygain (carol service) at local church or chapel, have been especially popular in parts of north Wales. By about the second half of the last century, hundreds of texts, full of elaborately organised phonetic patterns, had been produced by local poets to fit specific popular tunes alive in oral tradition. Many of the texts themselves came to be circulated orally, although large numbers were to be found in manuscripts, almanacs, 'ballad' leaflets and printed books. These compositions were usually lengthy, often heavily moralistic or doctrinal, and, far from confining attention to the Birth at Bethlehem, would in many cases narrate the entire life–story of Christ and not infrequently cast a glance back to the Fall at Eden and forward to Doomsday.