From Sacred Spaces to Pop Culture

These earlier origins of the Christmas carol are rooted in a sacred context. But in the second half of the twentieth century, the carol continued to surface in pop culture even as Christmas increasingly gave way to a more secular holiday season. The first successful arrangement of Holst's setting in a popular music context was recorded by Scottish folk musician Bert Jansch in 1974. Jansch was a pivotal player in the British folk music revival that emerged during the 1960s and heightened during the 1970s, influencing Paul Simon, Neil Young, Jimmy Page, and The Smiths’ Johnny Murr. His arrangement of Holst’s setting brought Rossetti into this new context, but here we begin to see a clear detachment from the poem’s origin. Jansch cuts down the poem to only the first and last verses, and his recitation of Rossetti’s words is loose and imprecise, changing the lyrics where it feels comfortable.

Over the following decades, pop-rock musicians like Annie Lennox and Sarah McLachlan would feature covers of the carol on Christmas albums, sometimes using Holst’s melody and sometimes Darke’s, and there is often a similar sense of estrangement from the poem’s origin. James Taylor said that he first discovered the carol through Shawn Colvin’s album that came out just eight years before his own cover, and he calls it an “ancient song,” apparently either unaware that it was written by a Victorian poet or simply dissociated enough from the Victorian period to call it ancient. The era of Christmas covers between the 1980s and 2000s produced a wide array of commercialized editions of “In the bleak mid-winter."