The Carols of Christmas - Andrew Gant
The Carols of Christmas by Andrew Gant goes through various popular carols of Christmas and tells some of their intricate, and often confusing, history. You may not come out of the book wiser than when you started it about who wrote such and such a carol but Gant himself warns of this in the intro: "…if you occasionally get to the end of a chapter in this book slightly unsure about who wrote words or tunes or bits of either, me too…." Apparently we don't know exactly who wrote some of the songs, and many of them were revised from their original written form. One of the histories I found particularly interesting was that of Hark the Herald Angels Sing, originally Hark How all the Welkin Rings' by Charles Wesley. Apparently George Whitefield was one of the people who revised the song, one of the verses he changed was "universal nature say 'Christ the Lord is born today!' " to "With th'Angelic hosts proclaim, Christ is born in Bethl...