Christmas Song

The circumstances that transformed a 1960s American civil rights anthem into a sentimental French Christmas carol are, however, decidedly unusual and remarkable ...

“It’s been played many, many times on the radio and it comes back every year at Christmas time,” Saucier wrote in an email. He turned Sam Cooke’s “Twistin’ the Night Away” into “Laissez-Nous Twister”; Neil Sedaka’s “Going Home to Mary Lou” became “Oh Mary Lou.” The genre was called yéyé music for the shouts of nonsense words, like “yeah,” so common in early rock. In 1973 they released “An American Trilogy” with a loose French translation credited to Herrenschmidt and Bernheim. A melancholic “All My Trials” concludes the piece, representing the suffering of the enslaved. Raised in the South and made famous by northern commercial interests while singing the music of Black Americans, Presley practically embodied “An American Trilogy” in the flesh. (“John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave/ His soul is marching on!”) With a nudge from her pastor, [Howe decided](https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044025686148&view=1up&seq=324) to pen lyrics of a higher tone. Not a song about snow or Saint Nick, “Noël 70” was a children’s plea for peace during the dark days of the Vietnam War. An FBI agent suggested “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” a march Bobby loved to play and sing at campaign rallies (and which had been sung at Winston Churchill’s funeral three years earlier). “She wanted to elevate ‘John Brown’s Body,’ which had become the most popular song in the Union Army,” says Stauffer. The text then jumps to Jesus’ death and draws a direct parallel between the sacrifice of Christ and the sacrifice of Americans on the Civil War battlefield. Revival camp tune, abolitionist anthem, battle hymn, labor song, jazz standard, requiem—“The Battle Hymn of the Republic” has been repurposed for nearly every context and genre imaginable in its more than 200-year history. The audience was “carried away,”