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"The Cherry-Tree Carol"
"The Cherry-Tree Carol"
Genre	Ballad; Christmas carol;

"The Cherry-Tree Carol" (Roud 453) is a ballad with the rare distinction of being both a Christmas carol and one of the Child Ballads (no. 54).^[1] The song itself is very old, reportedly sung in some form at the Feast of Corpus Christi in the early 15th century.

Synopsis

The ballad relates an apocryphal story of the Virgin Mary, presumably while traveling to Bethlehem with Joseph for the census. In the most popular version, the two stop in a cherry orchard, and Mary asks her husband to pick cherries for her, citing her child. Joseph spitefully tells Mary to let the child's father pick her cherries.^[2]

At this point in most versions, the infant Jesus, from the womb, speaks to the tree and commands it to lower a branch down to Mary, which it does. Joseph, witnessing this miracle, immediately repents his harsh words.^[2] The more contemporary versions sometimes end here, while others often include an angel appearing to Joseph and telling him of the circumstances of Jesus's birth. Other versions then jump ahead several years, where the next verse picks up with Jesus on his mother's lap, telling her of his eventual death and resurrection.

Sources

The story may be derived from the apocryphal Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, written around the year 650,^[3] which combines many earlier apocryphal Nativity traditions; however, in Pseudo-Matthew, the event takes place during the flight into Egypt, and the fruit tree is a palm tree (presumably a Date Palm) rather than a cherry tree. In the apocryphal Gospel, Jesus has already been born and so Joseph's truculence is unrelated to any dismay over Mary's pregnancy, but has to do with an inability to reach the fruits of the palm and a concern over the family's lack of water.^[4]

The carol is found in the “N-Town Plays,” performed in the English Midlands around 1500. The song is very similar to a passage in one of the Coventry Mystery Plays.^[5] Having developed out of the folk tradition, there are a number of versions of text and tune.

Recordings

Traditional

In the early 1930s, James Madison Carpenter made a recording of an 80 year old man named Henry Thomas from St. Just, Cornwall, England singing a version which came from his great-grandmother who lived in the 1700s; the recording is available online via the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library website, along with Carpenter's transcriptions of the lyrics and melody.^[6] Many other traditional versions have been collected in the last century, such as an audio recording of Bob Arnold of Burford, Oxfordshire, England,^[7] and another of Thomas Moran of Mohill, Co. Leitrim, Ireland.

Alan Lomax recorded three versions in Kentucky in the late 1930s, including from the traditional singer Aunt Molly Jackson, all of which can be heard online.^[8]^[9]^[10] Jean Ritchie, also of Kentucky, recorded two traditional versions with slightly different tunes.^[11]^[12] The version sung on Ritchie's album Carols for All Seasons (1959), and later on her sister Edna's eponymous LP of traditional songs (1962),^[13] later became popular after a recording by Joan Baez.