Joy to the World

Joy to the world! The Lord is come
Let earth receive her King
Let every heart prepare Him room
And heaven and nature sing
And heaven and nature sing
And heaven, and heaven, and nature sing

Joy to the Earth! The Saviour reigns
Let men their songs employ
While fields and floods, rocks, hills, and plains
Repeat the sounding joy
Repeat the sounding joy
Repeat, repeat the sounding joy

No more let sins and sorrows grow
Nor thorns infest the ground
He comes to make His blessings flow
Far as the curse is found
Far as the curse is found
Far as, far as, the curse is found

He rules the world with truth and grace
And makes the nations prove
The glories of His righteousness
And wonders of His love
And wonders of His love
And wonders, wonders, of His love!

Joy to the World
Words by Isaac Watts, 1719; music by Lowell Mason, 1839

It may surprise you to learn that one of the best-loved Christmas carols in the English language was never written as a Christmas song at all. Its words come from Isaac Watts, an English minister and poet born in Southampton in 1674. Watts wrote some 750 hymns over his lifetime, including “O God, Our Help in Ages Past” and “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross,” and he is often remembered as the father of English hymnody.

In 1719 Watts published a collection called The Psalms of David Imitated in the Language of the New Testament. In those days, many English congregations sang only close, word-for-word versions of the Psalms. Watts thought they could do better and retell the old psalms in fresh verse. “Joy to the World” was his take on the second half of Psalm 98, where the seas, rivers, and hills are all called to rejoice. That’s where his lovely picture of heaven and nature singing comes from. Watts meant it as a celebration of a joyful future, not as a story of the manger. There are no shepherds, angels, or Bethlehem anywhere in it. Only over time did singers come to hear it as a Christmas hymn, and that’s where it has stayed.

For more than a century the words had no settled tune. That changed in America, thanks to Lowell Mason, a Boston music teacher and church musician who did more than almost anyone to bring music into American schools and churches. In 1839 Mason published the tune we know today, which he called “Antioch,” and marked it “from Handel.” Listeners have long noticed that its opening phrases sound a little like bits of Handel’s Messiah. But no Handel original has ever been found, and earlier versions of the tune had already appeared in English hymn books a few years before. Most music historians now think Mason shaped the melody himself from those sources and borrowed Handel’s famous name to lend it some polish.

Whatever its roots, the pairing stuck. By the late twentieth century, “Joy to the World” had become the most-published Christmas hymn in North America. Its fame doesn’t rest on any one hit recording, either. It has simply been sung in churches, schools, living rooms, and around pianos for generations. One fun footnote: if someone in your group grins and mentions a bullfrog, they’re thinking of a completely different “Joy to the World.” That one was written by Hoyt Axton and became a number one hit for Three Dog Night in 1971.