Away in a Manger

These words are in the public domain.

Away in a manger, no crib for a bed,
The little Lord Jesus laid down His sweet head;
The stars in the sky looked down where He lay,
The little Lord Jesus, asleep on the hay.

The cattle are lowing, the Baby awakes,
But little Lord Jesus, no crying He makes.
I love Thee, Lord Jesus! look down from the sky,
And stay by my cradle till morning is nigh.

Be near me, Lord Jesus, I ask Thee to stay
Close by me forever, and love me, I pray.
Bless all the dear children in Thy tender care,
And fit us for heaven, to live with Thee there.

Away in a Manger
Written by an unknown author, 1885; music by James R. Murray, 1887

“Away in a Manger” may be the first Christmas carol many of us ever learned, often sung as small children in a church pageant or around the family piano. It’s a gentle lullaby of a song, and for a long time nearly everyone believed they knew who wrote it. They were wrong.

The first two verses initially appeared in print in 1885, in a Lutheran Sunday School collection published in Philadelphia called Little Children’s Book for Schools and Families. No author’s name came with them, and to this day nobody knows who wrote the words. The carol was already finding its way into church programs before then. By Christmas of 1883 it was being recited at a Sunday School celebration in Nashville under the title “Luther’s Cradle Song.”

That title is where the trouble began. In 1887, a Massachusetts-born music teacher named James R. Murray published a children’s songbook called Dainty Songs for Little Lads and Lasses. He set the words to a sweet, simple tune of his own and labeled it “Luther’s Cradle Hymn,” adding a charming note that Martin Luther had composed it for his own children and that German mothers still sang it to their little ones. It was a lovely story, but there was no truth in it. Luther had lived and died more than three centuries earlier, and no German original has ever been found. Still, the claim was repeated in songbooks well into the twentieth century, and plenty of people were surprised to learn otherwise.

The detective work that settled the question came in 1945, when Richard Hill, a music librarian at the Library of Congress, published a thorough study of the carol. He found nothing linking it to Luther, and suggested it may have begun as part of a children’s play or story about Luther celebrating Christmas with his family. Along the way he turned up something else remarkable: the words had been set to nearly two hundred different tunes. Murray’s melody, often called “Mueller,” became the favorite in the United States. In Britain, people usually sing it to “Cradle Song,” a tune written by William J. Kirkpatrick in 1895, so travelers are sometimes surprised to hear a familiar carol with an unfamiliar melody.

The third verse, the bedtime prayer beginning “Be near me,” has a mystery of its own. It was first printed anonymously in 1892, in a collection put together by gospel songwriter Charles H. Gabriel. It was later credited to a Methodist educator named John T. McFarland, but that story doesn’t hold up, since the verse was already in print years before he was said to have written it.

“Away in a Manger” never appeared on a sales chart, and it didn’t need to. It has been sung by generations of children and the grown-ups who love them, and its words are in the public domain, free for anyone to share.