Now this is a fun tune! Give “African Noel” a listen, and you can hear why Linda and I wanted to program it—the piece is catchy and has great momentum. Its arranger, Victor Johnson, is one of the most prolific and accomplished arrangers working today. He lives in the Houston area and works around the country as an organist, conductor, composer, arranger, and clinician.

My curiosity was piqued by the title, “African Noel,” which is rather vague. I’m a musicologist by training. I find, gratefully, that those instincts for digging into sources of music haven’t left me, even though my graduate work was half my life ago. That passion for the “deep dive” turned out to be useful this week, when I was researching the song for our Sounds Good Choir’s Fall 2024 session.

The first place to try to learn more is usually the inside front cover of a sheet-music publication, so I went there. Disappointment: our sheet music for Victor’s “African Noel” has a blank inside front cover. Whoops! Looking to the right, on the first page of music, we simply see the words, “Traditional African Carol.” Surely there’s more to the story…

In the choral world specifically, before Victor’s version, there was the 1994 publication of “African Noel” by the great André J. Thomas. While André’s version has also been popular, his publication doesn’t shed more light on the situation, so that shallow dive into the waters of music history wasn’t, unfortunately, much help.

Next, I looked around the websites of several different publishing houses. In addition to the rather siloed nature of the choral world (choral directors sometimes can rightly be accused of not going very far into other genres for inspiration, such as band, solo voice, or orchestra), popular culture is also a factor. I discovered that there are dozens of settings of this tune, and not just for choir, but also for band, marimba ensemble, and so on. Among these many versions, someone gave a clue as to the song’s origin by simply saying that it’s a Liberian folk song. That clue gave me enough to go on. Time for a deep dive!

It turns out that the original Liberian folk tune has nothing to do with Christmas. The song “Banuwa” is a secular song meaning “Don’t cry, pretty little girl.” In this video “Banuwa” accompanies a sort of flash mob which was part of a university’s graduation ceremony in Uganda.

There is also the way in which songs are transmitted through popular culture. How could a tune like this have entered the American public consciousness to the point where André Thomas or Victor Johnson found it and wanted to arrange it for choir? It’s hard to say, and because I wasn’t able to get a response from Victor about this, I am left to conjecture.

The 1950s were a time when tunes from other cultures began to be adapted—one might say, more pointedly, appropriated—by popular American singing groups. “Banuwa” was such a tune, recorded by the iconic Kingston Trio.

At first blush it seems that, the Kingston trio is singing lyrics that have about as much (or as little), cultural sensitivity as we find in their song “Tijuana Jail.” We also have the situation where a song like “Wimoweh” was appropriated by The Weavers’ publisher, who didn’t properly credit or license the song from its original arranger, requiring lawsuits and decades of wrangling for Disney and others to pay the African musician, Solomon Linda, who claimed ownership of the song. It’s easy to imagine something similar happening here with “Banuwa / African Noel.”

However, I have to check my tendency to be judgmental; the situation is quite opaque, and in such cases, one sometimes has to turn to rather obscure folk-music research websites (like Mudcat) to get something that seems like credible context. I had to turn to the “Comparative Video 101” website, by the intrepid Jim Moran, for more insight on this one. It’s still hard to tell, but one commentator noted that the song is based on another called “Gbanawa,” written in the narrative voice of a man in a Liberian prison of the same name, singing to his girlfriend that she shouldn’t cry. While that explanation makes more sense, I can’t claim that any of this is definitive. Such is the life of oral tradition.

What I find remarkable in all of this, despite the murkiness of the situation, is the tune itself. A great melody can seem timeless, both old and new at the same time, fresh and lively, even if it’s ten, one hundred, or five hundred years old. We can analyze such tunes until we’re blue in the face, and we won’t get any closer to why they affect us the way they do. As the late Thelonious Monk famously said, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”

Happy singing and listening. Enjoy this wonderful piece of music.